The whistleblowing website Wikileaks has defended the release of almost 400,000 classified US documents about the war

in Iraq. The "war logs" suggest that evidence of torture was ignored, and detail the deaths of thousands of Iraqi civilians. Iraq Body Count, which collates civilian deaths using cross-checked media reports and other figures such as morgue records, said that based on an analysis of a sample of 860 logs, it estimated that around 15,000 previously unknown civilian deaths would be identified.In one incident in July 2007, as many as 26 Iraqis were killed by a helicopter, about half of them civilians, according to the log. Wikileaks has been asked to remove the documents from the web and return them to the Department of Defense, and Mr Assange said that media organisations in the US and elsewhere were coming under pressure from the Obama administration not to report on or publish them.The release of the documents comes as the US military prepares to withdraw its 50,000 remaining troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. Violence in the country has declined sharply over the past two years, but near-daily bombings and shootings continue While the U.S. tally of Iraqi & US-led Coalition deaths in the war logs is 109,000, a widely quoted 2006 study published in The Lancet used a cross-sectional cluster sample to estimate about 650,000 deaths were due to the Iraq war increasing mortality. Another study by the World Health Organization called the Iraq Family Health Survey estimated 151,000 deaths due to violence (95% uncertainty range, 104,000 to 223,000) from March 2003 through June 2006. The Iraq Body Count reviewed the war logs data in three reports in October 2010 and concluded that the total recorded death toll, civilian and combatant, would be more than 150,000. An article on the leaked documents in Science magazine commented on these sources, "Taking the WikiLeaks data into account, IBC now estimates that at least 150,000 have died violently during the war, 80% of them civilians. That falls within the range produced by an Iraq household survey conducted by the World Health Organizationand further erodes the credibility of a 2006 study published in The Lancet that estimated over 600,000 violent deaths for the first 3 years of the war." U.S. armed forces As of May 28, 2010, there were 4,404 dead and 31,827 wounded in action (WIA). Armed forces of other coalition countries See Multinational force in Iraq. As of 24 February 2009, there were 318 deaths from the armed forces of other Coalition nations. 179 UK deaths and 139 deaths from other nations. Breakdown:[44][45][49]

Australia 21 Azerbaijan 1 Bulgaria 13 Czech Republic 1 Denmark 7 El Salvador 5 Estonia 2 Fiji 1 Georgia 5 Hungary 1 Italy 33

Kazakhstan 1 Latvia 3 Netherlands 2 Poland 30 Portugal 1 Romania 4 Slovakia 4 South Korea 1 Spain 11 Thailand 2 Ukraine 18

United Kingdom 179

An October 20, 2003, study by the Project on Defense Alternatives at Commonwealth Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, stated that for March 19, 2003, to April 30, 2003, "Based on the analysis that follows we estimate that the 2003 Iraq war produced between 7,600 and 10,800 Iraqi combatant fatalities." The study also stated: "Our analysis of the evidence leads to the conclusion that between 10,800 and 15,100 Iraqis were killed in the war. Of these, between 3,200 and 4,300 were noncombatants that is: civilians who did not take up arms."

Coalition deaths by country USA: 4,459 UK: 179 Italy: 33 Poland: 23 Ukraine: 18 Bulgaria: 13 Spain: 11 Denmark: 7 El Salvador: 5 Georgia: 5 Slovakia: 4 Latvia: 3 Romania: 3 Australia: 2 Estonia: 2 Netherlands: 2 Thailand: 2 Azerbaijan: 1 Czech Republic: 1 Fiji: 1 Hungary: 1 Kazakhstan: 1 South Korea: 1 A study[92] of U.S. veterans published in July 2004 in The New England Journal of Medicine on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that After deployment, 6.2 percent to 19.9 percent suffered from PTSD. For the broad definition of PTSD that represents an increase of 10.5 percent (19.9 percent - 9.4 percent = 10.5 percent). That is 10,500 additional cases of PTSD for every 100,000 U.S. troops after they have served in Iraq. Information on injuries suffered by troops of other coalition countries is less readily available, but a statement in Hansard indicated that 2,703 U.K. soldiers had been medically evacuated from Iraq for wounds or injuries as of October 4, 2004, and that 155 U.K. troops were wounded in combat in the initial invasion.[94]

A March 12, 2007, Time article[103] reported on a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. About one third of the 103,788 veterans returning from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars seen at U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs facilities between September 30, 2001, and September 30, 2005, were diagnosed with mental illness or a psycho-social disorder, such as homelessness and marital problems, including domestic violence. More than half of those diagnosed, 56 percent, were suffering from more than one disorder. The most common combination was post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. In January 2008, the U.S. Army reported that the rate of suicide among soldiers in 2007 was the highest since the Army started counting in 1980. There were 121 suicides in 2007, a 20-percent jump over the prior year. Also, there were around 2100 attempted suicides and self-injuries in 2007.[104] Seventy percent of children are suffering from trauma-related symptoms according to a study of 10,000 primary school students in the Sha'ab section of north Baghdad, conducted by the Iraqi Society of Psychiatrists and the World Health Organization. "We're now finding an elevation of mental health disorders in children emotional, conduct, peer, attention deficit", according to Iraqi psychiatrist Hashimi. "A number are even resulting in suicide."[142] Many clear reasons exist as to why the U.S. attack on Iraq was not justified. Iraq has not been found to have weapons of mass destruction and is not even linked to the al Qaeda terrorist group. In addition to losing many lives and much more money, the United States has lost most of its allies because it goes against the principles of war to attack a country that is not a threat. Also, there is a good chance that the Bush Administration attacked Iraq simply to control their oil supply.

Was it necessary to invade Iraq? Were there really WMDs in Iraq? Who really benefited from the invasion of Iraq? Join me as I try to answer the unanswered questions in the hope to make clear what really happened in Iraq and not the false information that the media often broadcasted. Iraq was a calm and peaceful country in the Middle East neighbouring Turkey, Syria Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait and Jordan. The country was ruled by President Saddam Hussein and was a politically stable country that was on its way to soon becoming a developed country. The Iraq War began, on March 20, 2003 with the invasion of Iraq by the United States under the administration of President Bush, the United Kingdom under Prime Minister Tony Blair and approximately forty other governments. Prior to the invasion, the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom asserted that the possibility of Iraq employing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) threatened their security and that of their coalition/regional allies. In 2002, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1441 which called for Iraq to completely cooperate with UN weapon inspectors to verify that it was not in possession of weapons of mass destruction and cruise missiles. The UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission was given access by Iraq under provisions of the UN resolution but found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Additional months of inspection to conclusively verify Iraq's compliance with the UN disarmament requirements were not undertaken. Head weapons inspector Hans Blix advised the UN Security Council that while Iraq's cooperation was "active", it was not "unconditional" and not "immediate". Iraq's declarations with regards to weapons of mass destruction could not be verified at the time, but unresolved tasks concerning Iraq's disarmament could be completed in "not years, not weeks, but months. Meanwhile anti-war groups across the world organized public protests. According to French academic Dominique Reyni, between January 3 and April 12, 2003, 36 million people across the globe took part in almost 3,000 protests against war in Iraq, with demonstrations on February 15, 2003(it was a coordinated day of protests across the world expressing opposition to the then-imminent Iraq War)being the largest and most prolific. In the following months a force of roughly 300,000 soldiers and military personnel invaded Iraq. Following the invasion, the U.S.-led Iraq Survey Group concluded that Iraq had ended its nuclear, chemical, and biological programs in 1991 and had no active programs at the time of the invasion (although weapons of mass destruction were never mentioned by governments in public after the invasion of Iraq). Although some degraded remnants of misplaced or abandoned chemical weapons from before 1991 (which the French government sold to Saddam Hussein during the IraqIran war) were found, they were not the weapons which had been the main argument to justify the invasion. Some U.S. officials also accused Iraqi President Saddam Hussein of harboring and supporting al-Qaeda, but as expected no evidence of a meaningful connection was ever found. Another criticism of the initial intelligence
4

leading up to the Iraq war comes from a former CIA officer who described the Office of Special Plans as a group of ideologues who were dangerous to U.S. national security and a threat to world peace, and that the group lied and manipulated intelligence to further its agenda of removing Saddam. Subsequently, in 2008, the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity, a group partially funded by George Soros has enumerated a total of 935 allegedly false statements made by George W. Bush and six other top members of his administration in what it termed a "carefully launched campaign of misinformation" during the two year period following 9/11 attacks, in order to rally support for the invasion of Iraq. Soon after the war finished an Iraqi resistance started up in the streets of Baghdad which soon spread to all of Iraq, with each area having there own freedom fighters or so called insurgents group which denied the invaders access to many areas throughout Iraq. But Soon the American generals found a way to overcome that problem, some strong reports suggest that American solider helped ,supplied and trained Shia militia groups in order to get rid of the Sunni freedom fighters that still denied the American soldiers some parts of Iraq. A number of witnesses also say that they saw American and coalition soldiers would stand aside and watch as Sunni familys would be dragged out of their houses and butchered in the streets. This militia war resulted in hundreds if not thousand of deaths through out Iraq. Eight years on the American government has not yet confirmed or denied these reports.

In October 2002 former U.S. President Bill Clinton warned about possible dangers of pre-emptive military action against Iraq. Speaking in the UK on a Labour Party conference he said: "As a preemptive action today, however well-justified, may come back with unwelcome consequences in the future....I don't care how precise your bombs and your weapons are, when you set them off, innocent people will die. While the U.S. tally of Iraqi & US-led Coalition deaths in the war logs is 109,000, a widely quoted 2006 study published in The Lancet used a cross-sectional cluster sample to estimate about 650,000 deaths were due to the Iraq war increasing mortality. An article on the leaked documents in Science magazine commented on these sources, "Taking the WikiLeaks data into account, IBC now estimates that at least 150,000 have died violently during the war, 80% of them civilians. That falls within the range produced by an Iraq household survey conducted by the World Health Organizationand further erodes the credibility of a 2006 study published in The Lancet that estimated over 600,000 violent deaths for the first 3 years of the war. While some would say that those deaths were necessary for the freedom of Iraq. I strongly think that there is no excuse for the death of innocent people. On June 30 and December 11, 2007, the Iraqi ministry of oil awarded contracts to international oil companies for some of Iraq's many oil fields. The winning oil companies(most of which belong to the Bush family) enter joint ventures with the Iraqi Ministry of Oil, and the terms of the awarded contracts include extraction of oil for a fixed fee of approximately $1.40 per barrel (about 20% of what its actually worth). The fees will only be paid once a production threshold set by the Iraqi Ministry of Oil is reached.

Some say that this war was necessary for the freedom of the people of Iraq and that Saddam Hussein was a dictator and a threat to the stability of the region. In my own personal opinion I think that this war was not for freedom, stability or democracy but for oil and money. Saddam was not an angel but he kept Iraq a stable and developing country, he also made Iraq one of the strongest and most influential countries in the Middle East, and I think the war on Iraq is unjustified and was a great mistake as Iraq has not been found to have weapons of mass destruction and is not even linked to the al Qaeda terrorist group. In addition to losing many lives and much more money, the United States has also lost most of its allies and its respect in the eyes of the world. By Hazim Raad