The New York Times is reporting that up to 100,000 Iraqi families have been displaced due to violence. Two weeks ago, I posted on Juan Cole’s reporting of the number of displaced Iraqis at 65,000 individuals, not families. This estimate is much, much, much higher.

A new estimate by one of Iraq’s vice presidents has put the number of families who have fled their homes at 100,000, a number far greater than recent projections by other Iraqi officials and one that further clouds the debate over how deeply sectarian conflicts are affecting the nation.

The latest estimate was made by Adel Abdul Mahdi, a Shiite leader selected as one of two vice presidents, but it was not clear where he had gotten his information. In an interview last week, the Iraqi national security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, said 13,750 families had been displaced, which could mean about 70,000 to 80,000 people.

The conflicting numbers speak to the difficulty in estimating how many people are fleeing the violence, when most are believed to be finding shelter with relatives or friends.

Using al-Rubaie’s rubric, Mahdi is suggesting between 500,000 to 600,000 Iraqi civilians have been displaced. By way of comparison, that would be equivalent to over 7,300,000 Americans being forced from their homes to escape a growing civil war and militias that use assassination and beatings to strike fear into regular Iraqis. This is primarily seen in ethnic homogenization of neighborhoods. Of course, this doesn’t alarm the Bush administration.

“Some of them truly are moving because they’re concerned about their own personal security or their family’s security, I’m sure of that,” General Lynch said. “Some of them are moving for economic reasons. Some of them are moving to be with their families. But we’re not seeing internally displaced persons at the rate which causes us alarm.”

But Iraqi officials say that people who live in areas where they are part of an ethnic or religious minority face continual threats, including in places far from Baghdad.

Sheik Omar al-Jibouri, a human rights officer with the Iraqi Islamic Party, a large Sunni Arab group, said that in Zubayr, a suburb of Basra, Sunnis are being increasingly warned to leave. At least 60 Sunnis were killed there in the past month, he said.

“Leaflets fill the streets saying, ‘Leave this district, Wahhabis!’ ” Mr. Jibouri said Saturday. “Neither students nor officials can work” if they are Sunnis, because of the threats, he said.

First, the fact that potentially a half million people have been displaced doesn’t cause concern among the American authorities in Iraq is absurd. Not suprisingly it reflects the complete lack of respect the Bush administration has for the Iraqi populace. If the Bush’s response to Katrina is any indication, there isn’t a whole lot of institutional concern for displaced civilians.
Two weeks ago, in response to these statistics first coming out, I wrote:

[I]f our troops can’t be used to protect Iraqi’s civilian population during this time of war, what the hell are we doing there?

We talk a lot about the damage our military is suffering while mired in Iraq. As Condi Rice points out, we’ve made thousands of tactical errors. It’s time to recognize that one of our most devastating tactical errors has been our failure to provide ample protection to the Iraqi civilian population from ongoing violence against our occupation and between rival militias. We are now bearing witness to this failure on a seismic scale and all we know about the administration’s response to this crisis is that they are not at all alarmed by it. What a heartbreakingly predicatable state of affairs.