An Estimated 600K Iraqis Have Died in the War

[Tuckerfan]

Putting this here, since I’m sure it’s going to generate some heat.

“This clearly is a much higher number than many people have been thinking about,” said Gilbert Burnham, the report’s lead author and a professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. “It shows the violence has spread across the country.”

Iraq’s violent death rate rose from 3.2 deaths per 1,000 people in the year after the invasion to 12 per 1,000 from June 2005 to June 2006, according to the researchers, whose findings are being published this week in the British medical journal Lancet.

Most of the deaths reported in the study are of military-age men. But Burnham said it was impossible to differentiate among civilians, insurgents and members of the Iraqi security forces.

He said he expected criticism of the study, which grapples with an issue that is sensitive to U.S. and British officials: the undetermined number of war-related deaths.

Well, we know what we’ve accomplished, what exactly was the mission?

[tdn]

Hey, ya know? Keep killing Iraqis, and eventually we’ll get bin Laden.

And bring peace and democracy to Iraq.

[Revenant_Threshold]

@tdn

Hey, ya know? Keep killing Iraqis, and eventually we’ll get bin Laden.

Isn’t bin Laden Saudi? (Or should that be a Saudi? A Saudian?)

[GorillaMan]

@Revenant Threshold

Isn’t bin Laden Saudi? (Or should that be a Saudi? A Saudian?)

His Saudi citizenship was revoked in 1994.

[Revtim]

Ahh, the timing of this report, just before the elections, is just politics. Just like during my performance review last year, the boss kept bringing up the stuff I did wrong. I told him that bringing up the results of my work now, right when they are deciding if they were to keep me on or not, that was just a dirty trick!

[tdn]

@Revenant Threshold

Isn’t bin Laden Saudi? (Or should that be a Saudi? A Saudian?)

Of course not. He’s Iraqi. He must be. After bin Laden attacked us, we had to attack his homeland. To invade Iraq for any other reason would just be silly, now wouldn’t it?

Now wouldn’t it?

[Damuri_Ajashi]

@Revtim

Ahh, the timing of this report, just before the elections, is just politics. Just like during my performance review last year, the boss kept bringing up the stuff I did wrong. I told him that bringing up the results of my work now, right when they are deciding if they were to keep me on or not, that was just a dirty trick!

Not if you really were a fuckup, then your performance review would be the perfect time to bring it up. Or have I been whooshed?

[Revtim]

Yeah, kinda.

[Wee_Bairn]

Kill for peace! At this rate, there won’t be any Iraqis left to enjoy the freedom that the great GWB :rolleyes: will eventually bestow upon them.

[Ethilrist]

@tdn

Of course not. He’s Iraqi. He must be. After bin Laden attacked us, we had to attack his homeland. To invade Iraq for any other reason would just be silly, now wouldn’t it?

Now wouldn’t it?

Actually, I thought it was to take WMD away from Hussein, so he couldn’t kill hundreds of thousands of people.

[ivylass]

According to the CNN article, some experts are saying the estimate is much too high and is most likely politics.

An accurate count of Iraqi deaths has been difficult to obtain, but one respected group puts its rough estimate at closer to 50,000. And at least one expert was skeptical of the new findings.

“They’re almost certainly way too high,” said Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington. He criticized the way the estimate was derived and noted that the results were released shortly before the Nov. 7 elections in the United States.

“This is not analysis, this is politics,” Cordesman said.

[drm]

Whether the number is 50 000 or over 600000, the number is too fuckin’ high. That much is definate and arguing over numbers like this is just fucking stupid. The fact that there is ANY number is wrong.

[Marley23]

The margin of error on this thing almost 200,000 deaths either way (426,369 to the low end, and 793,663). 1,849 families were surveyed. I’m not sure that’s enough of a sample.

[tagos]

@Marley23

The margin of error on this thing almost 200,000 deaths either way (426,369 to the low end, and 793,663). 1,849 families were surveyed. I’m not sure that’s enough of a sample.

It’s plenty fine as a sample and the article has passed peer review by 4 experts due to the controversy over the last one. As a methodology I’ll bet it’s better than the ‘count bodies in the press and morgue’ approach that gets 50,000.

To quote Juan Cole’s analysis.

Ironically enough, the same journalists who will question this study will accept without query the estimates for deaths in Darfur, e.g., which are generated by exactly the same techniques, and which are almost certainly not as solid.

The study concludes that an average of 470 Iraqis per day have likely died as a result of political violence since March 19, 2003, though the number could be as low as 350 per day if the margin of error skewed to the low side. United Nations estimates based on figures from Iraqi morgues are more like 100 per day.

I follow the violence in Iraq carefully and daily, and I find the results plausible.

First of all, Iraqi Muslims don’t believe in embalming or open casket funerals days later. They believe that the body should be buried by sunset the day of death, in a plain wooden box. So there is no reason to expect them to take the body to the morgue. Although there are benefits to registering with the government for a death certificate, there are also disadvantages. Many families who have had someone killed believe that the government or the Americans were involved, and will have wanted to avoid drawing further attention to themselves by filling out state forms and giving their address.

Personally, I believe very large numbers of Iraqi families quietly bury their dead without telling the government of all people anything about it. Another large number of those killed is dumped in the Tigris river by their killers. A fisherman on the Tigris looking for lunch recently caught the corpse of a woman. The only remarkable thing about it is that he let it be known to the newspapers. I’m sure the Tigris fishermen throw back unwanted corpses every day.

Not to mention that for substantial periods of time since 2003 it has been dangerous in about half the country just to move around, much less to move around with dead bodies.

There is heavy fighting almost every day at Ramadi in al-Anbar province, among guerrillas, townspeople, tribes, Marines and Iraqi police and army. We almost never get a report of these skirmishes and we almost never are told about Iraqi casualties in Ramadi. Does 1 person a day die there of political violence? Is it more like 4? 10? What about Samarra? Tikrit? No one is saying. Since they aren’t, on what basis do we say that the Lancet study is impossible?

There are about 90 major towns and cities in Iraq. If we subtract Baghdad, where about 100 a day die, that still leaves 89. If an average of 4 or so are killed in each of those 89, then the study’s results are correct.

Informed Comment

[yojimbo]

@ivylass

According to the CNN article, some experts are saying the estimate is much too high and is most likely politics.

And some say it could be under

While critics point to the discrepancy between this and other independent surveys (such as Iraq Body Count’s figure of 44-49,000 civilian deaths, based on media reports), the Bloomberg School team says its method may actually underestimate the true figure.

“Families, especially in households with combatants killed, could have hidden deaths. Under-reporting of infant deaths is a widespread concern in surveys of this type,” the authors say.

“Entire households could have been killed, leading to survivor bias.”

BBC NEWS | Middle East | 'Huge rise' in Iraqi death tolls

Statistics are easy to support or dismiss depending on where you’re coming from.

By almost all accounts though, a lot of people are now living in a more dangerous place due to security and infrastructure failings. Iraq Body count etc doesn’t take deaths other than those directly caused by the fighting into account.

These figures may be high but the amount of Iraqi’s who have died from a direct or indirect reason linked to the invasion and aftermath is a lot bigger than any allied government would care to admit to.

[vibrotronica]

Yeah, MIT and Johns Hopkins “doctors” and “statisticians” are just a bunch of foaming-at-the-mouth, Bush-hating Michael Moores and Jane Fondas. We can’t have killed more than 100,000, tops! Why do they hate America so much?

[RTFirefly]

Bush, today:

I applaud the Iraqis for their courage in the face of violence. I am, you know, amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they’re willing to — you know, that there’s a level of violence that they tolerate.

So you see, this violence is just a price the Iraqis are willing to pay for their freedom. So why should we get worked up?

[Zoe]

The NBC report that I saw on this research said that Johns Hopkins used the same techniques to calculate death tolls that are used in natural disasters. It also said that the Coalition Forces are directly responsible for 30% of the deaths.

That leaves me wondering how many of the rest of the 70% would still be alive if we had not preemptively invaded Iraq.

All of the deaths that the report refers to are violent deaths related to the war.

Just last December Bush said that 30,000 Iraqis had lost their lives. Even Iraqi officials admit to 100,000.

(The above information came from Richard Engels report on the Johns Hopkins study which is to be released Thursday.)

[elucidator]

This is a morbidly dreadful argument. One hundred thousand innocent lives squandered is a horror, three hundred thousand a catastrophe, but six hundred thousand? Can’t get my head around it, don’t know whether to cry or puke.

But it says something else, something important: if we don’t know, its probably because they don’t tell us. Because they don’t trust us, they don’t look upon us as a sympathetic force, but as an armed force not to be trusted. It would certainly explain the appalling numbers of Iraqis who regard attacks on our troops as justified.

My God, what have we done?

[The_Hamster_King]

The methodology of this assessment is pretty straightforward. They picked about 1800 families at random and interviewed one member of the family about recent deaths before and after the invasion. In about 80% of the cases they were able to confirm what the family member was telling them with a death certificate. They used that information to calculate the yearly mortality rate in Iraq. It came to 13.3 deaths per 1000. The pre-invasion mortality rate was calculated to 5.5 deaths per 1000, which apparently closely matches pre-war assessments from other sources. The 655,000 figure is a nation-wide extrapolation based upon the difference between the pre- and post-war death rates.

Unless someone can demonstrate a major flaw in the methodology of this study I’m more inclined to believe it than previous assessments that rely on counting every dead body everywhere in Iraq. Many dead may overlooked by the authorities, but the families know they’re gone.

And as for the charge that “it’s just politics” … EVERYTHING is politics. If it damages the Republicans, tough shit.