The title pretty much says it all. This morning on the BBC Radio 4 News it was reported that the UK Government is disputing the numbers of dead civilians in Iraq. This seems to be a reponse to an open letter written by a number of prominent public figures in Britain.
The figures (hopefully up to date) that I have obtained are as follows:
The Lancet - In excess of 100,000 dead since the war started.
Personally I hope the figure is as low as possible, but who can we trust to give us the truth and how can we (the west) justify this amount of carnage in “liberating the iraqi people”?
Another issue that seems to escape discussion is how to determine who died due to the War… versus those that were bound to meet their maker anyway.
The 100k figure seems a bit high though… so I’d cut it in half.
The only point not worth taking seriously is people who think 500lb bombs with laser guidance falling into cities only kill culprits and not civilians.
The justification is that however many deaths there are, the number of deaths in the long run will still be less than that had Saddam stayed in power. I must admit, such claims are begining to look rather tenuous: Saddam may have been brutal and totalitarian, but he did not actually directly kill many of his own people after 1991 (when he would argue that he was averting the megadeath of a civil war) and everyday life could continue with some kind of stability.
It’s impossible to know. The Lancet figure is laughable - Their error bars are so big their ‘low’ estimate is 8,000 and their ‘high’ estimate is 200,000. It strikes me that this study, presented during the election season, was just an attempt to come up with a ‘scientific’ way to put a great big huge number into the public discourse. “We don’t have a clue how many Iraqis have died, but here’s a great big horrible number you can use to attack the Bush administration with!”
Iraq Body Count just tallies up all the body counts reported across the country. The problem with this methodology is that hospitals may have been over-reporting civilian casualties because A) there’s no way to tell a civilian from an insurgent, B) If they are opposed to the U.S. invasion they have an incentive to over-report casualties.
So I would take the Iraq Body Count site as probably being the closest, but with the understanding that if they are wrong, it’s probably on the high side.
There is no doubt that thousands of civilians have died. And that’s probably all we can really say at this point.
This may be a factor, but on the other-side, given the state of chaos in parts of the country I doubt that all civilian deaths were reported. For example, many civilians probably died in Fallujah before the situation cleared up enough to so that they could be brought to a hospital. Given that muslium law dictate the need for a quick burial, I wouldn’t be suprised if the already dead in at least some cases were buried directly by thier family members instead of being brought to a hospital.
I think you’re misunderstanding the errors in the Lancet study, Sam. It is a respected medical journal, and was attempting to study the effect of war on mortality in general and gauge the extra mortalities compared to non-war. Thus, say, half a million Iraqis would have died in that period from various causes anyway, and the error margins attempt to account for that uncertainty.
However, I’d agree that in this instance the figure of 1000 randomly chosen sample points might well be misleading in all kinds of ways. It is certainly a little silly to quote 100,000 as any kind of “bodycount”.
I would agree that there is no doubt thousands have died, and that’s all we can really know.
Looking over the Iraq Body Count site however, I would think it that if they are wrong, it would be on the low side. They claim to only include civilian deaths if they can find 2 separate media cites, which leads me to believe if anything, possibly many smaller incidents are not being captured. In regards to bias, since they are only collating documented reports from other media (about 35 or so sources), I believe any bias would originate in those reports (which is another debate the board has had many times).
Also, in incidents mentioning families they are assuming a family size of 3, as a conservative estimate, believing the average family size in Iraq to be 6.
Not to quibble over numbers, just somewhat impressed by how the Iraq Body Count project is approaching the matter.
So if we throw out the Lancet study and presume that the gov’t numbers are probably overly conservative, then the numbers are between 15,000 and 30,000, which is probably as accurate as we are going to get in a situation where both the amount of chaos and bias on both sides cloud the numbers to such a degree.
That’s not as worthless as it sounds. If both CNN and the AP report on an incident based on one source, then presumably that’s two major media organizations that have checked out the sources story and agree that it’s creditble. I’d say that’s more worthwile then just one service having checked out and certified the story.
But of course, dozens of media outlets reported the “Jenin Massacre”, too. And if IraqBodyCount had been counting deaths there, they would have grossly over-counted, because the numbers that were coming out of Jenin (and even being reported by Palestinian hospitals) were grossly inflated.
Well of course more media outlets doesn’t necessarily make for infinite certainty, I’m just saying its better then one, even if they both go to the same source.
Were the reports of the Jenin massacre reported as actual estimated death tolls or “rumored” figures by any western media outlet. As I remember, the Israelis kept journalists out until later, when they were finally allowed in the reported that the rumors couldn’t be collaborated.
Also, at least in the cases of Jenin, when the reports were exagerated, they went for broke. Instead of the tens of people that actually died the rumors claimed “thousands”. Looking at the Iraq Body Count database, the reports are not like that, none of the individual numbers are that sensational. Of course that doesn’t make them certain, but if we’re to try at all to come up with an estimate, these numbers don’t seem to be a terrible place to start.
Agreed, and these were civilians as well. All we are doing is feeding the fire of terrorism. I think any claim we had to the moral high ground has long since been abandoned.
I found this article in the Economist about the Lancet study enlightening. The study itself is available on The Lancet’s site (free registration neccessary). It’s definitively worth reading.
As others have mentioned, the 100.000 number is an estimate of excess deaths after the invasion - over and above the pre-invasion death rate. They asked about deaths from january 2002 to september 2004.
They counted all deaths, not only non-combatants. However, military deaths are probably underrepresented, because they only counted deaths where the persons killed had lived in the household at least two months before their deaths.
There’s a lot of unsecurity around the 100.000 estimate for several reasons (they go into some detail about likely sources for error), but the real numbers are just as likely to be greater than smaller.