We debated this in early '05, but based on Aquila Be’s comments in this ongoing thread, it appears there’s still some skepticism about the figure of 655,000 Iraqis dead because of the war and occupation, as estimated in a recent study by Iraqi and American epidemiologists.
IBC is lower with 53954 - 59571. Believe what you want. Its all in how you spin the numbers and what assumptions you make.
-XT
To describe this figure as ‘over the top propaganda’ is completely inaccurrate and disparaging of what is an honest peer-reviewed scientific article. Accurately make that claim you would would have to point out serious, deliberate, flaws in the methodology, which no-one has done.
A good discussion of this is here :
The bolding is mine and that statement is that sums it up nicely IMO.
Where do you get the idea that no one has questioned the Lancet analysis, or found flaws in their methodology? Have you tried ‘debunking Lancet’ in google? I seem to be getting quite a few hits there…many with at least as much credibility as what you cited in your post.
As I said, its all in how you spin the data and what assumptions you make. Personally, I find it fairly incredible that something like 400+ Iraqi’s have died every day since the war started and that this has been under reported to such a major extent that most other estimates hover around what IBC claims…while the Lancet study is an order of magnitude (well, more) higher.
-XT
Well, don’t forget that Iraqis dead “because of the war/occupation” includes a great many who have not died violently, but who likely would still be alive if the war had never happened. 10 Iraqis killed by car bomb = front page news. 100 Iraqis die from drinking bad water = page 10 news, if that.
And the Lancet study is from back in '04. We have a more recent one, as noted and linked in the OP.
Theres another question hidden in the larger one. For instance, in another context our Senior Baghdad Correspondent, MadMonk mourns the death of an acquaintance who died from the unavailability of kidney dialysis. This is not a directly attributable death by violence, which would be the unstated assumption of “death tolls” due to “war”.
Americans such as we tend to thing of “war dead” strictly in terms of soldiers lost, for such is our experience, we have not been carpet-bombed, due to the blessing of geography, the strategy of the RAF’s “Bomber” Harris has not been applied to us.
Truth is, modern warfare kills soldiers but massacres civilians. World War II estimates center around somewhere north of 50 megadeath, with the greatest bulk being Soviet. Note well: the vast majority of these deaths are non-combatant. America lost roughly half a million, almost all of them military, civilian deaths were miniscule by comparison.
I think this is a near-sightedness peculiar to us, due to our history: everybody else knows it, we have to be reminded. All wars are the massacre of the innocent, they cannot be otherwise. Which is why the decision to undertake war should be taken with grave reluctance, the last resort, where nothing but the grimmest neccesity exists. Needless to say, present circumstances do not, and never did.
“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.” - Thomas Jefferson
To show it was “propaganda” you would have to show INTENT to to delibrately skew the estitmates upwards. No-one has done this.
There have of course been plenty of attempts to discredit the methodology. None of them have held up IMO.
True enough…though IBC also factors such things into their calculations. It would be fairly hard to miss 400+ Iraqi’s dead a day for every day since the invasion however. If Lancet (or your new cite) were saying the difference was + or -, say, 5% of what is generally accepted, then I’d say that was reasonable. However, we aren’t talking 5% difference here…but an order of magnitude difference. Thats quite a gap, wouldn’t you say? How do you account for it? Are groups like IBC deliberately under representing casualties by an order of magnitude?
Sorry…I assumed it was Lancet or one of the spin-off surveys using the same meta-data and methodology. I didn’t really look it over directly. If I have time after work I’ll take a peek. Apologies.
-XT
I never said it was deliberate skewing of the results…I doubt this is a provable position unless some internal memo’s or such are leaked.
Certainly…I accept unconditionally that none of them have held up in your opinion.
-XT
As I pointed before, IBC looks for what the official press mentions, you are ignoring that the official press has been found before to print propaganda and has been constantly threatened for looking for information (In Iraq). It is not strange that they are under counting a lot. And **the Johns Hopkins research is looking for evidence that IBC does not look at all ** (As the IBC web site mentions).
To be fair, they can be; it largely depends on the military technology, and doctrines, of the day. In Renaissance Italy or 18th-Century Europe, it was possible for the armies to fight wars just among themselves and leave the civilians out of it (if the generals were so inclined). In Classical Greece or Rome wars could have been fought that way, except that everybody assumed the victors had a right to make slaves or corpses of the losers, civilians included.
IBC only go off published reports there is nothing particularly unbelievable about the fact that the majority of deaths go unreported.
Believe it or not, some right-wingers have accused IBC of overcounting the dead. See here. General Wikipedia article on the body-count question here.
It would be easy. How many bodies are buried by people afraid to go any farther than their back yards, or buried in rubble, or deliberately not counted, or chucked in a river, or left to rot ?
Yes, I believe so.
The UN estimates 32,000 casualties for 2006. Cite. This is three times higher than the Iraqi government estimate, a lot more than 5%. The UN report was compiled using reports from morgues and hospitals across Iraq. If the UN number is a bit low, very possible, and the survey number is actually near the bottom of its confidence interval, there is not that much difference. I doubt the UN number counts side effects of the war as already mentioned. I’d wonder if it counted casualties in regions with a strong insurgent presence.
If you look at the total number of deaths in the US from all causes in 2003, you get around 2.5 mill.
Given some very dirty figuring, that would translate in Iraq to a similar toll at the same death rate per 100,000 to something in the region of what? around 150-200 thousand.
You’d expect that in any eventuality, the death rate in Iraq is likely to be proportionally higher than the US simply because of better health and welfare.
Now this study examines a period 1.5 time longer than the 12 months, therefore you’d expect the numbers to be similarly higher, and add in the breakdown of health facilities etc, and you can soon make a good case for 300-400 thousand deaths from what you might call expected causes. Put in place things such as poor water supply and other disease, and you are up there.
So you can see that there is a huge potential for interpretation of how deaths ocurred just from those figures alone, and thats without taking into account deaths from violence.
I’m no apologist at all, I despise those who planned and plotted this war, long before it took place, however, even on the lowest estimates of around 60thousand, imagine scaling that up to US population numbers, and what you get is a pretty horrific number by anyones standards, which would entail multiplying by something around 12, which would be around 720 thousand.
I would put the case to anyone, that if the death rate in the US rose by such an amount, it would be seen as pretty horrific, and yet the bean counters and propagandists are bouncing this death toll in Iraq as if it were a mere bagatelle, a trivial inconsequence.
Its not unreasonable, given the lies of the US administrators that justified this war, that the 60k death toll is very much an underestimate, but without reasonably accurate figures, it does not help to make assumptions that could wilt under scrutiny, far better to point their lying estimate and condemn them on that basis.
60 thousand dead Iraqis, less security, and the prospect of worse to come, that’s plenty good reasons to condemn Bush and his murderous cohorts along with their money grabbing corrupt business partners.
The question I would ask is, have any of these ‘debunkings’ been in the scholarly literature? Because anyone can say anything in a blog, or in AEI’s or Hoover’s in-house publications, or whatnot.
The thing about griffin quoting Daniel Davies is that Davies isn’t the authoritative source; the Lancet article is. Davies is just bringing it down closer to layman’s language.
That should be the standard for the rebuttal/debunking/whatever: there should be one in the scholarly littcher where the real debate goes on, and someone reasonably intelligent can give the English-language version.
I think it’s essential to remember that the IBC describes itself as “the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq that have resulted from the 2003 military intervention by the USA and its allies.”
What’s more, the IBC relies on a rather stratospheric list of sources:
I appreciate all their talk about standards, but this is the view from 40,000 feet of what is happening on the ground. How many deaths in Baqubah or Nasiriyah or similar towns are reported only in the papers of those cities, but not reported in the international press? It goes without saying that the IBC is catching only a fraction of the war-related deaths - it’s a direct consequence of their methodology.
A little light reading on a related note: Iraq’s Woes Are Adding Major Risks To Childbirth
Wonder how many of those deaths were reported in the Agence France-Presse or the Sydney Morning Herald?
By the way, I want to make it clear that I’m not being at all critical of the IBC. I think someone should be doing exactly what they are doing - producing a complete count of Iraqi deaths that have been reported in the reputable international press - but it should not in any way be confused with an estimate, even a low-ball estimate, of actual war-related deaths. That is not what they are providing. They are doing something necessary, but quite different.
If we were talking about a few hundred or even a thousand or so, I’d agree. We are, however, talking about 600,000. Thats a hell of a lot of dead people to bury in back yards, stick in rubble or chuck in rivers. Do you have any idea of what that number means in real world terms?
Why? IBC is an anti-war organization. Why would they deliberately be under-estimating the numbers of Iraqi dead? Whats their motive for doing such a thing?
(from memory) They also cross check every death certificate to verify deaths they reported. We are talking about a HUGE amount of difference here…aprox 60,000 verse nearly 700,000…more than an order of magnitude difference. Thats not 5% difference…or 100% difference. Its more like 1000% difference (if the math in my head is in the ball park). Thats pretty big.
BTW, I’m not saying Lancet is wrong. As I’ve said in other threads concerning this, I simply think that Lancet is using a broader definition and scope of what a civilian death is than anyone else is…or ever has. Had this definition been used in previous wars then the death tolls for those wars would be (obviously) an order of magnitude higher than is generally acknowledged. If we count everyone who has a heart attack and couldn’t get care due to circumstances concerning the war as someone ‘killed’, then of course the numbers are going to be much higher. We could probably look back on wars of the past and instead of 30 or 40 million Russians killed increase that to 300 to 400 million killed (going on memory again for Russian civilians killed in WWII…just using the numbers as a rough example).
To my mind when someone is ‘killed’ in war, that means they are killed directly from bombs or bullets. Thats why I orient to IBC’s stats…they are, IMHO, more meaningful. Lancet attempts to extrapolate its figures by comparing them to civilian death rates before the war to those now and getting its figures by interviewing households about ANY death thats occurred…then determining which ones were caused by the war and which were ‘normal’.
So…as I’ve said. Its all in how you spin the data and what assumptions you make. I think Lancet IS useful (as I’ve said in other threads on this subject)…its just saying things different than most people are reading it. And its also being used for political purposes to jack up the horror of the war in Iraq. IMHO no jacking up is needed…60,000(!!) civilian deaths is quite horrible enough, thanks.
-XT