Psyche, Science, and Society

More comments on Iraq mortality study

October 11th, 2006

Juan Cole defends the Lancet study, providing additional arguments as to why it should be taken seriously:

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

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. Of course, 4 is an average. Cities in areas dominated by the guerrilla movement will have more than 4 killed daily, sleepy Kurdish towns will have no one killed.

If 470 were dying every day, what would that look like?

West Baghdad is roughly 10% of the Iraqi population. It is certainly generating 47 dead a day. Same for Sadr City, same proportions. So to argue against the study you have to assume that Baquba, Hilla, Kirkuk, Kut, Amara, Samarra, etc., are not producing deaths at the same rate as the two halves of Baghad. But it is perfectly plausible that rough places like Kut and Amara, with their displaced Marsh Arab populations, are keeping up their end. Four dead a day in Kut or Amara at the hands of militiamen or politicized tribesmen? Is that really hard to believe? Have you been reading this column the last three years?

Or let’s take the city of Basra, which is also roughly 10% of the Iraqi population. Proportionally speaking, you’d expect on the order of 40 persons to be dying of political violence there every day. We don’t see 40 persons from Basra reported dead in the wire services on a daily basis.

But last May, the government authorities in Basra came out and admitted that security had collapsed in the city and that for the previous month, one person had been assassinated every hour. Now, that is 24 dead a day, just from political assassination. Apparently these persons were being killed in faction fighting among Shiite militias and Marsh Arab tribes. We never saw any of those 24 deaths a day reported in the Western press. And we never see any deaths from Basra reported in the wire services on a daily basis even now. Has security improved since May? No one seems even to be reporting on it, yes or no.

So if 24 Iraqis can be shot down every day in Basra for a month (or for many months?) and no one notices, the Lancet results are perfectly plausible.

And David Lindorff noticed an aspect of the study that has so far been ignored by the press, namely that 30% of the violent deaths were attributed to U.S. troops. 30% of 600,000 is around 180,000 deaths from U.S. troops! If true, these results that the U.S. has been butchering Iraqis at a phenomenal rate.

That means U.S. forces have, since the March 19, 2003 invasion, killed between 132,000 and 246,000 Iraqis. It should be recalled that the Pentagon has estimated that the insurgency numbers perhaps 20-40,000 individuals, and they have only succeeded in killing a fraction of them. Assuming generously that the military has succeeded in killing maybe a quarter of the enemy fighters, that would be 10,000 people at most, leaving the U.S. civilian death toll at 122,000-236,000. The Christian Science Monitor, no radical rag, once did a survey and found that U.S. forces were killing civilians in Iraq at a rate of 30 for every enemy fighter slain. At that rate, it would appear, if the peer-reviewed Lancet study is correct, that the U.S. invasion and occupation forces have killed between 127,000 and 238,000 civilians

I guess they call it Operation Iraqi Freedom because the Iraqi subjects are freed from their [now wretched] lives..

Entry Filed under: Iraq, Middle East, Mortality, Public Health, Research Methods, Social Issues, War and Peace