Another 9/11 anniversary. Three thousand dead. A terrible tragedy. A horrific crime.
Five and a half years into the invasion and occupation of Iraq, a million dead, give or take a hundred thousand or so. So much destroyed, so many dead they have to be counted by survey like voters in an opinion poll. No exact number. No real list. No one can read out the name of every dead man, woman and child each year the anniversary comes around. The architects of this crime aren’t being hunted down - they were rewarded. Reelected.
A million dead: Three hundred and thirty three 9/11s. More than one a week, every week for five and a half years.
Or to put it different way, with a diagram of stickmen, each representing a thousand dead:
9/11 victims
Iraqi victims
23 Comments
Wonderful picture.
simple structure but meaningful
Not to belittle at all the tragedy that the Iraq war has been to all involved in it, but saying that a million people died in it is completely incorrect. The government of Iraq’s own figures show a maximum of 150,000 violent deaths during the war as of June 2006, and it is impossible to imagine that this has increased to as many as a million in the intervening time. Asides from this, since the majority of people who have died violent deaths in Iraq have died as a result of bombings, and since the proportion of people killed to those wounded in a bombing is 1 to 3, this would imply that a quarter of the population of Iraq has been killed or wounded during the war - and nowhere near this number have been wounded.
For comparison, during the first world war, when the French army was involved in high-intensity combat with a major power on its own soil for more than four years, 1.4 million soldiers and 300,000 civilians were killed. The Iraq war has been terrible, but it has not been this terrible.
Plus - by connecting the Iraq war to 9/11 you are conflating the two in the same fashion that George Bush attempted to do - Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, Al-Qaeda only started fighting in Iraq after the invasion. In fact, if we had had to choose a country other than Afghanistan to invade in response to the 9/11 attacks it would have been Saudi Arabia, as this is where the funding for the attack and the majority of the hijackers came from. 9/11 made people more likely to go along with a war fought with the idea of eliminating a potential sponsor of nuclear terrorism, but the war could well have been fought even if the 9/11 attacks had been foiled or not taken place. Don’t forget - ‘regime change’ in Iraq was part of George W. Bush’s manifesto when he ran for office.
This cannot be said enough: Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, and fighting this war in Iraq does not make western countries any safer from the threat of terrorism.
Definitely full of meaning. It gave me the shivers.
@FOARP
I think you’re referring to the Iraq Family Health Survey published in the New England Journal of Medicine. That study appears to contradict the two Johns Hopkins surveys published by the Lancet, but actually corroborates them to a large degree. This article gives quite a good summary, but you need to read the whole thing carefully and not get stuck on the headline.
On the connection between Iraq and 9/11, you’re right to say there was no connection between the two in terms of responsibility. But I strongly disagree that they are not connected. They are directly connected. Before and after the invasion, the Bush administration linked the two on almost every occasion that either of them was mentioned. Much of the US media did the same until they realized they’d been had. But my connecting the two is only partly based on this lie, and other lies told about the “global war on terror.” The dead are the dead. But it’s usually the weak who die in far greater numbers and the strong whose much lesser suffering gets the most attention.
No worries. Soon all of you will pay for it, with your lives.
The NWO ain’t playing around…They will kill you.
If you ain’t dead then by … dumb luck, you will be enslaved aftewards. No matter. You will suffer, and you will pay.
LOL LOL LOL.
I don’t think it’s a million, despite the Lancet story. It just strains credibility. As FOARP said, look at the casualty figures for WW1 and WW2 - Fallujah was bad but it’s not Hiroshima.
I think you can make the point just as well by showing the Iraq casualty rate is 50-100 times that of 9-11.
Theo, “I don’t think” is not credible refutation. Comparing the Iraq conflict to either of the two world wars is nonsense, since the nature of these conflicts is so radically different. The Lancet reports were not “stories” - they were rigorous studies carried out by qualified scientists and peer reviewed by qualified scientists.
Returning to FOARP’s original comment:
“…the majority of people who have died violent deaths in Iraq have died as a result of bombings…”
This is just plain wrong. The 2006 Lancet study found that “Most violent deaths were were due to gunshots (56%); air strikes, car bombs, and other explosions/ordnance each accounted for 13–14% of violent deaths.”
@Rob - Comparable ratios exist for gunshot wounds, where are 2-3 million wounded such fighting wound produce? I’m sure you are aware of the irregularities existing in the Lancet report - the fact that data was only collected on main streets (i.e., where the majority of the combat takes place), the fact that although roughly 90% of those interviewed were able to provide death certificates the Iraqi government simply hasn’t issued even nearly that many certificates. It is true that similar methodology has been used in other cases (such as the civil war in the Congo, for example), but we have seen many examples of how such statistical analysis can be wrong by a good margin even when the conditions for gathering of information are perfect - errors in estimating voter turnout and election results based on exit polls being a prime example. Once again, the war in Iraq has been a catastrophe for the people of that country, but has it been a calamity comparable to the occupation of Yugoslavia by the Axis (1,027,000 dead), the eight-year-long Japanese invasion of China by Japan (3.86% of the Chinese population), the Spanish civil war (500,000 dead) or the 27 year-long Angolan civil war (a maximum of a million dead)?
You have said that the nature of the Iraq conflict is radically different to that of other conflicts, this is true, the conflicts mentioned above were fought with a far greater intensity and involved state-sponsored mass-murder, no credible commentator is suggesting that this is happening in Iraq. If there is a useful example for comparison it is the Algerian civil war, in which numbers in excess of 150,000 were killed in an 11-year conflict. I do not think it is helpful to bandy about figures which are not likely to be believed.
It’s probably worth noting that the 1,000,000 dead number comes from all deaths associated with the war, not just ‘violent’ deaths. Little Fatima who died of dysentry caught from water contaminated with human fecal waste from a bombed sewage pipe or Hakim who couldn’t afford the black market insulin or Zena who was beaten for not covering her head are just as much casualties of the war as those who got bombed or shot.
@FOARP
Taking your points one at a time:
1) A projected 2-3 million wounded
I cannot answer this with any real knowledge so I won’t. It may or may not be true. But I also don’t have any real knowledge that 2-3 million people have not been wounded.
2) Data only collected on main streets
This is simply not true. The survey anticipated the risk of main street bias and took specific measures to ensure that it did not occur.
3) The government did not issue that many death certificates
The death certificates were not issued by the central government - they were issued locally. The government, like the entire country, was in such a state of chaos and had so little control of the country it simply did not know how many certificates had been issued at a local level.
3) Surveys for voter turnout and election results
These can be very wrong for various reasons, eg. potential voters think they might vote, but then can’t be bothered, or people leaving the polling booth lie. But most polling, if it is carried out properly, is seldom wrong to the degree you suggest. And election pollsters don’t ask and receive evidence from the interviewees in the form of a filled-in polling form. The majority of those interviewed for the Lancet survey did just that - show the death certificates. (I know you dispute the certificates but, as I said, the central government was incapable of gathering that information.)
4) Iraq not as bad as Axis-occupied Yugoslavia
On what basis should we assume this? Besides, Yugoslavia’s population in the 1940s was only about 2/3 of Iraq’s at the time of the 2003 invasion. As for the other comparisons, again, why should we assume it cannot be that bad?
In the case of Algeria, if any comparison is to be made it would be that Iraq combined both the violence of the 1990s and the war of independence. The figures for the war of independence vary from a low of 350,000 up to a high of 1.5 million.
Rob - I agree, the Lancet study of Iraqi casualties was based on the best epidemiological methods. But sometimes even the best epidemiological models are just wrong because the assumptions they are based on are not as neat as the science. Back in the 1980s I worked in a department of medicine where my colleagues in public health were predicting a HIV holocaust, based on models using then current levels of infection. As we now know it didn’t happen.
The Iraq deaths survey was based on second hand reports of deaths … not actual hard mortality data. I’m sceptical and I’d guess the actual number of deaths is somewhere between the 650,000 cited by the Lancet (not a million) and the 65,000 body count figure. Not a credible refutation … but even 100,000 deaths is a crime that Bush, Cheny and Blair should be held accountable for.
Theo, both the Lancet and the IFHS studies only ran up to June 2006 and reported violence surged in the second half of that year. Whatever figure was true two years ago, a lot more people have died since then.
None of us can say with absolute certainty what is the number of dead. We can look at the various studies and make our assessments of what kind of ballpark the death-rate has been. The biggest disparity between the Lancet and the IFHS reports was what proportion of people died from violence. There was a difference in the total number of deaths but both were closer to half a million than the 50,000 quoted by Iraq Body Count compiling only civilian violent deaths from English-language news reports. Iraq Body Count has doubled its figure since then.
As I said, both the Lancet and IFHS reports are two years old. In September 2007, the British polling agency ORB gave a figure of 1,220,580. In January 2008, ORB revised that number down to 1,033,000. This figure agrees very strongly with what one would expect given the increase in reported violence in late 2006 and 2007.
100,000 cannot be taken as the real figure since it relies solely on active reporting and by its very nature can only represent a proportion of the violent deaths of civilians. The Lancet and IFHS reports included all violent and non-violent excess deaths. And, referring to Twisted-Colours comment #10 above, a child that has died of dysentry because of the war is just as dead as a 30-year-old man who had his brains blown out.
But although we disagree on the most likely death toll, at least we agree that the even the lowest figure is horrific. For those who choose the lowest possible number - well, then Iraq has suffered 33 9/11s with a population only a tenth that of the United States.
“I think you’re referring to the Iraq Family Health Survey published in the New England Journal of Medicine. That study appears to contradict the two Johns Hopkins surveys published by the Lancet, but actually corroborates them to a large degree.”
Eh, no the study contradicts the 2nd of two JH studies. The 2 JH studies do not corroborate each other to begin with. The 2nd one gets twice as many violent deaths as the first for the same period, and shows non-violent deaths going down while the first one said they went up. The IFHS estimates 150,000 violent deaths while Lancet said 600,000 violent deaths. This is also while the IFHS adds in upward adjustments which Lancet did not, meaning the difference is even greater than appears.
Your link to the Socialist website claims that we are supposed to believe that because IFHS found more non-violent deaths than Lancet did, that this is supposed to somehow make their estimates more alike, literally, claiming we should view apples as oranges, in order to bring about some thing thread of “corroboration” for Lancet.
“Theo, “I don’t think” is not credible refutation”
“Because I say so” is not a credible basis of allegedly “scientific” facts demanding of a “credible refutation”. I don’t believe the Lancet study did the interviews it claims. I don’t believe they viewed death certificates. I don’t believe they “accounted for main street bias”, or anything else. Can you give me a credible reason to believe any of these claims?
“The death certificates were not issued by the central government - they were issued locally. The government, like the entire country, was in such a state of chaos and had so little control of the country it simply did not know how many certificates had been issued at a local level.”
Can you provide any proof for this claim Rob? Or is it just your theory that needs to be true to prevent the obvious conclusion about the Lancet? I don’t believe you have any actual evidence for the claim above, just as there is no actual evidence for the claims of the Lancet study itself.
“The majority of those interviewed for the Lancet survey did just that - show the death certificates.”
Why should I believe they did that? The Lancet survey sent an Iraqi doctor whom nobody knows and who hides himself from journalists and others out to do interviews. He did this with “anonymous” help from others who were supposedly doctors. They were allowed to _destroy_ all the data on where and who they supposedly surveyed so that nobody could actually check to see if they actually did anything they claim, or if any of this was properly randomized. They then handed this absurd data to the US authors who gave it to Lancet who chose to believe anything they said and “review” calculations based on that faith. The basis of these claims is not science. It is faith-based, accepting as science “We say so, and no you can not verify anything we say.”
Hopefully ObaMao will get elected so yet another Cultural Revolutionary Change can occur.
Over 6,000,000 murdered and counting…
I see all the old favourite arguments trying to discredit the 2 ‘Lancet’ reports are being bandied about again and poor old Rob’s on his own trying to correct the commonly-believe myths about the truth.
Yes yes yes, it’s easy to ignore the facts because they don’t fit comfortably with your view of your home nation as benevolent - always the ‘good guys’ - but the truth is that the western imperial nations (US/UK etc etc etc) are all, without exception, totally malignant. Exporting violence with impunity is their bread and butter - without the arms trade none of them would have power, and whether committing the violence themselves or merely supplying the means to commit violence to despots and enemies of democracy around the world, they’re always part of the picture somehow. Quite often it’s the UK’s FCO or the US CIA/NSA handing over intelligence to mercenary groups employed by corporations in old imperial colonies to exploit the local resources and population. This is not the rosy ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ tinted view that most Brits want to see, but it’s the truth.
The Lancet studies BOTH destroy that mythical worldview, but it’s about time people weren’t able to bury their heads anymore and accept responsibility for their governments actions.
If you REALLY wanted to know the truth about the Lancet/Orb studies then you’d read some of Les Burnham’s refutations of the slanders against his work and not use phrases like ‘main street bias’ so easily. Tsk… lazy.
Erm, Vim, I think you’ll find that even the LOWEST estimates or counts of Iraqi dead “destroy the mythical worldview” of western states being benign. Unless, of course, you think that 100,000 or so dead civilians can be the result of benign policy.
You don’t need faith in the absolute correctness of the Lancet studies to support the political view that you and I (and millions of others) share on this point.
And when even the two Lancet studies are themselves in complete disagreement on violent deaths (L2 estimates twice as many for the same period as L1), your faith starts to look suspect.
Lancet co-author Burnham has answered some criticisms satisfactorily, but on some issues (including “main street bias” and the discrepancy between L2 and L1 on violent deaths) his responses have been not only woefully inadequate, but have contradicted the responses made by his colleague Les Roberts on the same points (for examples he said that they’d take main street bias into account in the design of the sampling method, whereas Roberts asserted that it wasn’t an issue and that they’d never heard of such a bias).
And there are now at least five peer-reviewed studies which are seriously critical of Lancet 2, but none which corroborate its findings (the ORB poll wasn’t peer-reviewed science).
I think you have to take some of the criticism of the Lancet studies seriously if you don’t want to come across as just another “true believer”.
I am ashamed to say that I am retiring from this debate because it could go on forever. It probably should go on, but I would like to do other things.
Ray, keep up the good work searching daily for any blog that mentions the words Lancet and Iraq and then calling everyone involved a liar.
And MLster, I’m not going to go through every point you made because it would take up too much time - time that I would rather spend on the main focus of this blog which is China. I will however question your first two points and then go no further.
1) Since you have both Lancet reports in front of you, please explain why you believe “L2″ gave twice as many violent deaths as “L1″.
2) When did Les Roberts say he had never heard of main street bias? The only references to this I have seen him make have been to explain why he believes the survey took this into account and how the researchers avoided it.
Rob, to answer your questions:-
1. The Lancet 2004 (L1) estimate for violent excess deaths was 57,600. (The publicised figure of 100,000 was for excess deaths by all causes, not just violence). This figure excludes the Anbar governorate.
The Lancet 2006 (L2) data provides an estimate (for the period covered by L1, excluding Anbar) of 112,500 -126,000 violent excess deaths, approximately twice that of L1.
The fact of this serious contradiction between L1 and L2 is little known for two reasons: a) the *violent* deaths figure for L1 wasn’t published in the Lancet paper itself, so few people were aware of it. The source for the figure is Richard Garfield, co-author of L1 (http://www.epic-usa.org/An_Interview_with_EPIC_A.html); b) The Lancet authors presented L1 and L2 as corroborating each other based on figures for deaths by *all* causes. This was somewhat misleading as it conflates violent deaths with non-violent.
2. Contradiction between Burnham and Roberts on MSB. Gilbert Burnham states that there was “an effort to reduce the selection bias that more busy streets would have” (http://tinyurl.com/yltzr8). In other words he concedes that there is such a bias, and claims that the sampling methodology specifically took account of it. Les Roberts, on the other hand, simply dismisses the idea of such bias: “Realize [for MSB to occur], there would have to be both a systematic selection of one kind of street by our process and a radically different rate of death on that kind of street in order to skew our results. We see no evidence of either.” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/6099020.stm). In another interview Roberts was even more dismissive of MSB, declaring that he had “never heard” of such a bias occuring on busy streets, in all his years conducting such surveys (I can’t find the link for this interview, but it should be easy enough for someone with the time to dig up. I remember Roberts’s wording clearly as it struck me as directly contradicting what Burnham said on the issue.
Note, however, that Burnham and Roberts were in agreement over their claim that their sampling methodology was designed to give “each separate house […] an equal chance of being selected”. But they have yet to indicate *HOW* they achieved this (the sampling methodology as published in the original Lancet study certainly wouldn’t achieve it) - despite being asked repeatedly by other reseachers in the field. In other words, their reponse to the MSB criticism has consisted largely of unsupported assertions - they haven’t demonstrated how they randomly selected houses well away from streets intersecting main streets. And clearly the burden of evidence is upon them to do so (especially since Burnham concedes that there is a bias on busy streets).
Here are some useful links (eg to peer-reviewed, and other, papers which criticise the Lancet study. None of these are from Neocon apologists, but from leading experts in the relevant fields:
http://www1.cedat.be/Documents/Working_Papers/CREDWPIraqMortalityJune2007.pdf
http://www.icrc.org/web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/html/review-868-p943
http://www.hicn.org/research_design/rdn2.pdf
http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Standards.pdf
http://www.bepress.com/ucbbiostat/paper237/
http://www.warc.com/LandingPages/Generic/Results.asp?Ref=819
http://www.gdnet.ws/middle.php?oid=237&zone=docs&action=doc&doc=9026
http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Mainstreaming.pdf
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~jewell/lancet061.pdf
What an exercise in futility! Rob, I do not see anyone here questioning your basic outrage over crimes committed. But your claims here have serious holes in them, be it an exaggeration or an outright BS. Face it. People call you out on it, and all you can do is insist that you are right. That attitude has never advanced any cause, no matter how good. And feel free to retire from this debate. An easy way out: Everyone just wants to hurt your feelings! Where did I hear that before?
Well, yes Neddy, my last comment might have seemed a bit petulant, but that wasn’t really my intention. Don’t worry, I certainly don’t think everyone’s out to get me and hurt my feelings. And I can assure you my feelings are not hurt in the slightest.
Taking a break or retiring completely from the debate may be a cop-out. But the reason is simple - to deal with the issues at a level that the subject deserves would take far more time than I have right now.
I don’t really blame anyone for getting some of the facts wrong over this issue. They’re in good company - John Pilger and Robert Fisk got it wrong (they both wrote, incorrectly, that the Lancet 2006 study estimated “civilian” deaths). Even Noam Chomsky got basic facts wrong (eg on ORB, which he misnamed and whose figures he quoted incorrectly).
And the Chomskyite website, Medialens, (whom I agree with on many issues) got it completely wrong in several ways. That was unfortunate, because much of the misinformed mythology that’s emerged over the issue originated with them.
For example, Medialens wrote:
“Whereas the Lancet report estimated around 100,000 civilian deaths in October 2004, IBC reported 17,000 at that time.” http://tinyurl.com/povn9
That’s incorrect in two ways. First, the Lancet study didn’t estimate “civilian” deaths as Medialens claim. Secondly, IBC record only violent deaths, so the comparison should be between 57,600 and 17,000. But even that isn’t comparing like with like, since IBC do not include combatant deaths, whereas the Lancet study does.
Medialens’s criticism’s of IBC were mostly erroneous. For example, they wrote:
“IBC is not primarily an Iraq Body Count, it is not even an Iraq Media Body count, it is an Iraq Western Media Body Count”. http://www.medialens.org/alerts/06/060314_iraq_body_count.php
That’s completely wrong. IBC use non-media sources (eg hospital, morgue and NGO data) and non-Western media sources. They monitor 72 major “non-western” media on a daily basis, along with 120 “western” sources.
Even Medialens’s dichotomy of Western/Non-Western media shows ignorance of how media organisations such as Reuters function in Iraq (for one thing, they rely on Iraqi reporters for data gathering).
Of course, IBC’s incomplete count is often misrepresented by the mainstream media as an “estimate”. Medialens got that part right. But they seem to overlook the fact that the Lancet authors misrepresent IBC in the same way, as is demonstrated by this quote from Burnham/Roberts in a prominent article for Slate magazine:
“President Bush stated that 30,000 ‘more or less’ had died. The president’s estimate roughly matched the estimates of Iraq Body Count, which derives its total by monitoring newspaper reports of violent deaths. Today, IBC estimates there have been 45,000 to 50,000 violent deaths.” http://www.slate.com/id/2154203/
Now, compare that quote from the Lancet authors with one from the London Times (10 Dec 2006): “[IBC] put the number at about 50,000 civilian deaths, although its estimates rely on previously published sources.”
You can appreciate the irony when you realise that IBC were accused (by Medialens supporters) of being “war apologists” for not spending more time contacting the Times to correct this notion of “estimates”.
IBC became a convenient scapegoat in a very unpleasant and misinformed campaign. Of course this had roots in the frustrations people felt over the lack of accountability in the media for the mass slaughter in Iraq. That doesn’t excuse the ineptitude and nastiness which surrounds this issue, but at least its underlying causes are understandable. Sadly, as a result of the hysteria, anyone who criticises the Lancet studies in any way is likely to be labelled “pro-war”.
article mentions a total of 655,000 deaths attributable to invasion and occupation with 151,000 being the estimate of actual casualties.
the 655,000 is debatable. 1 million is an exageration.
still the invasion of iraq has resulted in a tragic loss of life and property.
a useful comparison can be made to the number of iraqi’s killed by saddam’s regime. when the invasion has killed more iraqi’s than saddam hussein then it can be asked if the iraqi’s are really better off.
Post a Comment