Genocide?
posted October 12, 2006 at 12:40 p.m.
US, Britain reject study that claims Iraqi death toll tops 600,000
But some experts support results, which were extrapolated from interviews with Iraqi families.
By Tom Regan
Christian Science Monitor
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and the Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, in cooperation with Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have released a study that says more than 655,000 Iraqis have died in Iraq following the US-led invasion of that country.
The Guardian reports that authors of the study say that nearly 31 percent of the deaths were caused by coalition troops, while most of the remaining fatalities were caused by violence such as gunshot wounds (56 percent) and car bombs.
"Although such death rates might be common in times of war," write the authors, Professor Gilbert Burnham and colleagues, "the combination of a long duration and tens of millions of people affected has made this the deadliest international conflict of the 21st century and should be of grave concern to everyone.
"At the conclusion of our 2004 study we urged that an independent body assess the excess mortality that we saw in Iraq. This has not happened.
"We continue to believe that an independent international body to monitor compliance with the Geneva conventions and other humanitarian standards in conflict is urgently needed. With reliable data, those voices that speak out for civilians trapped in conflict might be able to lessen the tragic human cost of future wars."
British medical journal The Lancet, which published the new study online, published a similar study in 2004 that also created a controversy over the number of Iraqis killed. But the Guardian reports that for the new study, the authors of the piece had it reviewed by four independent experts, who all urged the research be published. One of the reviewing experts noted the "powerful strength" of the research methods, "which involved house-to-house surveys by teams of doctors across Iraq."
The Associated Press says that the project's researchers conducted a survey of 1,849 households across Iraq, and extrapolated the final numbers based on reports they gathered from the interviews. [Editor's note: The original version misidentified the article's source.]
The researchers, reflecting the inherent uncertainties in such extrapolations, said they were 95 percent certain that the real number lay somewhere between 392,979 and 942,636 deaths. Even the smaller figure is almost eight times the estimate some others have derived.
AP reports that the survey has been met with a mixed reception. Gen. George Casey, the senior American military commander in Iraq, says the study goes way beyond the numbers he has seen, and doesn't give the report much credibility. Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, which also tracks Iraqi deaths, says he also believes the numbers are way off.
But Steve Heeringa, director of the statistical design group at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, says the report is a "remarkable effort" and Frank Harrell Jr., chair of the biostatistics department at Vanderbilt University, "called the study design solid and said it included 'rigorous, well-justified analysis of the data.' "
Both Washington and London immediately dismissed the report. The Globe and Mail of Toronto reports that President Bush and government officials in Iraq rejected the study's findings.
"The methodology is pretty well discredited," [Bush] said yesterday. Similarly, Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh told Reuters: "These numbers are exaggerated and not precise."
Mr. Bush has previously put the number of Iraqi deaths at 30,000. He reaffirmed that number yesterday. "I stand by the figure," he said. "Six hundred thousand or whatever they guessed at . . . it's not credible."
The Daily Telegraph reports that the British Foreign Office said the Iraqi government "is best placed to monitor the number of dead."
Frank James, writing on the Chicago Tribune's blog "The Swamp" says Bush may have a point, and that he has a right to be skeptical until more is known about the study.
In an e-mail [Donald Berry, Chairman of the Department of Biostatistics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center], apparently no supporter of President Bush's Iraq War policy, described the study published today in The Lancet, the British medical journal, as "unreliable."
"...The last thing I want to do is agree with Bush, especially on something dealing with Iraq. But I think 'unreliable' is apt. (I just heard Bush say 'not credible.' 'Unreliable' is better. There is a certain amount of credibility in the study, but they exaggerate the reliability of their estimate.)
"Selecting clusters and households that are representative and random is enormously difficult. Moreover, any bias on the part of the interviewers in the selection process would occur in every cluster and would therefore be magnified. The authors point out the possibility of bias, but they do not account for it in their report.
But Daniel Davies, writing in the Comment is Free section of the Guardian website, describes attempts to "rubbish the Lancet Study" as "devious hack work."
Whatever detailed criticisms one might make of the methodology of the study (and I have searched assiduously for the last two years, with the assistance of a lot of partisans of the Iraq war who have tried to pick holes in the study, and not found any), the numbers are too big. If you go out and ask 12,000 people whether a family member has died and get reports of 300 deaths from violence, then that is not consistent with there being only 60,000 deaths from violence in a country of 26 million. It is not even nearly consistent.
This is the question to always keep at the front of your mind when arguments are being slung around (and it is the general question one should always be thinking of when people talk statistics). How Would One Get This Sample, If The Facts Were Not This Way? There is really only one answer - that the study was fraudulent. It really could not have happened by chance. If a Mori poll puts the Labour party on 40% support, then we know that there is some inaccuracy in the poll, but we also know that there is basically zero chance that the true level of support is 2% or 96%, and for the Lancet survey to have delivered the results it did if the true body count is 60,000 would be about as improbable as this. Anyone who wants to dispute the important conclusion of the study has to be prepared to accuse the authors of fraud, and presumably to accept the legal consequences of doing so.
In an editorial, The Daily Star of Lebanon writes that regardless of what the real number is, the report is another indictment of the Bush administration's policies in Iraq.
The fact is that nobody knows exactly how many people have died since the US-led invasion in March 2003. And given the state of utter chaos in the country, accurate figures are not likely to be revealed any time soon. But the reality on the ground is almost certainly worse than the rosy picture Bush insists on conveying to the American public. Already we know that Bush's optimistic statements have repeatedly contradicted the assessments of national intelligence agencies, as well as the daily reporting by virtually every major news outlet.
One of the primary (stated) goals of the war was to rescue Iraqis from brutal oppression and tyranny. Iraq was supposed to be the shining example of democracy in the Arab world – a place where people would live in freedom from tyranny, under the protection of the rule of law. But occupied Iraq – where terrorism, sectarian violence and corruption are rampant – is quite unlike the Iraq that exists in Bush's imagination.
READ THE LANCET STUDY BELOW
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