100,000 Iraqi civilians dead, says study

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100,000 Iraqi civilians dead, says study

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Sarah Boseley, health editor
Friday October 29, 2004
The Guardian

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About 100,000 Iraqi civilians - half of them women and children - have died in Iraq since the invasion, mostly as a result of airstrikes by coalition forces, according to the first reliable study of the death toll from Iraqi and US public health experts.

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The study, which was carried out in 33 randomly-chosen neighbourhoods of Iraq representative of the entire population, shows that violence is now the leading cause of death in Iraq. Before the invasion, most people died of heart attacks, stroke and chronic illness. The risk of a violent death is now 58 times higher than it was before the invasion.

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There is no longer any plausible reason why George W. Bush should not be brought before the Hague Tribunal to answer changes of Crimes Against Humanity.100,000 Iraqi civilians dead, says study | World news | The GuardianThis message has been edited by contracycle, 10-29-2004 09:07 AM

As a thought exercise, I've been trying to think of what the possible counters to the study might be. So far, I've come up with:

• the study is flawed because the Lancet is not a reputable source
• ah! but most of those killings weren't intentional. So that's unfortunate, but alright.
• good. They were all terrorists (aka the "better 30 dead Iraqis than 1 dead American" defence)
• Saddam is responsible really. Proves we were right to go in.

When the report starts to get discredited by those with a vested interest in the occupation, I think they'll go for the first point, and try to point out that the Lancet has "anti-American leanings", and has been wrong in the past about something once.So far a Pentagon spokesman has bashfully said "there is no accurate way to validate the estimates of civilian casualties by this or any other organisation". Presumably a sudden attack of the coy? SourcePEThis message has been edited by Primordial Egg, 10-29-2004 01:29 PM

Don`tcherknow those Russian Special Forces that smuggled out the 380 tons of explosives to Syria and Iran, also whipped out the NBC stuff at the same time? :-P

I haven't seen any detail about the data/analysis (and it's been so long since I did any statistics I probably wouldn't understand it anyway ), but on Newsnight tonight they did show a Bush supporter questioning both the validity of the research and the political bias of the way it was reported. It was also said (by Newsnight, not the Bushbaby) that the report in the Lancet said the potential range could be anything from ~8000 to nearly 200,00 IIRC. Presumably 100,00 was what the researchers calculated to be the likeliest number.

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Confused ? You will be...

Do you consider president Bush personally responsable for the civilian deaths in Iraq?The article says: Yes, but that is because there was so little violent death before the war. The overall mortality rate, however, was 1.5 times the original mortality rate if you accept the survey's high claims, which I don't. The article was misleading in their use of stastics. Reminds me of that good ol' Woody Allen quote... First, I'd like to point out that the article states this number like a fact, not the uncertain number it is. Quotes from the actual study (here): This is partially because: That is pretty self explanatory. Also: The study only took into account 33 neighboorhoods. That is not a valid sample size. If there was intense fighting concentrated in some of the clusters, it would drastically skew the data. For example, the cluster in Fallujah gave results so much higher than any others that for the entire report they give stasticial calculations for the data set including Fallujah, and not including Fallujah. Probably, most military (i.e. non civilian) deaths were excluded. Probably.The people who carried out this study made no secret of the fact that it could have delivered a highly skewed number, and the number it delivered is 3-10 times larger than all the other estimates. If I have to choose betwee one dubious survey and a whole truckload of reliable ones I'm definitely going with quantity and quality over, well, sensationalism. The newspaper overrated what the people running the survey said about its accuracy, and the people running the survey overrated its accuracy.However, the number of deaths should not have any effect on whether or not someone is guilty of a war crime. It is known that at least 10,000 civilians have died, and that is enough to indict someone. What I want to know is why you think president Bush is personally responsable. Do you actually think a president should guilty for all collateral damage in a war? If so, every wartime president we've have should have been convicted many times over.TTFN,
JT

Would we have gone to war if his administration hadn't pushed for it? It's not like Saddam attacked us, or anything. Why not? How many would have been enough for a statistical estimate? Except for Fallujah, was there? Everything I've heard is the exact opposite - everyone I've heard talk about the survey has remarked upon what minute scrutiny the statistical reasoning was subjected to. This was, after all, a peer-reviewed study.Were the others you referred to peer-reviewed?If this survey had returned results more to your liking, would you still, in all honesty, be uncertain about its validity? Not to accuse you of rabid partisanship, or anything.For my part, I share your concerns. I don't view this as anything but the most accurate estimate, to date. But it is still an estimate. The real damage we've caused may never be known.But we did take Milosevitch to trial with nothing more than statistical population analysis to substantiate genocide. Oddly enough, the more people you kill, the harder it is to prove that any of them were ever alive. (Hence, Holocaust revisionism, etc.) According to international law, occupying forces have a responsibility to secure territories they occupy and prevent looting and other crimes and lawlessness.Bush and his planners didn't commit enough troops to do that, because they knew that if they had been upfront about the enormous troop commitment, they wouldn't have been able to rely on public support for the war. Remember that they fired the guy who said that it was going to cost as much as it's turned out to have cost.So, the way I see it, the Bush administration were knowingly responsible for a violation of international law in failing to secure the area from looting and lawlessness. Doesn't that make them war criminals? Of course, to be tried as a war criminal, you usually have to lose the war... Maybe that would give world leaders pause before embarking on a course of war, knowing that they would be held more than merely politically responsible for the outcome. Is that a bad thing?This message has been edited by crashfrog, 10-29-2004 09:47 PM

It was not about whether or not we had been attacked - it was about whether or not there was a serious threat. Bush wasn't alone in thinking that there was. Even John Kerry voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq. If going to Iraq was wrong, he is just as guilty as Bush. Any number I say would be completely arbitrary, but I think it is clear that their sample size is too small, and Fallujah is a perfect example. A single cluster out of 33 messed up their numbers so badly that if they would have included it in their data, it would have given the number of deaths as 198,000. If, by bad luck, a half dozen clusters were well above average, it would have skewed their numbers.Another indicator that the sample size was to small is their range of error. They are 95% sure that the number of casualties is between 8,000 and 198,000. If a pollster told that he was pretty sure his survey revealed Kerry would get between 13% and 89% of the vote, would you believe him if he told you that he was pretty sure Kerry was going to squeak out a 51% victory?Not on the topic of sample size, though, they had another problem. They used their survey to estimate the crude death rate (i.e. the death rate including infants) in Iraq before the war, and they got the number 5.0 deaths per thousand. Atlapedia gives the death rate for Iraq as 7.0 per 1,000. They used bad data to exagerate the increase in the rate of death. Atlapedia gives the infant rate of death as 80 per 1,000. The survey gives the post war infant mortality rate as 57 per thousand. The data from their survey actually gives a smaller infant death rate after the war started. I don't know - they didn't give out the data for all the clusters in the report. There weren't any others as extreme as the Fallujah cluster, though, otherwise they would have been mentioned. Appeal to (anonymous) authority. [/qs]This was, after all, a peer-reviewed study.[/qs]That is an appeal to authority to the reviewers. A paper which has gone through the peer-review process has more clout than one that hasn't, but that doesn't necessarily mean it is any good.Here is a quote from the Guardian story: So Richard Horton though this paper was important enough to "fast-track." Let me raise some questions: what are the chances that the presidential election didn't enter Dr. Horton's mind when he decided to fast track the survey, and what are the chances that his obvious admiration for this paper didn't affect the review process?
There is more, though. Just recently, Dr. Horton has been the subject of a scandal (The reputation of Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, has been tied to that of Andrew Wakefield ever since the controversial study on MMR was published six years ago. He ran his old colleague’s research to the surprise of some experts. Last week, after being shown the evidence of The Sunday Times investigation, he admitted publishing was a mistake. He was apparently so startled by our findings that he immediately went public, despite an agreement that he was shown them in confidence. Medical insiders now wonder if he can survive the scandal that has damaged The Lancet.

Ok.There wasn't a threat. Nobody thought there was any credible evidence that Saddam posed an immediate, looming threat. The administration tried to present the threat of a threat, but that doesn't seem like a compelling reason for war. Well, I disagree. For instance, we authorize policemen to carry sidearms and excerise deadly force. But that doesn't mean that we approve every single use of deadly force - we still prosecute police personnel who kill needlessly, even though we told them flat-out they could use deadly force when it was called for.Kerry, like the rest of Congress, voted for the authorization of force in order to show Saddam that we were serious about force. And it worked. But Bush went to war anyway.I'm not sure why you brought up Kerry in the first place; it's Bush we're talking about. Yeah. It's the best I have. I don't have the training to examine the statistical methodology of the report; neither do I have a copy of the report.But I don't expect you to find that compelling, of course. I don't know. Presumably the review process proceeds in such a way as to eliminate the influence of any one particular editor. There's a difference between looting occuring despite all possible precautions to the contrary, and looting occuring because no strategy was put in place to prevent it, which is the case here. I'd say we draw the line at the degree to which measures were taken to prevent it. Surely you'd agree?I'm not familiar with any precautions that were undertaken to prevent the wholesale looting of Iraq's weapons and nuclear facilities; the only plan enacted to prevent looting, according to White House spokesman Scott McClellan, was to protect Iraq's oil assets. Well, I'm no mind reader, so I can only speculate as to the motivations of the Administration. But it's certainly beyond dispute that the administration underestimated the number of troops they would need, and given the number of people who told them and told the public at the time that they weren't going to commit enough troops, its ludicrous to suggest they weren't aware that was the case. We're talking about two different people, but I made a mistake. I was thinking of someone else because I knew about Shinseki's retirement being on schedule. But it turns out that the guy I was thinking of who got fired was related to Medicare, not the Iraq war. So, never mind. Well, I'm not certain how America could start a war and have it be a just war. But I recognize that could be a possibility, so I don't think that starting a war is a war crime in itself.But I don't think it would be a bad thing if our leaders were afraid to start wars, because the consequences would be far worse than losing the next election. I don't think being the president should excuse you from the legal consequences of unjust warfare; quite the opposite, the majority of the consequences should lay on your shoulders.To sum up, I guess, I'm coming around to your position, kind of. The numbers are iffy at best, and I agree that your assessment of the methodology appears sound to me. But I have no particular training or expertise in this area, and it appears that at least some people who probably do disagree with your assessment, presumably. So I don't know what to think.At any rate, the raw bodycount isn't really the issue for me. The issue to me is that the Administration appears to have done whatever they needed to do to get the country to go to war, presumably because they thought it was the best thing for the country, even though there was no evidence that was the case.

Kerry voted for the use of force as a last resort to give the pres bargaining power to apply diplomatic solutions first. He has said that his approach would have been very different, so you can't lump him in there. Yes if the president invades a country that has not made an aggressive attack nor declared war on the US. If the president invades a country based on a mistake he should answer for it: there should be consequences.Defense is when you have been attacked. Iraq did not attack us — even shwub admits that.ANd we are not even getting into the issue of geneva convention violations ...

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

Crashfrog and RAZD,
I am just going to deal with the "threat issue" in this post, I'll talk about the other stuff later. Here are some excerpts from the "Congressional Resolution on Iraq":

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Whereas in 1998 Congress concluded that Iraq's continuing weapons of mass destruction programs threatened vital United States interests and international peace and security...

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I will again remind you that Senator Kerry, along with a majority of the house and senate, signed this document - many people who did not support the administration believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that presented a threat. (I am not trying to change the topic to Sen. Kerry, just trying to show that these beliefs were widely held among those in high levels of government and across party lines)Here is some more (from the same source):

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Whereas Iraq both poses a continuing threat to the national security of the United States and international peace and security in the Persian Gulf region and remains in material an unacceptable breach of its international obligations by, among other things, continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability, actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability, and supporting and harboring terrorist organizations;

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So Sen. Kerry believed Iraq harbored terrorists, but has been relentlessly been critiquing Pres. Bush for believing the same. Very disingenuous in my opinion. (That was an off topic jab at the senator, and I apologize, but I couldn't help it. )

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Whereas the current Iraqi regime has demonstrated its continuing hostility toward, and willingness to attack, the United States, including by attempting in 1993 to assassinate former President Bush and by firing on many thousands of occasions on United States and Coalition Armed Forces engaged in enforcing the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council;

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So the belief was that Iraq was willing to attack the U.S.

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Whereas members of al-Qaida, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq;

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Kerry actually voted for that! He believed al-Qaida was in Iraq! (there I go again...)

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Whereas Iraq's demonstrated capability and willingness to use weapons of mass destruction, the risk that the current Iraqi regime will either employ those weapons to launch a surprise attack against the United States or its Armed Forces or provide them to international terrorists who would do so, and the extreme magnitude of harm that would result to the United States and its citizens from such an attack, combine to justify action by the United States to defend itself;

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The threat was grave enough that the U.S. was warranted in attacking Iraq.

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Whereas the Iraq Liberation Act (Public Law 105-338) expressed the sense of Congress that it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove from power the current Iraqi regime and promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime;

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A chief goal was to replace the current government with a democracy.

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(a) AUTHORIZATION- The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate...

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There were not any qualifiers on that - if the president thought it was necessary, he could order the use of force. Let me rephrase that - both the senate and the house of congress, including Sen. Kerry, told Bush that he could use force at his discretion.Summary: Kerry, one of the most outspoken critics of the war, believed that al-Qaida was in Iraq, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, that Iraq was a serious threat to the safety of American citizens, and that we should replace Saddam's regime with a democracy. He also said that President Bush could use force if he deemed it necessary.I need to get sleep - the rate at which I make typos is exponentially increasing, and I don't think I'm gaining coherency, either.Sweet dreams,
JT

Wait, your cite doesn't even conclude that. It concludes that he has "programs", not weapons.Don't get ahead of yourself. And remember too that, no matter what Kerry or Clinton or whoever thought Iraq had, Bush was the one that actually pushed for a war about it. Hell, Florida harbored the 9/11 terrorists for years. Should we bomb Jeb Bush?I realize you'd like to wave this resolution around like some kind of proof, but is it really? What's the burden of proof for a resolution? Don't you think that Congress might very well draft a resolution for purposes of political expediency rather than out of any sort of committment to what can be proved?I will grant that this resolution might represent the best of Congress's knowledge at the time, but that's hardly evidence that their conclusions were in any way accurate. For someone who just called me out for an argument from anonymous authority, it's surprising to see you do the exact same thing here. Everybody knows that they were. They were also in Florida. There's a difference between living in a country and working for its leaders. Was it? Or did the members of Congress feel it politically advantageous to say so? Well, he joined Congress in signing a resolution that said so. That's not really the same thing at all, now is it?Politicians sign things they may not believe. I'd be disappointed if that comes as a shock to someone your age.I mean, why is Congress supposed to be an unimpeachable authority on this issue? You haven't really addressed that at all. For instance, did they come to these conclusions from the intelligence the Bush administration presented?

belief is not enough for one to instigate war and destruction and mass death -- you need to be sure.and if you start such a program on a belief and you are proven wrong by the evidence acquired afterwards then you should bear the consequences ...... that is justice after all.Bush made a BAD DECISION and needs to be accountable, not just to the US but to those who have been devastated by his mistake.the fact that he rushed to this BAD DECISION in spite of strong evidence that the inspections were working and that they were keeping Iraq in control make it double bad imho.It was wrong at the time: it has been proven more wrong as time goes on.Frankly I am appalled that people still support a person who has committed such a gross act of unwarranted aggression.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

BINGO.Frankly, that was obvious to me long before we went to war, and I question the intelligence of anyone who doesn't see it. I also question the integrity of our congressfolks who signed that resolution. Several of those statements have never been well-substantiated, and I think it was out of expediency more than anything else that people like Kerry went along with that push. Of course, anyone who questioned specific language in the document or voted against it on those grounds would probably have been overwhelmed by "patriotic" misrepresentation... so I can see the other side, though I still don't agree with their choice.Iraq was merely a target of opportunity for this administration, represented as something completely different to manufacture support for a decade-long ambition. Thus, I lean toward the same conclusions as Crash with regard to culpability for civilian casualties.John Stewart, after the pres. denounced a certain news network for running stories under the banner "March to War": "Yeah! It's not like some asshole was marching us to war!"

Crashfrog says: You are right - I was too hasty and missed that obvious fact. Again, you are right. The resolution didn't say Iraq was harboring terrorists, only that they lived there. I should have been more specific. All I was trying to show was the conclusions that Congress had reached. I guess I know that, but I wasn't thinking about it. But anyway, do you think many congressman would sign what amounts to a declaration of war without believing it? Some tax bill or welfare package maybe, but war? (as a side note, I am not old enough to vote, so I haven't had time yet to do away with all my naivette, although I am working on it.).RAZD says: How do you propose government makes decisions if it cannot do so based on belief? Belief is defined as: "conviction of the truth of some statement or the reality of some being or phenomenon especially when based on examination of evidence." If government is convicted of the truth of something, and has done all within reason to assure itself of its correctness, don't you think it should act? And, after the fact, if it turns out that the wrong decision was made (I am not saying invading Iraq was the wrong decision - I am entering the world of the hypothetical...), should those who made it be held responsable even if it was the best decision they could make at that time? But was it a reasonable decision at the time? The U.N. security council unanimously authorized the U.S. to use force, the U.S. Congress authorized the use of force, and the governments of many (30 or so?) other countries authorized the use of their troops in Iraq. Invading Iraq may have been a bad decision (I don't think it was), but the huge number of entities that supported it testify to the fact that it was, at the very least, a reasonable decision.Zephyr - by the time I got here (to your post), my responses to RAZD and Crashfrog covered all the issues contained in your post. By the way, did absentee ballots ever get to you?RAZD said (in post 9): I am going to structure my response on the notion that the accusation of those violations is based on civilian deaths. If that is not the primary reason you think "shwub" (loyalties aside, that is an awesome name ) is a war criminal, let me know. While burning strawmen is fun, it isn't conducive to good debate.During the Korean war, there were over 2 million civilian casualties - about 11% of the population - over 36 months. That gives a civilian death toll, per month, of 55,555 or 0.31% of the population. During the Vietnam war, there were around 3 million civilian casualties - about 6% of the population. Per month, there were 22,727 civilian casualties - about 0.17% of the population. Both of these wars had horrendous loss of life, but the leaders of those wars have not been denounced as war criminals.Now I'll look at Afghanistan. In the first 2 months, approximately 4,800 civilians died due to the war. That is 2,400 per month - 0.01% of the population. That is between 1 seventeenth and 1 thirtieth of what in the past has been considered acceptable (although terrible) in the past. I would also like to call attention to the fact that president Bush has been complimented for his decisions involving Afghanistan.In the first 21 months of fighting in Iraq, there have been 20,000 civilian casualties (Iraq Body Count gives the number as around 16,000, but I'll go with a more liberal estimate). That gives 952 civilians per month, or 0.004% of the population per month.Here are the numbers in one group:
War- - - - - Casualties per month - - - - -- % of population
Korean - - - - - - - 55,555 - -- -- - - - - - 0.31%
Vietnam - - - - - - 22,727 - - - - - - - - - - 0.17%
Afghanistan - - - - 2,400 - - - - - - - -- - -- 0.01%
Iraq - - - - - - - - 952 - - -- - - - -- - -- 0.004%
Iraq (If 100,000 had died)- -4,761 - - - - - 0.019%It is interesting to note that the more recent the war, the less the damage to the civilians is. That is a side note, though. What is interesting is that in the past 50 years (and probably ever, but I won't assert that without actually processing the numbers), the war with the least effect on civilians has been the Iraq war - the Vietnam war was 77.5 times worse, and the Korean war was 155 times worse. Even if 100,000 civilians (a woefully inflated number) in Iraq had died, Vietnam would still be 8.5 times worse than Iraq, and the Korean war would be 16 times worse.Summary: Even if the worst case scenario in Iraq is true, so far it has been the war with by far the least impact on civilians in the last 50 years, and if accurate numbers are used, it puts the other casualty numbers into the stratosphere. Presidents responsable for wars with monumentally greater civilian cost and reasons more dubious aren't branded war criminals, so why is President Bush?Later,
JT

If that was what it took to bluff Saddam Hussein, yes, I do. It's a funny game, politics. I hope you don't get so sick of it before the age of 18 that you opt not to excercise your franchise.And the bluff worked. He started destroying weapons, and he re-admitted the inspectors. To me, the whole situation is like a cop pulling a gun on a crook to get him to disarm, the crook disarming, and then the cop shooting him anyway. The way the Bush Administration had framed the debate, there was nothing Saddam could have done to substantiate his disarmament, short of the one thing the Bushies knew he would never do - suborn his nation's soveriegnty to the US at the cost of his own esteem among the leaders of the Middle East.I think the war situation is far too complex to characterize as "good" or "bad." But absolutely no decent American should be able to contemplate our actions in Iraq without a troubled conscience. Most troubling of all to me is that, when a cop shoots a crook needlessly, he's tried for murder, no matter what the crook may have done. When a President invades a country needlessly, he gets re-elected.A few notes on points you haven't addressed specifically to me. While you're about right on the size of our Coalition (49 nations, actually), only about six of those nations actually committed troops to the invasion. Many of the nations are in the Coalition because they're so small that they have nothing to contribute; thus they curry favor from the US at no cost to themselves.And you might take a closer look at some of our Coalition bedbuddies. Uzbekistan? Funny that we enlisted the help of a torturing, totalitarian regime in order to take down another. Not a surprise to see Afghanistan in the Coalition, seeing as how we still largely run that country. Of course, the nation of Micronesia is entirely dependant, by treaty, on the US for its defense, so naturally they're with us on this one.If you like, you can go here to this Wiki page and see a brilliant map that color-codes world nations by their position on the war. I think it really brings into perspective just how unilateral our so-called "Coalition" really is. Governmental positions on the Iraq War prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq - WikipediaAlso, your table about wartime casualties is interesting but incomplete - you forgot to include the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo.