I have a new article in this month's print edition on the attempt to count the number of dead in Iraq. My article focused mostly on how we process the numbers, but over the course of my research I accumulated a fair store of knowledge on the subject. Since the fifth anniversary recriminations are still in full swing, I thought it might be useful if over the next week or so, I covered the state of the debate.
In some sense, I don't think knowing the number matters1. The lower bounds of reasonable estimates are still high enough to make me think our involvement in Iraq was a bad idea, especially when considered in conjunction with the various other problems we know about, like the attacks on key infrastructure and the refugee crisis. So debating whether the number is 100,000 or an order of magnitude higher than that doesn't change my basic assessment of the situation.
But in many other ways, accuracy is tremendously important. These numbers shape the national debate; it is therefore critical that they should be as correct as possible. Also, the results from these studies have important implications for a range of policies. Knowing how bad the violence is, and what kind of violence we are dealing with, should shape many of the priorities and goals that we and the Iraqi government set for ourselves.
1 Go ahead, take this out of context.
If you just added up the deaths reported from a single newspaper over the course of 5 years, the number would be higher than 100,000. There's just no way it's that low.
The Iraq Body Count number, which covers all deaths printed in English-speaking media, is 80-90,000. This does not net out whatever number of people were dying violently before.
One consequence of clarifying and narrowing down the casualty figure is that readers can no longer rely on it as one the "facts" they can use in selecting what to read and what to ignore.
War opponents could be assured that any article that used a >500,000 casualty figure certainly was anti-war, war supporters knew that any article using a
Freddie,
What newspaper?
I see!
My apologies, one of the sentences above got truncated. It should have been:
war supporters knew that any article using a casualty figure
Seems like some other numbers would be helpful for some context:
Given the subject matter, this would be a really dumb article to pick not to put online. The whole point is to create transparency in the political discourse. I recognize that publishing a piece only in print and not online is not exactly the equivalent of classifying it top-secret and locking it in a man-size safe. But still, isn't this exactly the kind of piece that ought to be online?
Or is it going online? I don't see it yet.
If you just added up the deaths reported from a single newspaper over the course of 5 years, the number would be higher than 100,000. There's just no way it's that low.
The problem with the debate in a nutshell: For some people, perception is ten/tenths of reality, and the mainstream media only reports when a bomb goes off. Thus perception lives in the realm where All Is Bad, and if not Bad, then Worse.
At any rate, I look forward to reading your article, Megan. Some of the early predictions were clear up in the 1M+ range, so although 100k in five years is an appalling number from a humanitarian standpoint, it's also a potential wash compared to what Hussein & Sons were able to come up with in any comparable time period.
It is up, Brooksfoe; I just forgot to link it. It's here: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200804/war-statistics
This does not net out whatever number of people were dying violently before.
I haven't read the article, but I question why one should simply "net out whatever number of people were dying violently before".
This assumes that the rate of violent death from "before" would have remained the same indefinitely into the future. That assumption seems to me to be quite faulty.
My assumption is that the sectarian violence we see today is a result of the removal of Saddam from power. Since Saddam would not have lived forever, some or all of the sectarian violence was inevitable and cannot be attributed to "the war".
I'm afraid I have a hard time understanding why anybody should really care about the exact number. To paraphrase dear old Uncle Joe: "One death is a tragedy, but 80,000 or 1,000,000 are both just statistics."
Seriously, if you believe (as I do) that this Iraq war was an outrage on a whole bunch of different levels, you're not going to be mollified by learning that we killed 'only' 80,000 people -- even if you accept the unprovable argument that Saddam & Co. might have killed 80,001 during the same time frame.
Conversely, if you're a dyed-in-the-wool neocon who thinks this is America's finest hour since Yorktown, you're not going to suddenly repent just because the death toll reached 1,000,000. Like the poet said: "You don't count the dead when God's on your side."
Hm.
Your piece is mostly about people's reactions to the numbers, rather than how the researchers arrived at the numbers. Which is okay. Maybe the latter has been so extensively covered elsewhere that you felt it was redundant to go into it. But I had expected a bit more extensive exploration to back up your note in comments that a consensus had developed that the higher the estimate was, the sloppier the research had been.
Also, I came away from the piece a little unclear about what we're talking about here. First, the figure in the NEJM article is 151,000. The figure you've used on the blog is 125,000. I take it from another comment you made that 125,000 represents excess violent deaths over an analogous, previous 3.25-year period under Saddam. But that calculation isn't in the NEJM article as far as I can see; they don't do the excess violent deaths calculation, just the straight violent deaths calculation. So I would like to know where the figure of 25,000 or so violent deaths as the background rate under Saddam comes from.
Also, you start out with the line "How many Iraqis have died because of the American invasion?" But then you treat exclusively violent-death stats, though of course the chaos caused by the invasion also caused the non-violent death rate to rise. From the NEMJ:
"Overall mortality from nonviolent causes was about 60% higher in the post-invasion period than in the pre-invasion period. Although recall bias may contribute to the increase, since deaths before 2003 were less likely to be reported than more recent deaths, this finding warrants further analysis."
Maybe there's a reason why this isn't as important as the NEMJ thinks it is, but I'd like to hear what that reason is. I mean, sure, deaths from heart attacks because the post-invasion looting destroyed the hospitals aren't exactly directly attributable to US military action, but Shiite deaths from Sunni suicide bombers aren't either. These are both indirect effects, but ones which clearly stem directly from the US's decision to launch a war and eradicate the existing government.
A couple of other things...obviously these studies end in June 2006, which was getting on towards 2 years ago, in the middle of the most violent period of the war. So when we're talking about 150,000 violent deaths, by now one would have to assume the toll has risen tens of thousands higher. I don't know how many tens of thousands higher. But the death rate started falling in summer 2007, so you've got the most violent year of the whole war in there from mid-06 to mid-07. Right? It seems flatly inaccurate to state that the best estimates indicate there have been 150,000 violent deaths since the invasion; they indicate there were 150,000 as of almost 2 years ago. Again, the NEMJ:
"we estimated that there were 151,000 violent deaths in Iraq (95% uncertainty range, 104,000 to 223,000) during the post-invasion period from March 2003 through June 2006."
If the question is "How many Iraqis have died because of the invasion," the answer still has to be considerably closer to 200,000 than to 125,000. 125,000 might be the best-estimate answer to "How many Iraqis died violently because of the invasion through June 2006?"
Since Saddam would not have lived forever, some or all of the sectarian violence was inevitable and cannot be attributed to "the war".
You don't go far enough, Al. I can guarantee you that every single one of those people would eventually have died anyway, whether or not the US invaded.
Don't see how that relevant, brooksfoe. Some number of Iraqis were going to have their lives cut short by sectarian violence once Saddam's regime went away, regardless if Saddam went away because of our invasion or from some other cause. That number is unknowable but it is not zero, which is the implicit assumption made by Megan and the studies she is reviewing.
You don't go far enough, Al. I can guarantee you that every single one of those people would eventually have died anyway, whether or not the US invaded.
That ain't fair, brooksfoe. Saddam was 69 and his two sons were known for their competitive violence. Even without any further US involvement in the region and neglecting the policies of repression and infrastructure negelect that would doubless result in many unnecessary deaths under an ongoing Saddam regime, there was a high probability that within 10-15 years Saddam would have either died of old age or been assassinated during an old-age illness, and a large and bloody power struggle would have occurred, with many of the same non-US actors falling out along sectarian lines and generating violence in exactly the same fashion. Or more likely, worse fashion.
Mmmm . . . sort of. I'll be talking about all of this over the next week; you can agree or disagree as you like. It could be 200,000, mind you--I don't think we'll ever know. I would have liked to get into all of this more in the article, but I only had fifteen hundred words.
Some people are so caught up in the politics of petty resentment that they literally can't go a post without deliberately misinterpreting someones remarks, the better to troll away. But then, you and intellectual integrity parted ways a long time ago, didn't you, anonymouse?
I'm way late on this one, but I've seen conservative guesses that say 500,000 and many believe up to 1.5 million.
Let's think logistics here: 90,000 is the "body count" that we are sure of. That is confirmed reports of civilian deaths by the media. What about "Shock & Awe"? There wasn't any body count for that. All of the unmarked graves. All of the times our soldiers or hired merceneries wipe out families or even villages... I mean, c'mon! The official body count, which is verified at 90,000+, is just touching the tip of the iceberg of the Iraqi's murdered.
I would be shocked if the number is less than a million. Shocked. And remember, the estimate is one million Iraqi's killed by Sadam Hussein since he came to power. That would be about 1968 to 2003... 25 years. In 5 years, the U.S. has likely murdered more. So please, stop the arguements that Sadam would be worse... you can't get much worse than the U.S.
Any hey, check out 9/11 people... Loose Change on google.video. We are being lied to.... just like everything else.
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