One of the things you need to understand to grasp the state of play in the casualty debate is just why it's so hard to get an accurate count. Some of this is obvious, but much of it isn't, and the obvious bits vary from person to person, so bear with me.
In America or any developed nation, if we wanted to know how many people had died after a wrenching event like an invasion, it would be pretty easy. We'd go to the Census Bureau and find out how many people there used to be in America, and what the rate of population growth was. Then we'd find out how many people there are now, and we'd compare it to the number there should have been on previous trends. This would still be imperfect. For one thing, even here we don't know exactly how many people live in the country, or die in it; every year some people go missing, and others escape the long arm of the census. It also assumes trends would have continued. And it is hard to distinguish between babies that weren't born, and babies that died in infancy from war-related ailments. But it would generally be pretty close to accurate.
There are other ways that we could figure it out--counting death certificates, or crime reports. It's a multivariable equation; as long as you have enough variables, you can solve for the missing ones, and check your answers.
None of this works in Iraq.
One hears over and over that it is hard to collect data in the chaos. This is true, but underspecified; the physical danger to the interviewers is only one of the problems. In Iraq, they are compounded by the fact that the country didn't have good data before the invasion. All we've got is a 1997 census that no one is very confident in.
A list of the things we do not know about Iraq:
- The current population
- The population in 2003
- The geographical distribution of the population--the refugees have not been drawn evenly from all provinces.
- The demographic distribution of either the pre- or post-war population.
- The birth rate
- The death rate
The mechanism for collecting death certificates has broken down: it's not clear how many of the certificates are being recorded anywhere, but at any rate the central ministry doesn't seem to have all of them. Also, the government is thought to have a vested interest in downplaying the violence, which undermines trust in the figures they publish. It's also not clear when it broke down--whether Saddam's figures are accurate, or whether a lot of people disappeared (in any of several senses of the word) under his regime.
Even if the data exists at the provincial level, the physical danger makes it hard for interviewers to collect it, as well as making people very reluctant to talk to, much less help, strangers.
If we can't tally the deaths from public records, or compare the pre- and post-war populations, that leaves us with one option: we can ask the Iraqis. In a follow-up post, I'll discuss why that's really hard, too.
Why is ok to completely mangle mathematical references? You say:
There are other ways that we could figure it [the number of casualties in a disaster] out--counting death certificates, or crime reports. It's a multivariable equation; as long as you have enough variables, you can solve for the missing ones, and check your answers.
A multivariable equation can not be solved. You can solve a system of multivariable equations, but only if you have at least as many equations as you have variables.
You mean to say either:
1. There are many pieces of data. As long as you have all these values, you can plug them into an equation and find out the number of casualties.
OR
2. There are many equations, each of which provides a different estimate of the number of casualties. You can do them all, and then check how each method compares.
I'm not sure if you mean no.1 or no. 2. Please be more precise!
Whatever. Ok, so 500,000 haven't died. Maybe only, ONLY, 100,000 Iraqis are dead as a result of the invasion.
Getting the number down to 100,000 through the kind of sophistry deployed above is a victory of sorts. Not the victory we were promised by you and your kind circa March 2003. But you know, at this late date, we'll take what we can get, won't we.
And I guess we're never going to know for certain the precise link between the invasion and the utter devastation of Iraqi infrastructure, or what that's done to growth and development of a generation of Iraqis born between 1997 and whenever this thing ends. Or the hundreds of thousands (I'm keeping all my estimates on the conservative side so as not to run afoul of McArdle's attention the the fine points of demographic distributions) who have fled the country.
But what do I know. I'm just a simple non-interventionist, whose general aversion to war makes my views not worth considering by the powers-that-be.
As a pathologist, I always wondered about the death certificates in that Lancet article.
Who filled them out, who determined cause of death, how cause of death was determined, etc. Just curious.
or whether a lot of people disappeared (in any of several senses of the word) under his regime.
Well, we do have an idea because we've found the bodies. If nothing else, the presence of several thousand corpses with bullets in them do suggest a government killing their own people.
But kudos for Joe Strummer for reaching maximum AHQ (a**hole quotient). Someone addresses a topic in a serious, objective, dispassionate manner and he goes for melodramatics! So hold on to those hurt feelings, those will guide the country well through these difficult times.
(And thus do I match Joe's AHQ)
Whatever. Ok, so 500,000 haven't died. Maybe only, ONLY, 100,000 Iraqis are dead as a result of the invasion.
You mean, as compared to how many have died and would continue to die because the US ca. 1978-1990 loved Saddam Hussein for his ability to maintain "stability"?
This is, and continues to be, the single greatest fallacy of the anti-war body counters: they imagine that America's involvement with Iraq, and wrecking of Iraqi civilian life, only started in 2003.
You mean, as compared to how many have died and would continue to die because the US ca. 1978-1990 loved Saddam Hussein for his ability to maintain "stability"?
What are you TALKING about? I didn't support, don't support, wouldn't support America's Iraq policy from 1978 to 1990. You'll have to lay that one at the feet of Reagan and Bush I administration officials, not mine.
The Iraqi government today does not:
Have primacy of force
Provide a means of non-violently arbitrating disputes
Protect the lives or property of Iraqis
Ensure the rule of law
Ensure sanitation, water, electricity, or transport infrastructure
These basic functions are not in order so of course neither are the quaternary functions.
If no centralized bureaucracy, then no products of centralized bureaucracy. No census, no birth or death statistics, no GDP, none of the metrics that good economists require are available when government is not centralized, whether religious, secular, military, imperial.
Excellent news, however, the Surge is still working.
Math is hard. Let's go shopping!
Matt B, I don't think the people who objected to that Barbie doll envisioned that their objections would eventually be used as a sexist insult.
You mean, as compared to how many have died and would continue to die because the US ca. 1978-1990 loved Saddam Hussein for his ability to maintain "stability"?
The 100,000, 150,000, or 600,000 death figures are all "excess deaths," so they all take into account how many Iraqis would have died had Saddam remained in power, and give the number of deaths compared to that. You may argue that their numbers are faulty, but they do not just ignore the numbers that Saddam killed.