October 28, 2004

• o_O Something tells me that study if pretty flawed.
• er, "is pretty flawed"
• IraqBodyCount includes deaths directly caused by US military fire, I believe. This other study would include all violent deaths since the invasion. Part of the point of the study would probably be that Iraqis were less likely to kill each other before the invasion. But no one will care. Because no one does care. No one talks about Iraqi civilian deaths. It was not mentioned in the debates. Newspapers don't talk about it. It is the sad, selfish truth of American opinion: the lives of non-Americans equal far, far less than the lives of Americans.
• Nope. From Iraq Body Count:

  In the current occupation phase the database includes all deaths which the Occupying Authority has a binding responsibility to prevent under the Geneva Conventions and Hague Regulations. This includes civilian deaths resulting from the breakdown in law and order, and deaths due to inadequate health care or sanitation.

  Not saying which is more accurate - I'd tend to go with IBC, but that may only because it appears to have authority from having been established for some time - but that's not the reason for the discrepancy. However, IBC counts only media-reported deaths. "Casualty figures are derived solely from a comprehensive survey of online media reports." Could it be that all media organisations have missed in the region of 85,000 deaths? Perhaps. But unlikely. Maybe it's deaths from poor sanitation, nutrition and healthcare that accounts for the discrepancy, but to what extent this can be blamed uniquely on the occupation... unclear. And in any case, the study states that it's violent death which is the most significant cause. Hmmm.
• Bernockle: Sad, but true. i just posted a front pager, so i'll spare you all another today but i think that Smedley Butler needs to be invoked. Perhaps one of you monkeys could do some research and give us a FPP history lesson on perhaps one of the greatest Marine, patriot, and citizen to ever have lived.
• The Lancet is a pretty respectable journal, similar to JAMA or the New Eng. Journal of Med., as is the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Personally, I find it slightly impossible that there have only been 16,000 deaths including those "resulting from the breakdown in law and order, and deaths due to inadequate health care or sanitation." Does that seem within the possible?
• He loved the limelight too. Are we talking about the Quaker Marine?
• I think Bernockle and kamus have really touched on a important point about the glossing over of non-American casualty figures (at least here in the US, anyway). It's always bothered me and probably always will that American deaths grab the headlines while non-American deaths barely register. Whether the correct count is 15,000 or ten times that many, the fact remains that those numbers are often go unmentioned--and that's almost as sad as the deaths themselves.
• PatB: Quaker Marine?
• Freen, yeah, he was a Quaker. Quite a legend. Gary Cooper played him in the movie.
• Shoot. I just fact-checked my own ass and found I was full of shit. Coop never played Butler.
• MonkeyFilter: I just fact-checked my own ass
• I guess the huge discrepancy between the two numbers is partly because the one is from deaths reported in the media, and partly because the other is a study of 1000 households during and after the occupation. It seems like their being conservative, though I am not a scientist.

  That figure jumps to two-and-a-half times higher if data from Falluja - the scene of repeated heavy fighting - is included.

  While 1000 households may be too small a sample to be statistically accurate, I'd be inclined to think their methodology is better than that on the Body Count site. I tried to find the article here (free registration required) but there's way too much about Iraq (some pretty interesting) and I don't see where the BBC article gives the title.
• Well now that this is reported in the media, will IBC add this in?
• Well now that this is reported in the media, will IBC add this in? Excellent question!
• But then IBC has itself been reported in the media, which means that its bodycount should grow exponentially, until more people have died than ever lived in the first place...
• More on the raw stats here. I found the article at The Lancet without trouble, but the site wouldn't accept my registration! I'd be very interested in what a proper statistician had to say about this. Where's Xeny?
• Sorry! Meant to link to here.
• Interesting to see from Wolof's link that it's already being discussed in poltical circles in the UK. Nothing here yet. As of the posting time of this comment, of the US papers, only the Houston Chronicle has picked this up while it's getting a lot of coverage internationally. As noted above, the study claims that they are being conservative in their estimate which is pretty hard to believe, but even if they are off by a factor of two and it's closer to 50,000- 25,000 of which would be women and children, wouldn't that be a war crime or something? It's shocking by any measure! The Geneva convention stipulates that occupying powers have an obligation to protect the civilian population- clearly the coalition has had little interest in upholding its tenets, except when it suits them.
• This was a statistical analysis comparing death rates before and during the occupation. I'm not sure what they report as the margin of error. I heard the author of the study on the radio, and he said that he'd like to see a more comprehensive study once the situation in Iraq has stabalized.
• How many Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war?
• Talking rubbish about epidemiology
• thanks homunculus - crookedtimber discussion is well-informed.
• Here is how I have been explaining my position on the war and "democracy for Iraq" to a couple of friends who, although reasonable people, have at least some support for the war. ME: OK, remember September 11th, 3000 civilians killed. You know how happy we were about that. We've killed at least 10 times that many Iraqi civilians. So if Bin Laden pulled off 9 more 9/11 attacks, then told us he was imposing a new form of government for our own good, how would you react? Judging by the silence I get in response the argument seems to be working (again these are reasonable if slightly misguided friends, not hard core Bushies)
• More discussion of the Lancet study.
• Thanks, Wolof.
• This American Life has recently run an entire episode on the issue of Iraqi civilian casualties. It's very much worth listening to - they profile one of the authors of the Lancet study, interview one of the Americans who planned the bomb targets. Also - Iraq Body Count.
• Apparently the Iraq Body Count website is skeptical of the Lancet study - which has just been updated. I'm more inclined to trust the researchers who have developed methods to study mortality.
• The way things are now, I'll trust The Lancet's figures. 650,000 seems credible enough to me. More so than a mere 50,000. Wasn't Raed involved with an earlier casualty/fatality count that US authorities/media rejected? Or did I imagine that?
• Critics of the Lancet study suggesting hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq since the 2003 invasion should call for additional, independent studies that could provide a scientific basis for either confirming or refuting its alarming findings.
• Soon after we stopped bombing, Raed started collecting data for the Iraq body count. He toured the country and talked to citizens about losses. This was before he had his own blog, but Salam Pax posted about it on his now abandoned blog. Looks as though Raed's using reported data now, since he's living in California. Those of you who weren't following this stuff back then, Salam was the first Iraqi blogger that I'm aware of. He was posting even before the invasion, even though it was illegal under the Bathist government.
• The Other Iraq Study Not Getting Much Attention
• Kucinich-Paul Congressional Hearing on Civilian Casualties in Iraq
• The battle to save Iraq's children: Doctors issue plea to Tony Blair to end the scandal of medical shortages in the war zone
• The Number
• Iraqi deaths survey 'was robust'
• Is the U.S. Responsible for the Death of Nearly a Million Iraqis?
• Does the Pope wear a funny hat?
• Poll: Civilian death toll in Iraq may top 1 million. A British survey offers the highest estimate to date.
• None Dare Call It Genocide
• An estimated 151,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed in the violence that has engulfed the country from the time of the US-led invasion until June 2006, according to the latest and largest study of deaths officially accepted by the Iraqi government.
• As determined by a health survey. Ouch.
• But they were all in Al-Qaeda, right? right?
• Good discussion here And I REALLY don't like that Guardian headline (no offence homunculus). The new study found roughly 400,000 excess deaths, and attributed 151,000 of them to violence. Lancet found 650,000 and attributed 600,000 to violence (from memory).
• Pfft! As if the numbers really matter. It makes my heart hurt.
• I hear you BlueHorse. Les Roberts replies. A certain number of Iraqis died because of the invasion. We reported the death rate went up 2.5 fold, the Iraqi government now claims that it only doubled.
• Researchers of Lancet report respond to claim of inflated Iraqi civilian death toll
• Right-Wingers Can't Cover Up Iraq's Death Toll Catastrophe: The warmongers who got us into Iraq are blaming everyone but themselves for the humanitarian disaster they created.