In the current online
Lancet, a team of Johns Hopkins authors headed by Gilbert Burnham presents a calculation of Iraqi civilian casualties ten times greater than that of the Brooking Institute and twenty times greater than that of the Pentagon.
“We estimate,” write the authors, “that as of July, 2006, there have been 654,965 excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war.”
This is not the first October surprise hatched by researchers from the Bloomberg School of Public Health, and published by the
Lancet in the heat of an American election cycle. A predecessor piece, rushed to press on October 29, 2004, reached conclusions of similar magnitude. In that case, Hopkins’s Les Roberts, the lead author of the report, admitted that the timing was deliberate. And
Lancet editor Richard Horton clarified the political intent, editorializing :
The invasion of Iraq, the displacement of a cruel dictator, and the attempt to impose a liberal democracy by force have, by themselves, been insufficient to bring peace and security to the civilian population. Democratic imperialism has led to more deaths not fewer. This political and military failure continues to cause scores of casualties among non-combatants. It is a failure that deserves to be a serious subject for research. But this report is more than a piece of academic investigation.
Methodologically, the authors of the current study surveyed 12,801 Iraqi residents in 1,849 household from May through early July, 2006. They recorded respondents’ recollections of household deaths, supported (in most instances) by death certificates. The researchers divided the respondents’ recollections into two periods: the 14 months preceding the invasion, and the 40 months after. The total number of deaths recorded in the household sample was 82 in the 14 pre-invasion months, and 547 in the 40 post-invasion months. Comparing the death rates in the two time frames, they concluded that the death rate in Iraq has increased by a factor of 2.5. Extrapolating the death rates in the pre- and post-invasion periods over the entire nation, they conclude that roughly 655,000 more Iraqis have died under the democracy than would have died under the Saddam-era baseline — excess deaths, as they say.
As in 2004, the
Lancet study has garnered a great deal of press. And as in 2004, the study’s conclusions have been widely dismissed by serious researchers. The most obvious reason is that the Hopkins researchers don’t record 655,000 extra casualties — they extrapolate them.
Other organizations, many of them anti-war, maintain comprehensive databases that track civilian casualties in post-Baathist Iraq death-by-death. The Brookings Institute’s
Saban Center updates its
database weekly, based on several sources:
Iraq Body Count, whose meticulous tally is compiled from deaths reported in the Iraqi and international press;
Reports from the Iraqi health ministry and the Baghdad Medico-Legal Institute; and
Numbers compiled by the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq.
Using these sources, Brookings published a “low” estimate of 43,300 civilian casualties of the post-war, and a “high” estimate of 62,000, cumulative through summer, 2006. The primary ambiguity is less “Who died?” than “How?” When crime-induced deaths are subtracted from the total, the low end of the range results; and conversely when they are not.
Brookings has recently concluded that it is no longer possible to separate crime-based violence from sectarian-based violence. It therefore favors the higher estimate. But even this higher number is less than one tenth the number of
civilian fatalities calculated by the
Lancet authors.
Anthony Cordesman, who holds the Arleigh Burke chair in strategy at the Center for International and Strategic Studies (and no friend to the Bush administration), maintains that the sectarian conflict in Iraq now constitutes a civil war. Cordesman, however, termed the
Lancet estimates “certainly way too high.”
“This is not analysis,” he
told the Associated Press. “This is politics.”
How did the
Lancet calculate a civilian death number that exceeded that of other war critics by an order of magnitude?
Burnham and colleagues defend their statistically extrapolated estimate of “excess death” with reference to the purported imperfection of observation-based methods. “Our estimate of excess deaths is far higher,” they write in the
Lancet, “than those reported in Iraq through passive surveillance measures. This discrepancy is not unexpected. Data from passive surveillance are rarely complete, even in stable circumstances, and are even less complete during conflict, when access is restricted, and fatal events could be intentionally hidden.”
Under what circumstances are “passive” methods unreliable? Are we to distrust direct observation universally? If they are ever to be trusted — or, more precisely, if they are not to be dismissed as being inaccurate by an order of magnitude — the conditions for such (modest) trust surely seem to obtain in Iraq.
In Saddam’s Iraq, there were no commercial TV stations, no commercial radio stations, and no independent print organs. Today, there are, respectively, 54, 114, and 268. If one doubts the significance of these numbers,pick up an SRDS media guide for California — a state of comparable to Iraq in area and population. The media choices of multi-cultural Angelos are less varied than those of Baghdadis.
In contemporary Iraq, every party, every faction, every sect, has its own organ of communication, each eager to state its claims and air its grievances in the public square. Atrocity stories — deaths, kidnappings, disappearances — are the daily stuff of screaming headlines and prime-time TV. To accept the claims of the Hopkins researchers, one must first assume that the press of Iraq — free, diverse, and ubiquitous — misses nine out of ten killings on its own turf. No other research group shares this assumption.
Yet if the violence in Iraq is well known, and fulsomely reported, a nagging question remains: Why shouldn’t a careful extrapolation,
à la Lancet, approximate the numbers compiled by passive (i.e. surveillance-based) means?
Baseline Bungling
The conditions in which passive morbidity calculations should be rejected do not exist in Iraq right now; but they certainly existed under the Baath. Scholars of civilian mortality place the daily Saddam-era toll of regime-caused deaths between 75 and 125 citizens per day — roughly double-to-triple the average post-war mortality reported by the body-counters. (The death toll of the past two months, unusually bloody in four of Iraq’s 14 provinces, has matched this range.)
The variability in scholarly opinion on the Baath-era death-rate has two roots. First, when Saddam’s Makhabaret was trundling dead Kurds and Shiites into group graves en masse, it was hard to maintain a precise registry. Stalin, Saddam’s idol, had the same problem in the Ukraine.
Second, scholars debate which corpses should count. Just as there are arguments over the status of street-crime victims in post war Iraq, so too there are debates over how to classify the half-million troops who died in Saddam’s wars. Researchers generally exclude fallen Iraqi conscripts from Saddam’s body-count, leaving Baathist hands somewhat less bloody. Yet these certainly were victims of polity; the invasions of Iran and Kuwait were “wars of choice.”
The Hopkins researchers chose their “base-line” for pre-invasion Iraq carefully: January 2002 through March 2003. They chose a period of time in which Baathist violence against the Kurds was restrained by a U.S.-imposed no-fly zone in the north; a period of time
after the extermination of hundreds of thousands of Shia and Marsh Arabs in the south.
Burnham and associates carved out a brief period of enforced peace within a 25-year regime singularly dedicated to war and internal slaughter. They called it a “baseline,” and they compared that baseline against a period of war.
As a result, 300 of the 302 conflict-related deaths they report are “post-invasion.”
One wonders, though: Had they established a baseline that included the Anfal operation in the Kurdish north — a months-long assault in 1988 that demolished thousands of villages and killed hundreds of thousands of peasants — whether Kurdish respondents might have recollected more than a death or two; and, had they extended their “pre-war” baseline to the end of Desert Storm, whether the families of Basra and Muthana mightn’t have recalled another loved one lost.
A remarkably small number of additional pre-war deaths recollected by the 12,801 interviewees would have wiped out the “findings” of this study altogether.
The
Lancet authors consciously manipulated their pre-war baseline to advance their pre-selected post-war conclusion — that Saddam’s Iraq was less violent than Bush’s U.S. or Blair’s U.K. All they have actually proved is that Excel reliably performs multiplication operations on data fed through it.
The pity is that this flawed John Hopkins study, widely ignored by war scholars, will be mindlessly cited by the anti-American minions of the mainstream press. But that, after all, was its purpose.
— Richard Nadler is the president of Americas Majority, a 501(c)(4) policy group, and co-editor of the “Daily Dispatch,” a mil-blog covering the Iraq war. 
