
Mortality in Iraq Associated with the 2003–2011 War and Occupation - gruseom
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001533
======
lambda
According to Wikipedia
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Saddam_Hussein'...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Saddam_Hussein's_Iraq),
estimates of Iraqis killed by Saddam range from a quarter million to a
million, and estimates of Iranians killed in the Iran-Iraq are in a similar
range. So, let's call his death toll a half million to two million.

About a decade after the Gulf War, which had pretty much put a stop to
Saddam's killing spree, the US decided to invade Iraq again, on the pretext
that Saddam was building weapons of mass destruction. The evidence was quite
flimsy, and it turns out not to have been true. In the process, the US and
allies, plus the destabilization of the country after, managed to kill another
half million Iraqis.

Think about that for a minute. A half million people, killed based on a flimsy
pretext, that anyone with half a brain could see through (and no, I don't just
say this in hindsight, I thought the justification was flimsy at the time as
well). Somewhere between a quarter as many and as many people killed by the
Iraq War as Saddam himself had killed.

How did we come to this? How is it possible that we have gone so far astray
that we are slaughtering as many people as someone we vilify as part of the
"axis of evil"?

~~~
phaus
There were over two dozen foreign intelligence agencies that agreed that
Saddam either had or was attempting to build or purchase weapons of
destruction. Nuclear weapons are extremely difficult to hide anywhere on
earth, but many other types of weapons of mass destruction aren't difficult to
dispose of.

That's not to say that the invasion turned out to be a good idea, or that we
were justified in the attempt, but those agencies represent thousands of
really smart people in positions of authority around the world agreeing that
Iraq had them or was attempting to develop them, so its hard to argue that
anyone with half a brain could have known the truth. If we were wrong, its
because a good percentage of all western civilizations were wrong, not just
the United States.

You also have to factor in the theory that Saddam himself wanted the world to
think that he had them, in an attempt to dissuade Iran from thinking Iraq was
vulnerable. Iraq's strange behavior that lead to the invasion can really only
be explained in two ways: either he was pretending to hide weapons that didn't
exist, or he successfully hid real weapons.

Finally, half a million people were killed in Iraq. Clearly every combatant on
the battlefield shares a part of the blame, but that includes the enemy
combatants. The overwhelming majority of American Soldiers attempt to avoid
civilian casualties, often to their own detriment, yet the organizations we
have been fighting against in Iraq deliberately target anyone they can. The
larger the body count, the better. They view their fellow Muslims as traitors
for failing to take up arms against the United States, and so they target them
just the same as Americans.

~~~
gruseom
I don't doubt for a moment that American and other Western soldiers were
trying hard to avoid civilian casualties. It's deeply unfair to blame them for
things they didn't do or for decisions they didn't make and never would have
made had it been up to them. That being said, there are a couple problems with
your argument. First, it's not the case that dozens of intelligence agencies
believed the WMD propaganda. They would have been utterly incompetent if they
had. They're far from perfect, of course, but no way are they _that_ stupid
and certainly not on that scale.

Rather, what happened is that political leaders pressured the leaders of the
intelligence agencies (essentially political positions in their own right)
into delivering reports that gave the "right" (i.e. the wrong) answers
irrespective of what their professional analysts really thought. Few
intelligence agencies could withstand the overt political pressure that was
applied to the CIA and others (largely out of the Vice President's office, as
I understand it) in the run-up to that war—after all, ultimate power resides
with the political leaders in a democracy for obvious reasons. Note, however,
that when the same leaders tried to do it again a few years later, enough of
the professionals' real opinions was leaked to make a repeat manipulation
impossible. I have in mind the unanimous assessment of US intelligence
agencies in 2007 that Iran was not seeking nuclear weapons (an assessment that
still stands, incidentally, and is still unanimous, though you'd not guess it
from the news). When political pressure started to be applied to distort that
opinion, someone leaked a summary of it to the press, and that put an Iran war
off the table for the rest of the GWB administration. Bush writes about that
in his memoirs.

The other problem with your argument is that by the Nuremberg standards, war
of aggression is understood to be the "supreme international crime" that
encompasses all the evils that take place as a result of the war [1]. That is,
the Nuremberg standard of justice considers all the secondary consequences of
war (such as Iraq underwent with bombings, civil war, etc.) to be subsumed
under the original crime of a war of aggression. This arguably makes sense,
since without the invasion, there wouldn't have been a civil war. By this
standard, soldiers are not responsible for atrocities they didn't commit, but
the leaders who started the war in the first place actually are. Since that is
the standard of justice that we (rightly) apply to others, we ought not to
reject it or minimize it when it applies to ourselves. (The standard won't be
applied in this case, of course, but that's a separate issue.)

The above is how I understand it from the sources I've read, anyway. Factual
corrections are more than welcome.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_aggression](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_aggression)

~~~
berntb
>>since without the invasion, there wouldn't have been a civil war.

Uh...

This happened: A starts a war W with B. As a follow on effect, some groups
inside B starts a civil war W2 with others in B.

You say that A is responsible for _the second war_ W2 too, which they didn't
start and even actively tried to stop?!

After the war, when does A stop being responsible for everything bad that
happens to B, _done by B themselves_? After 10 years? 100?

You just blame A for everything, including the weather? :-)

(It is easy to make a good argument that the W2 war would _probably_ have
happened anyway, at some point. Or that Saddam was already doing a continuous
civil war with his army/police against everyone but his supporters, to keep
power. You might even argue, but not with your definitions, that USA is
responsible for all those killed by Saddam when they didn't topple him in the
first Gulf war...)

Edit: Clarity.

~~~
venomsnake
Yes - A is responsible. If I set fire on half of a fireworks factory, I
definitely could be hold responsible if the other half burns down to.

Saddam was keeping Iraq relatively stable. The toppling of the regime was done
so clumsy with so little idea what to do next that it enabled the sliding down
of Iraq into the madness that culminated in 2006-7

~~~
yutyut
Greatly oversimplifying the situation with that terrible metaphor.

------
beloch
I still remember the chill that ran through relations between Canada and the
U.S. after Paul Martin refused to join the war in Iraq (despite still be
embroiled in the war in Afghanistan). U.S. pop culture mostly ignored Canada,
as per usual, but what few mentions there were soon lumped Canada into the
same boat as "French surrender-monkeys", again in spite of the fact that
Canadian troops were fighting and dying in Afghanistan. Bush pursued a policy
of economic protectionism that could easily be confused for retaliation
against Martin's government if it wasn't that in fact. This is how the U.S.
treated its closest ally and biggest trading partner. A decade of madness
indeed! The continued expansion of the TSA and homeland security as well as
the NSA scandals indicate the insanity has dug itself in deep.

~~~
lazyant
yep, thank god Harper wasn't PM then or we would be still in Iraq

~~~
beloch
Or Ignatieff. Honestly, I suspect Harper's stand was just one of the usual
efforts of the opposition party to differentiate themselves from the ruling
party despite having basically zero real platform differeces. It would be
great if this country's politics started being more about policies than
personalities again!

------
bpodgursky
"95% uncertainty interval 48,000–751,000"

I understand the value in trying to quantify this, but it's difficult to
really conclude anything useful when your upper and lower confidence intervals
vary by 15x

~~~
Brakenshire
I agree, although I feel like it gives a slightly better feel of the
uncertainties to look where that figure came from:

> The wartime crude death rate in Iraq was 4.55 per 1,000 PY (95% UI
> 3.74–5.27), more than 0.5 times higher than the 2.89 ((95% UI 1.56–4.04)
> death rate during the 26-mo period preceding the war. By multiplying those
> rates by the annual Iraq population [43], we estimate total excess Iraqi
> deaths attributable to the war through mid-2011 as about 405,000 (95% UI
> 48,000–751,000).

------
mynameishere
That happens after most wars. At least it wasn't deliberate policy as with the
world wars. The real crime was that that war even happened. I remember how
laughable the propaganda leading up to it was. GWB couldn't go two sentences
without saying "weapons of mass destruction" or "Al-quada". Right down the
memory hole. Pretty sad.

------
pippy
It's nice to see some scientific work going into the causality count in the
Iraq war. Most of the surveys/official estimations are way off, the Opinion
Research Business survey reported over a million deaths while most US sources
stated around 100k mark.

This report is somewhere in the middle, which is most realistic.

~~~
jnbiche
There have been very serious studies done on Iraqi war mortality for quite
some time, starting with Roberts and Burnham, who did two very credible
epidemiological surveys of mortality in 2004 and 2006 (published in the
Lancet) using a similar approach as the study referenced above. The later
study estimated somewhere around 600,000+ (95% confidence interval of 392,979
to 942,636) had already died by 2006 (and this before the renewed sectarian
violence and US offensive in 2007).

It's notable that even this new study's lead author thinks their half-million
figure is an underestimate:

""We think it is roughly around half a million people dead. And that is likely
a low estimate," says Hagopian. "People need to know the cost in human lives
of the decision to go to war."

~~~
gruseom
I remember that _This American Life_ did a piece on the Lancet studies when
they came out. They focused on how the widespread reaction (in the West) to
their numbers was one of stubborn disbelief, despite the fact that these were
the most credible researchers in the field and that they used standard
techniques.

~~~
berntb
I remember this hilarious reality check from the Iraq Body Count project. I
never saw it answered... Do you have a link?

[http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/beyond/reality-
checks/](http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/beyond/reality-checks/)

This was also quite funny:

[http://lancetiraq.blogspot.com/2010_03_01_archive.html](http://lancetiraq.blogspot.com/2010_03_01_archive.html)

>>stubborn disbelief

I thought it was fun how many people on the left _knew_ how it was, with so
wildly varying data.

But of course, it never happens that researchers cheat on research papers. Or
interviewers in another country "fix" the answers. Or a hundred other things.

If I have a thesis in life, it is that paid shills and idealists lie. The
idealists "know" how it is, so the problem is how to get people to think
"correctly".

~~~
gruseom
Perhaps you know much more about this than I do. My memory is that the Lancet
authors were serious, qualified researchers who had done much similar work in
the past and whose objectivity had not previously been disputed. If there's a
critique to be made of their work, a snarky "that can't be right" blog post
certainly doesn't cut it. The authors of the new PLoS study say that they've
taken into account criticisms of earlier work; I am sure they have the Lancet
articles (among others) in mind, but I do not know the details.

The Iraq Body Count project has bothered me for years because they only count
individually confirmable deaths. There is nothing wrong with that as
documentary work, but there is something terribly wrong with citing the number
of deaths so counted as anything like a credible total for the war, when it is
obviously a severe lower bound. War is random and chaotic. Very many people
die whose paperwork does not get filled out. It is painfully obvious that
statistical techniques are required to arrive at a good estimate under such
circumstances. Thus to cite the Iraq Body Count as the _total_ number of
deaths in the war is dishonest, yet that is exactly how it has routinely been
cited, and I don't understand why they (or at least the people who quote them
in media pieces) have not been called out on this more often.

~~~
berntb
Uh, I can't see how that is relevant to the specific points I raised. (It
isn't relevant to talk about someone else using the IBC data in a way IBC
don't recommend. And there were lots of criticism before, see the first Lancet
report. It is not good with a political motive either -- timing reports to
influence an election.)

1\. So you have no answer to the Iraq Body Count reality check and just ignore
it? (E.g. where is the conspiracy needed to hide all the missing maimed -- and
make their prostheses?!)

2\. Nothing to say about the scathing criticism of lacking integrity in the
second link?

3\. Considering your lack of answers on 1 and 2, you might want to retract the
claim that others put their heads in the sand. :-)

4\. And a new point: You are aware of that Beth Osborne is a Lancet Report
critic? _She_ has documented integrity since she got problems from "too high"
mortality values in the first Gulf war... And many other heavyweights in
exactly the right field?

5\. A second new point: Wikileaked papers also contradict the numbers -- and
there is no sign of a big conspiracy in WikiLeaks to hide point 1.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War_documents_leak#Total_d...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War_documents_leak#Total_death_count)

Since you have just ignored my references and arguments, I guess there is
nothing else to say? (The point 1 I have asked about since it was reported,
never a relevant answer.)

~~~
gruseom
I'm not having the kind of argument with you that you seem to think I am. I
looked at the articles you mentioned. Certainly their criticisms are
devastating if, and only if, they are true and fair. Are they? I can't say. I
don't have time to read the studies. If you have, and you've arrived at your
beliefs based on factual analysis rather than ideology, that's good.

My point about IBC was not intended to dispute what you said, but rather to
vent something that has bothered me for a long time. Sorry that wasn't clear.
I feel slightly justified by the fact that your second link does the very
thing I was complaining about:

 _these results were anywhere from seven to 14 times as high as other credible
estimates, including those made by the non-partisan Iraq Body Count, a
consortium of U.S. and U.K researchers, also concerned about the human toll of
the war_

This is deeply misleading. IBC's number is guaranteed to be a far
underestimate: there's no credible scenario under which all or even most of
the deaths in a bloody, messy war could be neatly individually documented, not
to mention accessible to foreign researchers over the internet. That's like
counting individual raindrops and adding only the drops you counted to produce
an estimate of total rainfall. A proper statistical study would be expected to
come up with a much higher number; an order of magnitude difference is
probably not unreasonable. That doesn't prove the Lancet study _was_ proper;
perhaps other criticisms are more serious. But this is the only one I feel
able to comment on and the fact that they included it without pointing out
that it is comparing an apple with a raisin does not give me confidence.
(Neither does your description of these documents as "hilarious". I don't see
any hilarity there. I do smell an ideological agenda.)

This may be unfair of me, but I can't help feeling suspicious of the fact that
IBC hasn't done more to counteract this widespread—I'd even say universal,
based on what I've seen—misuse of their data for absurd lowballing of the
damage caused by that war. They say their motivation is to do justice to the
human tragedy of the war. Shouldn't they be the first to object to dishonest
uses of their work which obscure how tragic it was?

~~~
berntb
You still ignore every argument I wrote. Including the internal documents
(Wikileaks).

So I'll not add more arguments, just a quick note:

AGAIN -- IBC write explicitly they are a lower bound.

Claims 7-14 times greater than the IBC do need good papers -- from authors
that haven't been criticized on moral grounds, for not releasing data timely
and doesn't look to have political motives. That is not the Lancet Report...

(And what an organization specialized in polling write about other subjects is
not so interesting anyway, but you lack everything else?)

------
russell_h
I haven't read the whole thing, but is this missing anyone who died in Iraq
whose family lives elsewhere?

~~~
segmondy
or entire families that got wiped out.

