10 ms·

Mortality in Iraq Associated with the 2003–2011 War and Occupation

110 points by gruseom 13y ago

pippy 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      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 13y ago
        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 13y ago
        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_death_count http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War_documents_leak#Total_d... 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.)
lambda 13y ago
According to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Saddam_Hussein's_Iraq http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Saddam_Hussein'..., 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"?
- arcadeparade 13y ago
  Because of the sanctions in the 90's there were also up to half a million excess deaths of children aged under 5. It was called genocide by both men who were in charge of it, both of whom resigned in protest. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iraq#Estimates_of_deaths_due_to_sanctions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iraq#Estimate... I also find it interesting that many people who deny that this many people were killed in Iraq since the 2003 invasion will have no problem believing the 100,000 figure of people who were killed in the Syrian Civil War so far, which has been a much smaller conflict than Iraq.
  - berntb 13y ago
    >>Because of the sanctions in the 90's there were also up to half a million excess deaths of children aged under 5 Saddam wanted to get rid of the sanctions, it was in his direct interest to inflate the statistics. (There were reports of e.g. multiple funerals for a given dead child, too.) His regime also had "extra" income from smuggling, which could have been used to alleviate suffering of civilians under his boot. These resources weren't used for that, as far as I've read. I never got a good answer to my standard point, when this was a hot subject: It is arguably bad to give in to extortion from dictators. In this case a dictator isn't using his resources to alleviate the suffering of civilians in his own country! To let dictators get their will through by the suffering of their own civilians is obviously a very, very bad precedent.
bpodgursky 13y ago
"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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
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.
russell_h 13y ago
I haven't read the whole thing, but is this missing anyone who died in Iraq whose family lives elsewhere?
- segmondy 13y ago
  or entire families that got wiped out.
beloch 13y ago
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 13y ago
  yep, thank god Harper wasn't PM then or we would be still in Iraq
  - beloch 13y ago
    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!
- macspoofing 13y ago
  It was actually Jean Christian who refused to go to Iraq
  - macspoofing 13y ago
    *Jean Chretien

110 points by gruseom 13y ago

pippy 13y ago

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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      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 13y ago
        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_death_count http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War_documents_leak#Total_d... 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.)

lambda 13y ago

According to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Saddam_Hussein's_Iraq http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Saddam_Hussein'..., 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"?

arcadeparade 13y ago
Because of the sanctions in the 90's there were also up to half a million excess deaths of children aged under 5. It was called genocide by both men who were in charge of it, both of whom resigned in protest. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iraq#Estimates_of_deaths_due_to_sanctions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iraq#Estimate... I also find it interesting that many people who deny that this many people were killed in Iraq since the 2003 invasion will have no problem believing the 100,000 figure of people who were killed in the Syrian Civil War so far, which has been a much smaller conflict than Iraq.
- berntb 13y ago
  >>Because of the sanctions in the 90's there were also up to half a million excess deaths of children aged under 5 Saddam wanted to get rid of the sanctions, it was in his direct interest to inflate the statistics. (There were reports of e.g. multiple funerals for a given dead child, too.) His regime also had "extra" income from smuggling, which could have been used to alleviate suffering of civilians under his boot. These resources weren't used for that, as far as I've read. I never got a good answer to my standard point, when this was a hot subject: It is arguably bad to give in to extortion from dictators. In this case a dictator isn't using his resources to alleviate the suffering of civilians in his own country! To let dictators get their will through by the suffering of their own civilians is obviously a very, very bad precedent.

bpodgursky 13y ago

"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 13y ago
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 13y ago

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.

russell_h 13y ago

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

segmondy 13y ago
or entire families that got wiped out.

beloch 13y ago

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 13y ago
yep, thank god Harper wasn't PM then or we would be still in Iraq
- beloch 13y ago
  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!
macspoofing 13y ago
It was actually Jean Christian who refused to go to Iraq
- macspoofing 13y ago
  *Jean Chretien