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01.03.12 - 6:13 PM
Lest We Forget, Iraq's Horrific Body Count
Over 162,000 people, about 80% of them civilians, were killed in Iraq since the U.S. invasion in 2003, according to new data published by Iraq Body Count to mark the withdrawal of US combat forces. Many more grim details and numbers, including the fact that civilian deaths have not noticeably declined since 2009.
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38 Comments so far
Show AllBe proud of GW and Cheneys lies that killed all these people for their own private war and profits. Now Iraq is left with no government, Iraq had nothing to do with the twin towers. Remember this when you go to vote. Money or people, just like the wall street attitude in America. Fuck the working class there is no profit left in poor people. We will all be poor soon, they have taken our money. The great GOP one percent, protect the rich at any cost, tax the poor, no health care, no social security, no food stamps, no heat assistance, no Medicare, no education, no collective bargaining, nothing. The great Republican free market. Vote republican, kill a few hundred thousand more people for money!
Be proud of Obama and his administration's lies that killed all these people for their own private war and profits. Now Iraq is left with no government, Iraq had nothing to do with the twin towers. Remember this when you go to vote for the lesser of the two evils with which we are presented. Money or people, just like the wall street attitude in America. Fuck the working class there is no profit left in poor people. We will all be poor soon, because the republicans and democrats have conspired with the "financial institutions", and they have taken our money. The great democrtatic/republican one percent, protect the rich at any cost, tax the poor, no health care, no social security, no food stamps, no heat assistance, no Medicare, no education, no collective bargaining, nothing. The great Republican and Democratic free market. Vote republican or democrat, and kill a few hundred thousand more people for money!
Is this grade school?
Body count lowballed, I think. The number of people whohave died as a result of the Iraq invasion is closer to a million, according to the Lancet study.
It is not lowballed, so much as NOT AN ESTIMATE in the first place. The Iraq Body Count (IBC) is a count of each death reported in at least two western media outlets. In the early days of IBC, their web page stated that clearly. I remember reading it. It stated that the actual casualties would have to be much higher, unless one expects that every Iraqi death is magically known about and duly reported. But because each death is documented, one cannot really argue with it. Neocons are forced to admit this number at least.
Therefore the numbers from the IBC are not inconsistent with those from the Lancet study. In fact it can be used to extrapolate the expected number of deaths. If the Lancet study was accurate in 2005, it estimated about 1 million Iraqi deaths. The IRB at the time reported 30,000 deaths. That is a ratio of 33 estimated death for each one reported in the monitored medias. The IBC has now counted 180,000 deaths, or 6 times the 2005 number, and if the reporting ratio of 1 in 33 still holds, that gives an estimated 6 million deaths. I hesitate to say it, because that is a huge number, and I ask myself could that really be correct, but if you understand how I came to that estimate, perhaps you can tell me what is wrong with it.
Please don't be silly. The Lancet numbers are absolute poopoo. Think about it. If there were 6 million dead Iraqis in a country of 30 million, that would leave a HUGE hole in the cities that would be quite obvious. Numerous sources count bodies and they state that civilian deaths peaked at about 3000 a month (in 2006 I believe...) If you take 3000 and multiply that by the number of months we have been there, 106 months, then we might have killed 306,000 at the very most. A non trivial number. A tragedy. But please? 6 million? No chance. 1 million, no chance.
Everyone here is so concerned with what they WANT to believe that they never look at numbers or facts if they question their premises at the very least. Display some intellectual rigor.
As for your question on how your method yielded such a high number, your premise, the lancet study, is wrong. Your logic was correct, one premise was incorrect.
You are the one displaying utter ignorance and a deliberate attempt to mislead. The Lancet numbers did not claim 6 million killed. They claimed 600000.
You deliberately manipulated the statement of the poster in an attempt to obfuscate.
The Lancet numbers use the same methodology that was used in Rwanda and Cambodia. The IBC uses a system where only names published in two seperate English newspapers count as killed.
You KNOW that yet chose to deliberately chose to put spin on it. This demonstrates clearly you have absolutely no integrity.
GwNorth, the poster braith did say 6 million, though in that instance he was making an incorrect extrapolation derived from the Lancet survey. This is pretty weak tea for accusing Mr. Shade of "deliberate manipulation".
But again, another one pushing the Lancet study as some kind of credible number have no clue what IBC is or does, and badly misrepresent what it does (whether "deliberately" or out of ignorance):
"The IBC uses a system where only names published in two seperate English newspapers count as killed."
Doesn't need "names". IBC collects names of the victims when these are reported. Most of the time the names aren't reported, just the numbers or often also demographic information, but not always names. It doesn't require "two" sources, see my other post responding to braith. And it is not only "English newspapers". Sources originate in many languages and most sources used are not "newspapers". You're accusing someone of "spin" while getting the facts completely wrong.
With regard to the Lancet, aside from my prior point that it's a huge outlier and has been widely panned by experts as noted in my other post. It's not really the "same methodology" used in Rwanda or Cambodia. In fact, the 2006 Lancet study did not even use the "same methodology" as the 2004 one. The latter used GPS units to select houses while the former used a different and more subjective method that's been accused of "Main Street Bias". See here: http://www.prio.no/Research-and-Publications/Journal-of-Peace-Research/Article-of-the-year/Article-of-the-Year-2008/
But presumably by "same method" you mean something really vague and general like "a random household survey", but I don't think anyone has ever used this method to derive death tolls for Rwanda. The most widely cited numbers such as 800,000 have come from demographic estimations, as far as I know, not from household surveys.
"Please don't be silly. The Lancet numbers are absolute poopoo."
No they are not, and if you had any integrity you would not make such a rediculous claim. There have been many attacks on the Lancet paper. There had to be in the USA (and it seems here too). They (and you) could not allow the truth to become widespread.
But the Lancets methods were best practice and have stood up to (genuine) scrutiny.
The numbers are consistent with other genuine estimates such as "ORB survey of Iraq War casualties". And yes, the life in Iraq has subjected to total upheaval. War including in the cities. People were still having to make do with dirty water in 2008, and the power supplies then were still intermittent.
Iraq used to be a country with the best medical facilities and education in the middle east. Now it is a country that has been destroyed. Describing it as a massive hole is an understatement.
"But the Lancets methods were best practice and have stood up to (genuine) scrutiny. The numbers are consistent with other genuine estimates such as "ORB survey of Iraq War casualties"."
The Lancet methods were not "best practice" and have not stood up to genuine scrutiny. See the links I posted (including peer-reviewed papers) rejecting its methods and estimates as unsound and wrong. Of course, if all this doesn't agree with you, you've given yourself an out with the No True Scotsman caveat "(genuine) scrutiny" where you get decide which scrutiny is or isn't "genuine". That is, anything that doesn't give you the answer you want (which is most serious reviews of it) isn't "genuine" scrutiny.
And the "ORB survey of Iraq War casualties"?!? Really? This was a badly designed opinion poll by a marketing firm that published it on their website, and it's been completely debunked in a peer-reviewed article here:
http://w4.ub.uni-konstanz.de/srm/article/view/2373
One can also fairly say the "ORB survey of Iraq War casualties" numbers are "absolute poopoo".
The Lancet article's methodology is the standard one for estimating civilian deaths in conflict situations and constitute the statistical methods used for other war zones were "exactly" the same methods of survey are used and then quoted by the State Department as in Bosnia, Congo and Darfur. Likewise, the Independent noted that the "only previous attempt to assess the level of civilian casualties was published in The Lancet medical journal" and somewhat incredulously noted that "its methodology was subsequently criticised." Yes it was criticised but it would have been more accurate to note that it had been criticised by those who either knew little about statistics or were pro-war. So when you suggest "absolute poopoo" or : "anything that doesn't give you the answer you want (which is most serious reviews of it) isn't "genuine""
Please realise that the figures under a million deaths to date, at the departure of the American invaders and occupiers in Iraq are a serious under estimate, and this has been shown repeatedly. Please also realise that the use of depleted uranium will insure levels of leukaemia and other radiological deaths, as well as berth defects and other complications for many many years to come, not to mention the 1/2 million child deaths acknowledged by then Secretary of State from sanctions before the war and the high level of berth defects as a result of the first Gulf War, which was started on another whim of the US criminal cabal of sociopaths in power then.
So please do not waste anybody's time trying to push your bullshit argument about numbers of body counts quoted by a government that does not count the deaths of the people they "liberate". Your argument about numbers is a cruel diversion, just as if I asked you to prove that 3, 4 million or 6 million Jews were the real score of the Holocaust. Get real.
Who do you represent?
You need to read some of my other posts. There is no "standard" methodology for calculating conflict deaths in war zones, and there are rather few cases where household surveys have been used for this. And where they have been used they often come to radically different conclusions. The Lancet survey did not use "exactly the same" methodology as in Bosnia, Congo or Darfur. In fact, the 2006 Lancet survey did not even use the same methodology as the 2004 Lancet survey. The figures mostly quoted for Darfur are a triangulation effort cross-referencing numerous studies and weeding out the bad ones, done by CRED in Belgium (who have themselves rejected the Lancet survey btw: http://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/20A03C0F8F4BC3ABC125743500318AF6-cred_jun2007.pdf).
The figures mostly quoted for Bosnia are from the "Bosnian Book of the Dead" which is not a sample survey, but a comprehensive counting project that's gone on for years in Bosnia. Numbers for the Congo have come from similar (but not "exactly the same") methods, including partly from one of the same authors as the Lancet. But these have also come under considerable question. And like in the case of Iraq, you find that when these methods are applied in war zones, different surveys often come to radically different estimates:
http://www.hsrgroup.org/docs/Publications/HSR20092010/20092010HumanSecurityReport-Part2-ShrinkingCostsOfWar.pdf
Yes, the Lancet survey was "peer-reviewed", and so was the IFHS survey by the WHO that rejected the Lancet survey. And so were many other articles that rejected the Lancet survey:
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa0707782
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10242690802496898
http://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/20A03C0F8F4BC3ABC125743500318AF6-cred_jun2007.pdf
"Please realise that the figures under a million deaths to date, at the departure of the American invaders and occupiers in Iraq are a serious under estimate, and this has been shown repeatedly. "
You are delusional. The only source that doesn't provide figures far under a million are crude extrapolations of the Lancet study. Or, if you're being generous, the ORB poll, which was never peer-reviewed and has been debunked in peer-reviewed literature: http://w4.ub.uni-konstanz.de/srm/article/view/2373
"Yes it was criticised but it would have been more accurate to note that it had been criticised by those who either knew little about statistics or were pro-war. "
Again, you are delusional. See the many experts quoted here:
http://dissident93.wordpress.com/2008/10/20/project-censored-as-censors/
You seem to live in a bubble world where only what you want to hear ever gets in. And then you smear the character of people who bring up the stuff you don't want to hear. They're so "cruel" for shattering your little fantasy world.
You've got most of this wrong. The IBC is a count of documented deaths, not an "estimate" or guess as such. And it is likely an underestimate, as they state on their database page (http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/), "Gaps in recording and reporting suggest that even our highest totals to date may be missing many civilian deaths from violence."
But it is not "a count of each death reported in at least two western media outlets." First, it does not require "two" outlets. See here from 2007: http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/reference/announcements/3/
They even list the exact proportion deriving from one source on the database page and is currently about 7,000 deaths in the total.
Second, it is not restricted to "western" outlets. Look at the sources on the incidents, some are "western", some are Iraqi, etc. You can see a broader list of media they use here: http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/reference/sources/
Third it is not restricted to only "media outlets" either. It says the data is "derived from a comprehensive survey of commercial media and NGO-based reports, along with official records that have been released into the public sphere." This means it will include things from HRW, Amnesty or other kinds of NGO's, and "official records" can mean from Iraqi hospitals or morgues, and the US or UK government, such as the US military database released by WikiLeaks, as discussed in the latest report: http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/numbers/2011/
You have a false picture of IBC that is much more narrow than it actually is. It should also be noted that their numbers have also been pretty consistent with other counting sources including figures from UNAMI or Brookings and from the Iraqi government (sometimes leaked unofficially, such as in this AP report: http://articles.sfgate.com/2009-04-24/news/17191954_1_health-ministry-count-iraq-body-count-civilian-deaths)
You're also wrong regarding the Lancet study. It did not estimate 1 million deaths in 2005. In fact, it never estimated 1 million deaths. It estimated 600,000 in 2006. Thus your "ratio of 33" is completely wrong and your "estimated 6 million deaths" is completely wrong. Moreover, that Lancet study was a gigantic outlier from any other source and has been widely panned and judged to be wrong, including in numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and other surveys such as by the WHO that estimated the numbers to be at least 4 times lower. Some (of the many) such sources:
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa0707782
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10242690802496898
http://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/20A03C0F8F4BC3ABC125743500318AF6-cred_jun2007.pdf
The IBC is likely an underestimate, but is a factual and defensible figure of what is known in reality. The Lancet survey was just a fanciful wild overestimate that is not factual and widely rejected by experts.
"First, it does not require "two" outlets."
It did, until 2008 (december 21st 2007), as your link shows.
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/reference/announcements/3
"Second, it is not restricted to "western" outlets".
Most are western sources, as your link shows. http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/reference/sources. There are few Iraqi sources on that list. It is also important to bear in mind that the original non complient Iraqi media outlets have been mostly shut down, and replaced with ones acceptable to the USA.
"It should also be noted that their numbers have also been pretty consistent with other COUNTING sources"
That is completely meaningless! Those are not estimates. These counts could not ever be an estimate. Even a MASSIVE counting effort involving house to house interviews (absolutely not possible) would fail because in many cases there are simply no witnesses left.
"... the Lancet study ... did not estimate 1 million deaths in 2005. .... It estimated 600,000 in 2006."
Agreed. That is an estimate of 600,000 against a count of 30,000 at the time. A ratio of 20 to 1. If the same ratio applies now, it would still extrapolate to 3 million actual dead.
"The IBC is likely an underestimate, but is a factual and defensible figure of what is known in reality."
You are not being honest. You KNOW that the number of document deaths has to be less than the actual number of deaths. It is not even an estimate, let alone "likely an underestimate". To make an estimate from this you need to know what percentage was counted. IBC does not attempt to estimate.
"The Lancet survey was just a fanciful wild overestimate that is not factual and widely rejected by experts."
Yes the USA has made LOTS of noise to discredit it. There is no way that they (or you) were going to permit the truth to leak out. And like the WMD lies, you are merely joining the chorus of lies. But there was nothing fanciful about the Lancet survey. It used best practice methodology, to attempt to estimate something difficult to estimate. It is consistent with ORB survey of Iraq War casualties. It is not widely rejected by experts, it is widely rejected by US propagandists.
"It did (require two sources), until 2008 (december 21st 2007), as your link shows."
But that isn't relevant to the current count. Your comment may have been relevant 5 years ago, but it isn't now (and the figures show it wouldn't have been hugely relevant 5 years ago, though at least factually true back then). The policy was changed in 2007, and this applies back to the beginning. Single-source material is there prior to 2007 as well. See for example:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/incidents/d4241
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/incidents/d4239
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/incidents/d4588
If you think there's stuff not in there from single sources, you should send it to them:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/contribute/submit/
You were wrong. Just admit you were wrong and move on.
"Most are western sources, as your link shows. "
"Most" is not all. Iraq is one country of 30 million people. "The West" is a vague collection of lots of different countries that is far bigger, and has a lot more media outlets. The only way for IBC to use an equal number of Iraqi and "western" media outlets is to ignore lots of western outlets (and the deaths reported in them). Here IBC lists the top 15 most useful media sources used in 2006-08. Four of the sources are Iraqi, another is Chinese, and the rest are from various "western" countries. You were wrong. Just admit you were wrong and move on.
"It should also be noted that their numbers have also been pretty consistent with other COUNTING sources"
That is completely meaningless! Those are not estimates."
This is a pretty strange view. It isn't "meaningless" at all, unless one doesn't actually care about reality. You seem to think that counting efforts are worthless (have no "meaning") unless you can be sure they'll count every single thing. I don't share that view at all. What it shows is that independent counting systems have come to similar results, and this reinforces that they are getting a meaningful picture. If they are "not estimates" this doesn't mean they don't have meaning. Many people do call them estimates (including in your favorite Lancet study), as people use that word broadly often, and the numbers given by those sources can be considered estimates of a sort. But you appear to mean estimate as some kind of guess, so to you only a guess at reality has "meaning", but people documenting actual reality has "no meaning" unless we can be sure they are able to document *everything*. This translates to "counts are meaningless because we can't be sure how close to the true number they are". Well, i think we can have quite a good idea of this in many cases, but the same flaw would also apply to your guesses/estimates: we can't be sure how close to the true number they are either. They often have huge error margins and a variety of issues can mean the true number is even outside those huge error margins. So what exactly gives them "meaning" then?
"You are not being honest. You KNOW that the number of document deaths has to be less than the actual number of deaths. It is not even an estimate, let alone "likely an underestimate"."
I am being completely honest (and I actually know the basic facts here, unlike you). I don't "KNOW" the number is less than the actual number. I believe it is based on the balance of likely biases. I can surmise confidently that there are other deaths that failed to be recorded, but there may also be recorded incidents where IBC overestimated the number killed in them. I think this is not particularly likely and very unlikely to equal out with the number of unrecorded deaths. Thus I say what is actually true and honest: it is likely an underestimate. You declaring what you "KNOW" about these unknowns isn't honest.
"Yes the USA has made LOTS of noise to discredit [The Lancet survey]."
No it hasn't. If you mean the US government, the "noise" was I think GW Bush once saying he didn't believe and maybe some officials echoing him on that day and then never speaking of it again. But maybe by "USA" you mean something weird like "the western media" or anyone who lives in the USA.
"But there was nothing fanciful about the Lancet survey. It used best practice methodology, to attempt to estimate something difficult to estimate. It is consistent with ORB survey of Iraq War casualties. It is not widely rejected by experts, it is widely rejected by US propagandists."
The Lancet survey did not use "best practice" anything, except maybe in terms of how to do a media blitz to promote itself. See my previous posts and links (including about the bogus "ORB survey". And yes, it is widely rejected by experts. You just don't know what you are talking about. Anyway, here are some of the "US propagandists" who have rejected the Lancet survey:
http://dissident93.wordpress.com/2008/10/20/project-censored-as-censors/
And here's some specific "US propagandists" from the last link above:
Jon Pedersen (Fafo) is one of the leading experts on Middle East demography [and "US propagandist"]. He conducted the Iraq Living Conditions Survey (ILCS, a cluster-sample survey of over 21,000 Iraqi households – much larger than Lancet 2006, which surveyed approximately 1,800). Pedersen has commented that the Lancet 2006 mortality estimates were “high, and probably way too high. I would accept something in the vicinity of 100,000 but 600,000 is too much.” (Source: Washington Post, 19 Oct 2006)
Research by ["US propagandists"] Debarati Guha-Sapir and Olivier Degomme, from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) estimates the total war-related death toll (for the period covered by Lancet 2006) at around 125,000. They reach this figure by correcting errors in the Lancet 2006 survey, and triangulating with IBC and ILCS data. Source: CRED paper.
Beth Osborne Daponte (the renowned demographer who produced authoritative death figures for the first Gulf War) [and a "US propagandist"] argues in a recent paper that the most reliable information available (to date) is provided by a combination of IFHS, ILCS and Iraq Body Count. This puts a working estimate well below the “million” figure claimed by Project Censored. Daponte is critical of the Lancet 2006 study – like several other researchers, she finds its pre-war crude death rate too low (which would inflate the excess deaths estimate). She writes that the Lancet authors “have not adequately addressed these issues”. http://tinyurl.com/48mq63
Paul Spiegel, an epidemiologist at the UN [and a "US propagandist"], commented on IFHS (which estimated 151,000 violent deaths over the same period as Lancet 2006): “Overall, this [IFHS] is a very good study [...] What they have done that other studies have not is try to compensate for the inaccuracies and difficulties of these surveys.” He adds that “this does seem more believable to me [than Lancet 2006]“. http://tinyurl.com/53s82b
Mark van der Laan, an authority in the field of biostatistics (and recipient of the Presidential Award of the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies) [and a "US propagandist"] has written, with Leon de Winter, on the Lancet 2006 study: “We conclude that it is virtually impossible to judge the value of the original data collected in the 47 clusters [of the Lancet study]. We also conclude that the estimates based upon these data are extremely unreliable and cannot stand a decent scientific evaluation.” http://tinyurl.com/4txbpw
Mohamed M. Ali, Colin Mathers and J. Ties Boerma, from the World Health Organization at Geneva (authors of IFHS) [and "US propagandists"], write that it “is unlikely that a small survey with only 47 clusters [Lancet 2006] has provided a more accurate estimate of violence-related mortality than a much larger survey sampling of 971 clusters [IFHS].” http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/359/4/431
etc. etc. etc.
OVER 1 MILLION KILLED. Many millions DISPLACED. Almost all professionals have left. Infrastructure and utilities: Destroyed. Buildings and streets in ruins.
NEVER MIND. YOU ARE AN AMERICAN DUFUS AND YOU KNOW NOTHING. KEEP FOLLOWING ORDERS AND IGNORE THIS UNFORTUNATE INFORMATION.
http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/1-over-one-million-iraqi-deaths-caused-by-us-occupation/
you got that right
how about the vets that are on disability
"Statistics published in Encyclopedia Britannica's 2003 Almanac indicate that 325,000 Gulf War vets were receiving compensation for service-related disabilities in 2000. The almanac lists 580,400 combatants in the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91, yet only 467 U.S. personnel were actually wounded during the conflict. The 325,000 disabled Gulf War vets are equivalent to 56 percent of the number of military personnel "serving in the theater of operation."
Furthermore, in 2000, nine years after the three-week war in Iraq had ended, the number of disabled vets from the Gulf War was increasing yearly by more than 43,000. While the number of disabled vets from previous wars is decreasing by about 35,000 per year, since the "War on Terror" began in 2001, the total number of disabled vets has grown to some 2.5 million.
With 518,739 disabled "Gulf-era veterans" currently receiving disability compensation, according to Jemison, the number of veterans disabled after the war is more than 73 times the total number of wounded, in and out of combat, from the entire 14-year conflict with Iraq. "
http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/2004/08/15_bollyn_depleted-uranium-blamed-cancer.htm
these soldiers were disabled by exposure to nuclear weapons - depleted uranium - and toxic vaccines
who says we don't love the vets...
Project Censored often has some good analysis of the media, but they are out of the depth and went way off the rails on this one, to the point of engaging in censorship themselves, as well as absurd cherry-picking. See here:
http://dissident93.wordpress.com/2008/10/20/project-censored-as-censors/
Again they basically just cherry-pick the Lancet survey and extrapolate it, even though that survey was a big outlier (including from other surveys) and has been widely panned by experts (see my other posts above for links). Then, to try to make the cherry-picking seem less absurd they lean on an "ORB poll" which was just a self-published extrapolation from an opinion poll by a marketing firm and which has been thoroughly debunked:
http://w4.ub.uni-konstanz.de/srm/article/view/2373
Unfortunately, in this instance, PC are the AMERICAN DUFUS's who KNOW NOTHING.
Common Dreams really shouldn't run this propagandistic IBC lowball number.
See my post above.
The crimes of the American and British armed forces in Iraq will be added to the tedious record of white, christian, capitalists that consistently fail to observe the values their mythologies champion; life, joy, compassion, and justice. And, for what in this case? They will not admit it, but we know it was to gain control of the second largest proven oil reserves on Earth. We will be deep in their next crime before many people in the United States and the United Kingdom finally admit their guilt in this example.
How many tankfulls of gas do we get for a murdered or maimed child?
"How many tankfulls of gas do we get for a murdered or maimed child?"
There it is in one concise statement......
162,000 is FAR too low an estimate. Well over a million is a far better estimate. And, add this to five million displaced and enormous infrastructure destruction and you have an ATROCITY of unspeakable proportions. The US is unquestionably Earth's biggest and most destructive bully.
Jim Shea
Et tu Common Dreams? Why are you minimizing the loss that Iraqis have suffered?
where did this new lying number come from? the john hopkins lancet study established a count f 1-1.5 million...all of a sudden there is this blitz with the new number as the u.s. "withdraws", ..i guess it is to establish the new "it was worth it...we saved them" narrative
duplicate
The most important thing about this horrendous war we've perpetrated on Iraq is not determining the actual number of Iraqis we murdered, but that we recognize it was a Criminal Act against humanity, and the men who organized and conducted the crimes should be taken to the Hague - forthwith.
At the very least, Darth Cheney's fake heart should be unplugged.
Yes, I have questions about the final death toll too, especially when I hear reports of between 3- 4,500,000 orphans in Iraq. This is why the 162,000 toll makes no sense to me. This really bugs me, actually! Iraq must not be minimised nor forgotten.. Peace
Suzy, how many orphans do you believe a country of over 30 million people, with around half the population being children, such as Iraq should have under normal circumstances, that is without the 2003 invasion but with the previous wars and sanctions? And how are you determining what portion of the orphan number lost parents due directly to violent deaths, in other words, how exactly are you relating it to the 162,000 number? And of course, how do you know that the "reports of 3- 4,500,000 orphans" that you've heard are even accurate numbers to begin with? It seems to me very difficult to draw any credible conclusions about the number of violent war deaths since 2003 based simply on an overall orphan statistic from any cause, let alone one that is poorly sourced or derived from unknown methodology in the first place. I would not be at all surprised for the violent death numbers to be somewhat higher than 162,000, but I don't see how those claims about overall orphan statistics can tell us much about this.
I've heard similar points made about numbers of widows too. Such as "I've heard reports that there are a million widows in Iraq, so it can't be 162,000 violent deaths since 2003!" Well, why not? How many widows should there be "normally" in a country the size of Iraq? And if there's a big remainder you think are due exclusively to the 2003 war, how many of these were specifically violent deaths, as opposed to some other indirect kind of death? Again, not easy to relate this to post-2003 violent death numbers alone.
If a compete noob gives the number 162,000, I can guess that they just did not know better. In your case, however, you have already shown your hand and you KNOW that that number is not even plausible as an estimate, yet you still push it. That is not ignorance, it is total dishonesty from a troll who has appeared on this forums to try to prevent the truth from being known.
Braith, you need to loosen your tin-foil hat and put down the kool-aid. I think the 162,000 is likely an underestimate yet it is not likely to be a huge underestimate, and is far more factual and plausible, and much closer to reality than the delusional figures you're deriving from extrapolations of one discredited outlier study from 2006.
And your attempt to redo your bogus extrapolations above is still wrong. You are not presenting "the truth", and obviously do not care enough to get the basic facts right to begin with. You're presenting delusional fantasies, and calling other dishonest for not drinking the same kool-aid.
To your point on Orphans. The population of the USA is 300000000 or some ten times that of iraq and it has some 79 million CHILDREN.
There are 2.9 million orphans in the USA . So that 4.5 million is hardly representaive of the number of orphans there would have been anyways. Keep in mind some 500000 children died to sanctions in Iraq that were imposed on them by the west. This suggest one can not conclude that Iraq just has a higher natural death rate amongst adults, thuis the number of orphans.
Numbers put out by WHO indicated WAR as being the number one cause of death In Iraq with 48000 deaths per year or some 25 percentof all deaths. The second leading cause of death is Coronary heart disease at some 26000.
The Invasion occurred 10 years ago and IBC numbers suggest 16000 dead civilans a year due to war. The WHO numbers (generally understated in times of war based on Iraqi Government statistics) are some 3 times higher then those suggested by IBC.
It does not jive. The lancet numbers are much more credible.
I notice you've now lost your range of 3-4.5 million orphans and this has changed simply to "4.5 million". Why? Moreover, I don't know how this number was derived or how accurate it is. Is it based on something more than someone's guess? I don't know. If the figure is true then Iraq certainly has a higher percentage of orphans than the USA does, but two things here.
First, about half of Iraq's population are children. It has a very different age structure than the USA which is much older. The average family size and number of children per family is also much larger in Iraq than the USA. In the USA I think the average is around 2, while in Iraq it's around 4 or 5. Iraq is also a far less prosperous country than the USA to begin with.
Second, how is "orphan" defined in your Iraq statistics, as compared with the USA statistic? Does it mean one parent dead? Two parents dead? Is there an age limit for the person qualifying as an orphan, if so, what is it? If the age limit is 18, then this would include children who lost a parent or parents as far back as the early 90's. If it has no particular age limit, then who knows what it includes.
So given all this, how many of the orphans are the normal rate and how many are the "war" ones? What would be a "normal" number of orphans for Iraq in 2011 by your estimation? And what makes you think your estimation is remotely reliable (whatever number it is)? And of the "war" ones how many are directly due to war violence (so it can be compared to the IBC or WHO numbers) rather than something else that you might consider indirectly related to the war, but not direct violence?
As I said before, you're trying to compare a statistic from orphanhood by any cause, that is not particularly reliable in the first place, derived as it is from unstated methodology with unstated definitions of terms, and using this to infer a number specifically for violent deaths since 2003. You have to make a lot of faith-based leaps to get to any conclusions from this.
I have no doubt that the number of orphans in Iraq today is significantly higher than it would have been without an invasion and all the resulting violence and destruction, but the figures can be made consistent with any of the violent death numbers since so much of any such calculation needs to be filled in with baseless assumptions.
"Keep in mind some 500000 children died to sanctions in Iraq that were imposed on them by the west. This suggest one can not conclude that Iraq just has a higher natural death rate amongst adults."
The claim of 500,000 children dying from sanctions has also come under a lot of question recently because more recent studies don't confirm the one from the late 90's that the 500,000 number came from. See here for example:
http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Truth%20and%20Death.pdf
The WHO data you cite below does find a higher death rate among adults since 2003, certainly a higher violent death rate among adults. Almost 90% of the violent deaths were adult men. If a large share of these men had several children, as is likely in Iraq, it would add quite a lot to the 'normal' orphan numbers (whatever number that might be) no matter which violent death estimate you're talking about.
On the WHO study, it said that violence was the leading cause of death among adult men, not the leading cause generally. And it was not "generally understated in times of war based on iraqi Government statistics"). It was based on a random household survey of the population. It is the best estimate they came to from that survey, and they even bent over backwards to raise that estimate as high as they could by doing *upward* adjustments to the survey data both for missed clusters and for presumed "underreporting". It is the only Iraq survey to have done this kind of upward adjusting. And yes, after doing this it said it's best estimate was 3 times the IBC number of that time (the direct survey findings would have made it 2 times or less), but this is partly (though not entirely) explainable in that the IBC number of that time was for civilians only, while the WHO estimate was for all violent deaths, civilian and combatant alike. One can also question if all the upward adjustments were really sound.
More importantly, the WHO study estimate was 4 times lower than the Lancet study (even after doing the upward adjustments). It concluded that the Lancet study was a very large overestimate. Indeed, if the WHO estimates are accurate, the Lancet study is wildly wrong. The WHO authors concluded as much in their peer-reviewed report in the NEJM. If the WHO is right, then the Lancet is simply wrong, period. Yet here you somehow use its data to conclude that "the lancet numbers are much more credible"?!?
That is what does not jive here.
>>irst, about half of Iraq's population are children. It has a very different age structure than the USA which is much older. The average family size and number of children per family is also much larger in Iraq than the USA. In the USA I think the average is around 2, while in Iraq it's around 4 or 5. Iraq is also a far less prosperous country than the USA to begin with
What RUBBISH!
The USA has ten times the population of Iraq. It has more children then the entire population of Iraq yet LESS Orphans. An orphan is defined as a child having no surviving parent. There are 79 MILLION children in the USA and that is almost three times the entire population of Iraq. Were every person in Iraq a child the USA still has nearly three times the population.
WHO always understates the numbers killed in War. They did this in the Vietnam war where only years later were the numbers revised upwards. The Lancet study was peer reviewed.
The Who numbers of 48000 were from LAST YEAR. Lancet did not claim that number died last year. Their study was done shortly after the Invasion when mass battles were ongoing and places like Fallujah were being bombed. Wehn the Mahdi army was still fighting and when US air strikes and artillerly bombardments were ongoing. When ethnic cleansing was happening in Baghdad and the Kurdish North all those numbers were HIGHER.
>>On the WHO study, it said that violence was the leading cause of death among adult men, not the leading cause generally
The who study stated WAR. it did not state death by all forms of violence. Who measures the deaths by Murder seperately from thoise attributed to war. That said the Homicide rate in Iraq has went up about 4 times since the US Invasion.
The WHO study shows violence in Iraq as having killed some 600 and people and war has having killed 48000.
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/world-rankings-total-deaths
Read the list and stop making stuff up. Note WAR and VIOLENCE measured seperately.
Violence is 608. War is 47695. Now to your point on Combatants versus Civilian. This another bogus argument. If the number of deaths due to war was 47695 then please tell me who the combatants are?
Again these numbers are from last year. Are you sueggesting those are Military Casualties, if so please illustrate the Military losses. Is it the US army or the Iraqi army that suffered 48000 killed last year?
The fact is those are virtually ALL Civilian deaths some 10 years AFTER the invasion and some 6 years after the peak of violence.
The Lancet numbers are credible. Keep in mind the lancet study INCLUDED all excess deaths due to the Invasion . It was peer reviewed and it included ALL excess deaths including deaths due to the destruction of infrasrtructure and health care services.
The Lancet Study pointed out that the Mortality rate pre invasion was 5.5 per 1000.
It climbed to 13.3 in the 40 months immediatley after the invasion and then dropped to and overall rate of 7.8.
The who study is for last year with 48000 casualties due to war. last year the mortailty rate would have had to of been lower then 7.8 per thousand as that number an overall rate including the peak of post invasion.
Thus doing simple math the 40 months post invasion would have had to have seen total deaths at LEAST twice as high as 48000 that were measured due to war last year.
This is 100000.
The lancet numbers are credible using WHO's data and simple math.
You don't seem to know what you are talking about here.
"An orphan is defined as a child having no surviving parent. " - No, often it is. Sometimes it is defined as a child who lost one parent to death, and other times it is defined as a child who has no parental care for any reason, whether you know what happened to the parents or not (i.e., abandoned, etc.). And other times it doesn't even necessarily mean a "child". Here you don't know what the definition is for your Iraq statistic because they are statistics that have never been explained or supported and have no stated methodology. They are free-floating assertions or guesstimates of some sort.
You do not know how many orphans there are in Iraq. You know that you have heard numbers of 3 or 4.5 million asserted in the media somewhere without explanation or methodology. All of the problems i stated before apply.
As to your claim of the WHO saying 48,000 dying due to "war" last year, I'm not able to tell exactly where this comes from. Your link is not the WHO, it's a private website by Le Duc media: http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/members.php, and seems to be giving decade-long yearly averages, and seem to have compiled them from a variety of sources. "OUR DATA: We use the most recent data from these primary sources: WHO, World Bank, UNESCO, CIA and individual country databases for global health and causes of death. We use the CDC, NIH and individual state and county databases for verification and supplementation for USA data."
I'd be interested to see the WHO data where you think these figures are coming from. Then I'd have a better idea what they mean by "war" here, and how these figures are being determined and how reliable they might be.
"The Lancet numbers are credible. Keep in mind the lancet study INCLUDED all excess deaths due to the Invasion ."
The Lancet numbers aren't credible, even according to the IFHS survey which was done by the WHO and published in NEJM. And it is mostly irrelevant that the Lancet included "all excess deaths" because over almost all of the excess deaths in that study are from directly to violence (601,000 out of 655,000). That study found no significant change in death rates except for direct violence.
It doesnt matter how many. we dont do body counts. besides, they were all brown people and live very far away.
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq