MIT funded a study to see how many people have died in Iraq. Their results are stunning. Rather than reporting 30,000 deaths, as Bush did in a speech late last year, or 50,000, as Iraq Body Count estimates, the MIT study put the number at well over half a million.
A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.
The article get into their methodology, which seems solid. Some of their findings:
Of the total 655,000 estimated “excess deaths,” 601,000 resulted from violence and the rest from disease and other causes, according to the study…
The interviewers asked for death certificates 87 percent of the time; when they did, more than 90 percent of households produced certificates…
Of the 629 deaths reported, 87 percent occurred after the invasion. A little more than 75 percent of the dead were men, with a greater male preponderance after the invasion. For violent post-invasion deaths, the male-to-female ratio was 10-to-1, with most victims between 15 and 44 years old.
Gunshot wounds caused 56 percent of violent deaths, with car bombs and other explosions causing 14 percent, according to the survey results. Of the violent deaths that occurred after the invasion, 31 percent were caused by coalition forces or airstrikes, the respondents said.
This is a staggering amount of death. In five years (1975-1979) Pol Pot killed 2 million Cambodians, or a quarter of their population. In the four years of the Iraq War, is it possible that Iraq has suffered losses almost a third as bad? This is insane. Pol Pot deliberately set out to kill civilians. America is, at least formerly, trying to protect them.
I don’t know why this study’s estimate is so much higher than other estimates. I hope to God they got something very wrong.
I have a long commute these days, a 50+ minute drive home. I hadn’t heard about this study yet. Tonight I was driving home, radio off, just thinking, and I kept having images in my mind of Bush being questioned in public about the deaths in Iraq.
I imagined–one of those Philip K. Dick kind of experiences where the image seems to be beamed down to you by satellite–that a young woman confronted Bush and demanded that he account for the HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DEATHS IN IRAQ! She said: “Just today THE LORD has revealed to me that the TRUTH WILL BE SEEN!”
At that point, Bush starts bleeding profusely from his mouth and eyes and ears and nose. Blood cascades from his suit. It’s like the grand finale of the movie Carrie. He staggers off stage, trailing tens of buckets of gore.
And of course, at that point the Secret Service goons run up and shoot the woman who asked the question.
(No, I’m not making this up.)
strange visions happen on long car rides.
I don’t want to seem too cranky and picky about this, but I have noticed a trend in language that seems to me to reflect something more profound: there is no longer a distinction between “amount” and “number” or “less” and “fewer.” We now talk about the amount of people killed, not the number. The number denotes individuals counted one by one; amount denotes quantity.
To me this general change in the use of language says something. I think it would be better if we retained this distinction in language that denotes the integrity of individuals, rather than measuring them in heaps. We count people; we measure quantities, and our collective failure to cope with that may have something to do with our failure to understand the consequences of big decisions on indviduals and families.
Perhaps a measure of the turning tide, this report is being talked about on the Today Show as I read this. Of course the closing statement in the report was something about the timing of the release of the report being “political.”
As if everything the Republicans say is apolitical?
The methodology used in the study, cluster sampling, is pretty sound for measuring population wide factors when there is no access to the whole population. Subgroups are studies and then corrected for variation from the data set of the whole population.
This is the same methodology that BushCo cites to talk about the casualty rates in Darfur, or even those that resulted from Saddam’s attacks on the Kurds and the Shi’ites in the South of Iraq.
Like all statistics, it comes with a confidence interval- even a whopping 50% would give 300,000 dead- still an abomination- and the sampling gives a more accurate number than that.
The other numbers are reported deaths, that is deaths reported through official channels and reported, either in the media (Iraq Body Count) or through the U.S. military’s tracking of civilian casualties (mostly for the purpose of paying compensation)- SInce much of Iraq is as violent or more violent than Baghdad, and only middle class neighborhoods of Baghdad and a few other major cities are sources of ‘reported’ deaths, it makes sense to find that the ‘reported’ death rate is about 10% of the overall death rate.
Eventually this will be well settled when a census gets done and the results compared to the food ration records maintained during Saddam’s regime- when that happens I think it likely that even the number of deaths estimated by Hopkins will be low.
Combine the half million dead with the 800,000 who have fled the country and Iraq has been completely denuded of its future.
In a just world Bush and many others would face jail for this.
According to the reports, the methodology is the same as that used to estimate mortality in Somalia, Sudan, the Balkans, and other wars/ethnic cleansings. It is certainly more credible than anything that comes out of the Regime.
As others have said, even if the numbers were off by half (and there’s no reason to think they are), the findings are heartbreaking. I don’t know how America will ever regain any friendshp or credibility in the world unless the liars and profiteers who committed this crime are tried and punished as the war criminals that they are.
For perspective, the study says 2.5 percent of the population has died as a result of the US occupation. That would amount to around 7 million people in the US. If you want to get an idea of how Iraqis, Muslims, and the rest of the world feel about the US, think about how Americans would react if a foreign invader killed 7 million of us for no reason except domestic politics and the enrichment of its ruling class. Really. Think about what that would be like.
PS. Boo, is it possible that you really believe that “America is, at least formerly, trying to protect them”? Sometimes I don’t understand you at all.
I actually meant to write ‘formally’ but I decided to leave it.
I do think the vast majority of our military efforts are designed to try to provide protection and security to the Iraqi population. The problem is that such a high percentage of the population is actively opposing us that the effort is incoherent. And it is also ineffective.
Look at it this way…
Pol Pot rounded up people and executed them. We may have directly contributed to the deaths of 600,000 people without ever deliberately targetting civilians.
Obviously, there has been an indifference to civilian losses in several operations, but that wasn’t their point.
What is staggering is that we could pile up this amount of casualties without ethnic cleansing or genocide being part of the policy. It shows how badly flawed the ‘liberation’ of Iraq really was.
It’s also another example of ‘we had to destroy the country in order to save it’.
I don’t believe for a minute that “the vast majority of our military efforts are designed to try to provide protection and security to the Iraqi population.” If that were the case, how could they fail so miserably? We are under a regime that cares only about its own power and profits. Period. The sooner we get over sentimental delusions that there is anything benign in the Bushits or the GOP, the sooner we can start doing our best to begin repairing the incredible catastrophes they have brought upon Iraq, America, and the world.
You argue that we’re not as bad as Hitler or Pol Pot, which I’d stipulate. That’s a far step from believing that the ones who sold this war and launched this occupation cared in the slightest about the costs of their behavior to Iraqis or anyone else.
PS… apparently no one has diaried this over at Kos. I was going to, but why don’t you just send yours over? I fear I won’t have the stomach for it.
Turns out it is at Orange, way the hell down the front page, and apparently not of much interest, incredibly enough. I still think your treatment belongs there.
So, how high is the Bush Administration’s “pyramid of skulls”? According to my quick and dirty calculations, it would be taller than the White House, or could fill every floor of that building to a depth of 2.5 meters.
Don’t forget to count the 300,000 to 500,000 children which died as the result of US sanctions and bombing of water treatment facilities in Iraq prior to the invasion.
See: UNICEF 1999 Iraq Child and Maternal Mortality Surveys:
http://www.fas.org/news/iraq/1999/08/990812-unicef.htm
and Dr Richard Garfield’s
Morbidity and Mortality Among Iraqi Children
http://www.casi.org.uk/info/garfield/dr-garfield.html