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.
