Iraqi war deaths

Iraq: over 600,000 excess deaths since war began

Iraqi war deaths
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This according to a new study to be published in The Lancet this week, by the same team who did the much maligned 2004 study also published there, which was the first scientific study to the effects of the War on Iraq. The news this time is much worse:

WASHINGTON — More than 600,000 Iraqis have died violently since the U.S.-led invasion, according to a new estimate that is far higher than any other to date.

The report, by a team of researchers criticized for its death estimates two years ago, says that 601,027 Iraqis have suffered violent deaths since the March 2003 invasion. It also suggests that the country has become more violent in the last year.

“This clearly is a much higher number than many people have been thinking about,” said Gilbert Burnham, the report’s lead author and a professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. “It shows the violence has spread across the country.”

Iraq’s violent death rate rose from 3.2 deaths per 1,000 people in the year after the invasion to 12 per 1,000 from June 2005 to June 2006, according to the researchers, whose findings are being published this week in the British medical journal Lancet.

The article tries its best to throw mud on the study, dragging in all kinds of irrelevancies like the Iraqi Bodycount Project, all of which is still familiar from the 2004 study and all of which fails to conceal the magnitude of this disaster. It’s so much more than expected that I don’t know what to say about it, only to note that none of this was necessary.

Two and two is five

Iraqi war deaths
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Over in the comments to this post, The Republic of Palau makes a point that deserves wider attention, about the critiques of that infamous Lancet study:

This whole situation has another aspect: the rubbishing of most respectable research that disproves the neocon worldview. It’s all of a piece with the faith-led agenda, when carefully researched, rigidly peer-reviewed science is rubbished on ideological grounds rather than its methodology or substance. The Lancet is a world-respected medical journal, and has no political agenda. The scientists approached the research as an epistemiological exercise i.e. ‘How can you safely estimate death rates and causualties in a war situation?’

The results were reviewed and reviewed, stringently and by some of the most eminently qualified scientists in the world, but that’s apparently irrelevant. Where the Republicans don’t like scientific results, they just rubbish and ignore them. They really are making their own reality.

These really are people who, as not even Orwell predicted, would happily argue that two plus two equals five if their masters ordered it. See also the ongoing saga of Michael Fumetti^wFumento, over at Deltoid. It’s hard to know whether to laugh or to cry.

Letter to the Observer

Iraqi war deaths, Manufacturing Consent, War Lies
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Sir,

it takes particular cheek to cite the partisan TCS website refering to the Lancet as “Al-Jazeera on the Thames” when the website in question is well known for its activism on behalf of corporate intrerests and the “journalist” who provided you with this quote has managed to both misread and misrepresent the Lancet report [1] in his own writings on the subject.

He made exactly the same mistake as your article did when it stated that:

The report’s authors admit it drew heavily on the rebel stronghold of Falluja, which has been plagued by fierce fighting. Strip out Falluja, as the study itself acknowledged, and the mortality rate is reduced dramatically.

When in fact the excess mortality figure the report arrived at, of 98,000, was reached with the Falluja figures left out of the calculations. If these had been included, the figure would have been even higher.

All of which leads me to conclude that the writer of your article, rather than reading the report itself and drawing his own conclusions, has instead relied on the accusations of those for whom this report is embarassing and who have an ulterior motive in bringing it into doubt.

Yours sincerily,

Martin Wisse

[1]: PDF file