600,000 Violent Deaths in Iraq

So what do we learn from this? Some people require a ruthless dictator to keep them in line? Looking at what has happened there, you can see just how bad Saddam would have to be to maintain order in that place. It's really sad.

From the [WSJ](http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB116052896787288831-8l5AMVpCdg07M…) : "Human Rights Watch has estimated Saddam Hussein's regime killed 250,000 to 290,000 people over 20 years."

Ben. All I can say is do you work in a straw factory?

Sand Niggers killing sandniggers, I love that scenario......, hope it accelerates.

Such compassion, Adolph. This from the same constituency that would have us believe the US went there just to save the poor Iraqis and and deliver Freedom and Democracy.

Interesting figures indeed. Let's say that half of the 601,000 deaths attributed to violence were caused by exploding civilians and that each exploding civilian killed 10 other Iraqis. This means about 27,327 jihadis didn't raise their hands at their post match roll calls.
Not all Lancet statistics convey bad news.

Ben, yeah just like the German obviously needed a Hitler to keep them in line.

After all, you wouldn't want to sugegst than any part of the repsonsiblity for these deaths attaches to the people who've got 140,000 troops in the country and who are bombing it on a regular basis.

Colby - what do you expect from someone whose screen name appears to be comination of Adolph (sic) Hitler and Enoch Powell?

It is just me, or did the Times reporter do everything possible to discredit this new study while still using an "objective" tone?

Let's say that half of the 601,000 deaths attributed to violence were caused by exploding civilians and that each exploding civilian killed 10 other Iraqis

That would be rather a silly thing to say, given that "Gunshot wounds caused 56 percent of violent deaths, with car bombs and other explosions causing 14 percent, according to the survey results."

I suggest Ben reads "Empire's Workshop" by Greg Grandin and "Imperial Brain Trust" by Lawrence Shoup that will forever bury this unadulterated crap of 'benevolence' that the US forever clothes itself in... this constant myth dredged up by the echo chamber (the corporate-state media apparatus) is that the US-UK governments support democracy, freedom and human rights. It is all a farce. The current revolutionary imperialists in Washington DC are exporting their own brand of Wilsonian free market absolutism - in other words nakedly predatory neoliberal capitalism - and are doing so at the end of a gun. This should be hardly controversial, were the supine media doing their job properly. Also Ben, you might read planning documents from the likes of Kennan, Nitke, Acheson, or any of the documents drawn up by the Councuil in Foreign Relations before and during the second world war. These expose US policies in the clearest way. Declassified British planning documents tell a similar story: every one I read reveals a clear disregard for advancing human rights and democracy in third world countries, but a clear concern that these countries will 'embrace progressive populist movements' that wish to 'tackle poverty and gain control over their won resources'. Why were the planners worried? Because this populism 'conficts with British business interests'.

At the end of the day, the poor and destitute peoples of this world are effectively 'unpeople' when their interests conflict with those who have power and priviledge. So Ben, its no use embracing 'triage' as a means of justifying US-UK aggression in Iraq. It was always known that an invasion could result in mass civilan death but the criminal gangs in Washington and London just didn't give a damn.

It will be funny to see with what zeal the right-wing think-tanks will discredit this latest study in Lancet. I anxiously await the "Climate Audit" crowd, led by their hero Steve McIntyre, to pick apart the stats and show how tree-ring proxies are a better indicator for Iraq War success!

It's early days of course but so far the pro-dead-arab side has skipped the attempts to discredit the science and gone straight to denying US responsibility and making out-and-out racist statements which pretty much boil down to 'the only good arab is a dead arab".

Gvevn how miserably the attempts to dent the science failed the first time around, I suppose this represents progress of a sort.

The numbers are simply not credible.

From 1940 to 1945 Bomber Command dropped 955,044 tons of weaponry on Europe(some of this was mines and the land total on Germany is less than this figure).

It conducted 391,137 sorties.

The area bombing campaign was by today's standards indiscriminate bombing of cities.

593,000 german civilians died (AJ Levine, The Strategic Bombing of Germany 1940-1945, Prager, 1992, p.190)

The lancet claims that MORE than this number has been killed in Iraq through violent means.

If so, where are the Hamburgs, the Colognes, the Stuttgarts, the 1945-style completely smashed cities, the deliberate policy of indiscriminate attack on civilian targets, and the enormous contracts for bombs and shells to actually DO this. I've checked the US DoD contracting, the bombs and shells to physically do this have not been produced.

Circa 500 a day? So the entire MSM have completely missed this since the invasion?

Has Hamit Dardagan, co-founder of Iraq Body Count, the London human rights group (they tabulate civilian deaths based on media reports augmented by hospital and morgue records) been off by more than an order of magnitude? They have 48,693 civilian deaths noted.

The Lancet figure is not supported by available data, historical precedence, or common sense.

it is one thing to make specious claims, but this one is so plainly silly that only the credulous could believe it.

MarkL
Canberra

Hi all
Well done Ian for seeing thru my sock puppet, Adolph Powell. However, good ol Enoch had it right 30 years ago regarding immigration to the UK, I think he meant West Indians but in reality it is muslims that are the problem.
Imagine the deaths of 600K muslims in the UK, it would meke for a much more safer society over there.
regards from new Zealand
Peter Bickle

Note how the Associated Press writer (via Yahoo news) calls the Lancet study 'controversial'. It is only controversal because it shatters the myth of US benevolence I alluded to above. At the same time, he refers to Iraq Body Count, with a much lower estimate based only on western media sources, and which even the authors of IBC claim is way below the real total, as 'respected'.

Normalize, normalize normalize. That is how the western media legitimizes western atrocities, while marginalizing alternate views, sending them down Orwell's famous 'memory hole'. Our media thus forever highlight the crimes of officially designated enemies, and forever downplays, ignores, or ridicules any suggestion that 'we' in the west are anything but noble defenders of peace and democracy.
Even the mainstream media over here in Holland has done its best to 'normalize' the US-UK invasion of Iraq, and hardly a mention was made that the invasion and subsequent occupation seriously violated international law and the UN Charter, the Nuremburg code and many aspects of the Geneva Conventions. By contrast, if the invasion had been carried out by an officially designated enemy, the media would have saturated the public with information along these lines.

MarkL, the extract from the article wasn't that long, but apparently you didn't read it. They are not saying that deaths were caused by bombs dropped from coalition planes. 56% were from small arms. Please pay attention.

Oh, I paid attention, Tim. You have not. People are not easy to kill in most circumstances (they tend to be somewhat averse to the notion), and the most effective way is to use indiscriminate attacks on populated areas using area weapons. (This is why nukes are such efficient mass-killers.)

The WWII figures show that EVEN DOING THAT, which involved massive indiscriminate area attacks which literally destroyed all the major cities of Germany still only resulted in 593,000 dead.

More than a ton of ordnance per dead German. Think about that for a second.

The contention that 56% of these were killed by small arms fire (336,000 people!) makes this number vastly less likely, in fact it makes it very close to impossible, because small arms fire is less effective at killing people in job lots unless used the way the Einsatztruppen did.

Small arms fire is much less destructive than artillery or bombing, and is by definition much more discriminate. You have to see the target, aim at it, and fire, rather than destroy the whole building and everyone inside with one shot or bomb.

Why on Earth do you think terrorists use car bombs to obtain mass casualties?

Check out the UN Small Arms Working Group's Survey and related material. It is instructive.

And if the Lancet IS right we still have the question of just HOW the MSM have entirely missed this for the last few years, and how Iraq Body Count has also found no evidence of such numbers!

I noticed you carefully avoided these points.

Sorry, the Lancet is simply wrong on this one. And it is obvious that they are wrong.

MarkL
Canberra

MarkL,

The Lancet paper must have been heavily peer-reviewed - probably by at least 5 experts in the field. Its a journal that is as rigid as Nature or Science.

What do you deem as a credible total of carnage of the war, anyway? The bottom line is this: the US-UK governments have made no effort whatsoever to tally up the number of civilians killed in Iraq since the invasion. Please tell me why this is? Moreover, you might also try to suggest why aggressor nations never tally up the victims of their wars. This applies right across the board. In the case of the US, no efforts were made by the government to determine the civilian death toll in the Korean War, Viet Nam, Latin America (during the 1980's when the US responded to progressive change in central America in with wholesale slaughter), or in Iraq. This is not to single out the US for rogue status; its been the standard practice of nations aggressing against other nations.

I'll tell you why. Because the government propogandists know that the true number of civilians killed by 'our side' in our aggressive wars is likely to be high and any official counts made by 'us' would demolish the myth of our noble intent. By contrast, if no definitive count is made then the total might well be 0. Any organization attempting to estimate victims of our aggression are therefore easy to ridicule because of the uncertainties in the methods used to estimate the death toll. The US-UK planners know this all too well.

Poor, deluded, hate-filled Jeff Harvey thinks the Yanks are running the world for themselves, does he?

He cites the UN Charter, Geneva Convention et al being violated as proof, proof!, that the Americans are one of the worst-intentioned nations on earth. This, the nation that has liberated more people than any other in the history of the world including the 40M+ of Iraq and Afghanistan from their tyrannical regimes not to mention the work they did in Kosovo when the deplorable, immoral United Nations did nothing.

Who lives under the yoke of US oppression? Me? You? Their citizens? That must explain why they are the nation that attracts the most immigrants - even if you exclude those coming across the border from Mexico. Why not ask someone who lives in Zimbabwe or is a black Muslim in the Sudan or a woman in Iran or any of the 20M+ North Koreans that are starving whether they'd like to go and live in the US so that they could be so massively oppressed.

Are the deaths in Iraq shocking? They sure are. Blaming the US, though, for not seeing that insurgents would slaughter their fellow Muslims at a machine-like rate is precisely equivalent to saying that Neville Chamberlain and his band of merry appeasers should have forseen Hitler's gas chambers. Reasonable people simply cannot imagine this sort of barbarity.

You belong to the set of people that Stalin called 'useful idiots', those that supported the USSR on ideological grounds against the West regardless of the depravity of its leadership.

You and your ilk add nothing to the world by your moral and intellectual bankruptcy.

Jeff Harvey,

MarkL, Canberra, is a right-wing ideologue, and is therefore totally divorced from reality.

Also it is worth noting that he and the rest of the tim blair bedwetting brigade take every opportunity to discredit the MSM, which makes it even more hilarious that he now backs up his own twisted view of reality using the MSM as an ally.

The study is a disturbing read, and if true, describes one of the greatest war crimes of all times.

Mark L, there's no incongruity between large numbers of individuals desiring to better their lives by moving to be within the most affluent country on the planet, and large numbers of individuals loathing that country for the detrimental impact of its' foreign policy on their lives and security. It's a large world after all, it's a large world after all... And given the choice, I bet a lot of people would pick being the oppressor rather than the oppressed.

As for asking which nation has been more liberating in human history... it must be some pathetic joke on your part to point to the descent of Iraq and reversion of Afghanistan into Hobbesian forms as indicators of US success.

Me, I'd look more to the marvellous Eurpoean project of eastward expansion and incorporation for economic and democratic liberty as a sustainable model of progress.

Mark L, you appear to be following different newspapers from myself. Reports such as this one:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6034975.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5057190.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5065446.stm

are merely the tip of the iceberg. Your contentions about small arms fire have no relevance to the situation in Iraq, due to the use of different tactics by the people there who are carrying out the sectarian murders.

Jack,

Thanks for spewing pure, unadulterated drivel. I suggest that you crawl back into the hole that the Council on Foreign Relations has dug for you. You haven't got a clue about the factors driving US foreign policy, and clearly you have you not read much aside from tomes from the likes of Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter. Anyone who writes, "This, [US] the nation that has liberated more people than any other in the history of the world including the 40M+ of Iraq and Afghanistan from their tyrannical regimes not to mention the work they did in Kosovo when the deplorable, immoral United Nations did nothing" is certanly a useful idiot for the criminal gang of neocons currently residing in the oval office. Yes, Jack, your words don't even reach the level of the sophomoric.

>However, good ol Enoch had it right 30 years ago regarding immigration to the UK, I think he meant West Indians but in reality it is muslims that are the problem

Funny, the "rivers of blood" (the London bombings aside) still seem to be missing.

I'm sure that's a source of ongoing regret for you.

MarkL: the vast majority of civilians killed in WWII were not killed by area bombing. It actually wasn't a particularly efficient way of killing people, unless ideal conditions prevailed -- eg Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo. Only Germany and Japan were intensively area bombed (partial credit to Britain), and "only" 2.4 million civilians died in those two countries due to the war. Yet over 30 million civlians were killed in the war in all countries. Obviously, there were a lot of other ways to die.

A better parallel to Iraq might be Yugoslavia, with 500,000 civilian deaths during the 4 years of German occupation. Not a lot of bombing, but an extremely intense partisan war.

Oh, I should have added: those 2.4 million deaths were from all causes, so that figure would overstate the effectiveness of bombing in killing civilians.

Jack, One last point. Go to your local library. Read some of the planning documents I alluded to. Even check up on the statements of senior planners like Kennan, Nitze, McNamara, or some of Kissingers more frank admissions. The CFR would also be a good source; or else Brezinski's "the Grand Chessboard", Wolfowitz's "Defense Planning Guidance", or "Project for the New American Century". Heck, this was authored by many of the senior advisers in the current Bush regime. They all spell out the intent of US foregin polciy which is one of unbridled expansion and hegemony. You'd have to be blind to ignore it. When Brezinski - much admired by te neocons - said that the aim of the US should be to "Mantain dependence and prevent collusion among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to prevent the barabrians from coming together", I think this is a pretty clear statement of US intent on the global arena. Have you read the National Security Strategy of 2002? Or the Nationa Space Command's "Full Spectrum Dominance? There are also obvious costs - in terms of human suffering and envronmental destruction - of current US expansionist policies. You wish to believe in the tooth fairy - that's fine - but many of us live in the real world.

Most of the people authoring Defense Planning Guidance, PNAC, A Clean Break etc. are the same people formulating US foreign policy. This will explain why the world is divided in a small number of 'have's' and a huge number of 'have not's', and why the US, under the camouflage of 'democracy promotion', has done everything in its power to ensure that the situation does not change. It also explains why many of the 'have not's' are trying desperately to enter the developed nations, and also explains why the planet is on the fast-track to ecological hell. You ignore volumes of evidence of US intent, and instead peddle the same kind of crap that appears on Fox, MSNBC and CNN.

Mark L: From 1940 to 1945 Bomber Command dropped 955,044 tons of weaponry on Europe(some of this was mines and the land total on Germany is less than this figure).

It conducted 391,137 sorties.

The area bombing campaign was by today's standards indiscriminate bombing of cities.

593,000 german civilians died (AJ Levine, The Strategic Bombing of Germany 1940-1945, Prager, 1992, p.190)

Help us out Mark, what percentage of total German casualties (not juxt civilian casualties) did the bombing fatalities represent?

Also, isn't it remarkable how the civil wars in Bosnia and Lebanon both killed around 100,000 people with no significant use of airpower?

Then we can discuss the Rwandan genocide and the Congolese civil war.

"Sand Niggers killing sandniggers, I love that scenario......, hope it accelerates." - Peter Bickel

"Poor, deluded, hate-filled Jeff Harvey..." Jack Lacton

Let's hear it for selective outrage, folks.

Ben, yeah just like the German obviously needed a Hitler to keep them in line.

No, but Yugoslavia needed Tito.

After all, you wouldn't want to sugegst than any part of the repsonsiblity for these deaths attaches to the people who've got 140,000 troops in the country and who are bombing it on a regular basis.

Certainly I do not wish to suggest that. But honestly, if the US and UK left today, would the average Iraqi be better off or worse off in, say, three months. It may have been a mistake to go there in the first place, but we are there. Now what?

If we can stay on topic for longer than a dozen posts, people!

I am no Iraq war cheerleader, and I respect the study's authors' bona fides, but the 500 a day result doesn't ring true for me. It could be that a whole lot of small-death-toll incidents are going unreported, or are lost in the noise of the mega attacks, but from what I glean from reports, MSM and others, there are not 500 killed (or excessively dying) each and every day. The recent escalation of violence has pushed the daily deaths into three figures, but only just, and it is certainly currently at a crescendo.

The study's methods may be rigourously peer-reviewed, but that still doesn't guarantee accuracy.

Ben,

Last year, a BBC reporter for the World Service made the point that 'The occupation in Iraq cannot end until the US-UK forces can provide security in the country'. On the face of it this sounds reasonable. But imagine a reporter making the same argument in occupied France, Holland or Poland during WWII. Imagine the reporter saying that the 'German forces cannot leave these occupied countries until they have put in place an apparatus that will provide security'. But, of course, the vast majority of the French, Dutch and Polish populations would have said, 'Hold on, the occupation can end right now, because that is what we want!'. The Iraqi population wants that too. Various polls have shown it. The occupation is unwanted and illegal and it is this that is the problem. The way the situation stands at the moment, it isn't what the Iraqi people want that is getting reported. It is what the occupiers want.

You also fall into the mainstream trap of assuming that the US-UK occupiers are actually there in a peacekeeping role. But the vast majority of violence is being perpetrated aganst the coalition forces by insurgents. Attacks have increased markedly since January to all-time highs this past summer. Again, even the top military brass in the US are saying it. The occupation is deeply unpopular, which is hardly surprising, given the actual aims of the war party and the resulting carnage.

Imagine the reporter saying that the 'German forces cannot leave these occupied countries until they have put in place an apparatus that will provide security'.

I don't think that is a fair comparison. Were the French, Dutch or Pols trying to kill each other at a feverish pace?

Anyway, it doesn't matter. I'm in favor of leaving right away. The US should not interfere in the politics of other countries unless they harm us, such as in Afghanistan. And then we should only kick their asses and then leave. Enough with the BS nation building garbage.

I suspect the Iraq Body Count estimate is way too low and in particular, I don't think media reports can be used to determine the number of civilians killed by US forces (the number IBC can specifically pin on coalition forces in the third year of the occupation was only 370, which seems absurd to me).

That said, this 600,000 figure is, well, amazingly high. What strikes me as odd is that 92 percent of the violent deaths could be verified by death certificates (if I remember correctly from what I read this morning), yet the official death statistics are far lower. I know there are times and places during this occupation when the Iraqi government hasn't kept track of the death toll (this was mentioned in an LA Times article last summer), but if the 600,000 figure is correct, they've been issuing death certificates for many hundreds of thousands, but only reporting tens of thousands.

That said, either the figure really is in the several hundred thousand range ("several" to me means 3 to 9) or else somebody in the study is lying. There were 300 violent deaths reported, mostly backed up with death certificates, so it doesn't seem likely a statistical fluke would give this result.

Too many "that said" s in the previous post. I hate my verbal tics. That said, my point is that I'm a little stunned by the size of this number. I'm not sure if the discussion at the end of the paper about passive systems is relevant, if most of the deaths they found could be verified by death certificates. Is it common for bureaucracies in wartime to issue death certificates and then be unable to count them? Not a rhetorical question--the authors say that passive surveillance methods commonly undercount by huge factors, but what is the mechanism of failure here? It seems possible to me that this might be more like an active coverup. One could also wonder (as I did above) if the survey team lied, but I doubt this.

Why aren't others replicating this? This team has done it twice now. A newspaper could almost do it, at least on a small scale with one or two clusters, just to see if a typical neighborhood of 40 households and 280 people has lost several people to violence

Donald; as far as I'm aware the Iraqi government does not currently produce statistics for the overall death rate. Even in the UK death certificates are issued by the coroner and not centrally collated until much later.

"Why aren't others replicating this? This team has done it twice now. "

The answer is simple. It is a very dangerous job going door to door in Iraq these days.

"A newspaper could almost do it,"

Yes it could, but that would take a journalist with guts and with some clue about what real journalism is about.

The latter is a rarity these days.

The vast majority of the foreign journalists in Iraq are reporting from the safety of the green zone.

They seem to be under the impression that they can accurately report on the state of Iraq without ever leaving their hotel room.

I am no Iraq war cheerleader, and I respect the study's authors' bona fides, but the 500 a day result doesn't ring true for me.

The Argument From Incredulity, fortunately for science, isn't well-received by peer-reviewed journals. But you'd fit right in over at the Discovery Institute for Intelligent Design.

From the UN Report:

"According to information provided by the Ministry of Health and the Medico-Legal
Institute in Baghdad, the number of civilians violently killed in the country was an
unprecedented 3,590 in July (including 183 women and 23 children) and 3,009 in August
(including 194 women and 24 children).1 The number of wounded reached 3,793 in July,
(including 234 women and 72 children), and 4,309 in August (including 256 women and
90 children). The Medico-legal Institute in Baghdad reported that the number of bodies
brought to the Institute was a record 1,855 in July and 1,536 in August 2006; the
overwhelming majority of the casualties died of gunshot wounds (1,417 in July and 1,091
in August). As a way of comparison, the total figure of civilians killed in Iraq were 2,669
in May and 3,149 in June 2006.
13. In Baghdad the total of persons killed in July and August was 5,106 (2,884 and 2,222
respectively). In August there was a decline in the overall number of killed and wounded
probably due to a reduction in the number of casualties in Baghdad. Such reduction was
somehow offset by increases in other Governorates, most notably Diyala and Mosul. The
reduction in the number of casualties maybe attributed to a degree of improved security
brought by "Operation Forward Together" in specific neighbourhoods of the capital. (See
paragraph 23)"

Note that it says Civilian deaths, but does not define civilian. Also its footnote states:

"The number of civilians killed by violence is calculated adding the number of casualties reported by the
Ministry of Health, which includes reports from all hospitals in Baghdad and other Governorates excluding
the Region of Kurdistan, and the reported number of bodies brought to the Medico-Legal Institute in
Baghdad. Only a small fraction (between 5-6 %) of the latter figures may be attributed to causes other than
violence. The Ministry of Health reported zero number of killed in Al-Anbar for July, which may indicate
an under-estimation due to difficulties experienced in collecting information in that particular Governorate."

It think we can safely state that there was more than zero deaths in Al-Anbar - but a more interesting question is if there were any death certificates given out in al-Anbar. Are these statistics equal to death certificates?

So to Compare to Lancet:
1) Need to know if number reported equal death certificates;
2)add deaths from Kurdistan
3) add unknown deaths from al-anbar
4) add deaths eliminated as not being civilian.
5) make sure we are comparing violent deaths to violent deahts

This would probably put us with in Lancet confidence interval but I dought would make up the complete difference between 100 deaths a day and 500 deaths a day.

If left out any other problem in comparasion please point it out to me! Thanks - Andy

I'm going to maintain that this sorry mess was predictable from the start...although count me as one who finds it hard to blame the US when Sunnis and Shiites are killing each other. Post number 1, despite being a rather depressing thought, makes a point that few are willing to admit (left or right).

Why are people arguing about this? If some feel the Lancet study is wrong, why then they should agitate for a new study, carried out by Iraq's democratically elected government. Or least under the aegis of the hyperpower in the house.

* lift muzak, lift muzak, lift muzak."

As Donny Rumsfeld said himself - "Do we have any metrics here?"

And no chickenhawks here are coming with any ones at all beyond the likes of MarkLCanberra pushing utterly irrelevant and spurious WWII analogies based on Tom Clancy novels and Pimlico reprints.

Never mind the bloody count anyway. Can we all agree it's been one unholy fucked up clusterfuck.

What Iraq needs now to restore order is a well-tested and hard-nosed secular administrator who understands the place on the ground, not afraid to put a bit of stick about and who has a proven track record of working with the western powers.

Oh where, oh where could such a man be?

Oh where, oh where could such a man be?

He's on trial in Iraq.

Fatfingers: "I am no Iraq war cheerleader, and I respect the study's authors' bona fides, but the 500 a day result doesn't ring true for me. It could be that a whole lot of small-death-toll incidents are going unreported, or are lost in the noise of the mega attacks, but from what I glean from reports, MSM and others, there are not 500 killed (or excessively dying) each and every day. The recent escalation of violence has pushed the daily deaths into three figures, but only just, and it is certainly currently at a crescendo."

Those figures almost entirely reflect deaths in Baghdad.

Look for reports on Iraqi deaths in Anbar - there are virtually none.

That's because its too dangerous for western reporters to go there and the government no longer runs hospitals or morgues there. Nineveh and some of the other Sunni provinces are almost as bad.

Melior, argument from authority doesn't give you any intellectual kudos either. Good going equating honest scepticism with wacko creationist mumbo-jumbo too.

Ian Gould, you are right that the media reports concentrate on Baghdad, and I'm willing to accept that many deaths are going unreported everywhere else in Iraq. If the intensity of killing in Baghdad (with 25% of the pop) is replicated across the country, then you would be approaching 500 a day. If it is historically higher elsewhere, then that could make up for the fact that the death toll is currently at a high point in the capital. Perhaps the numbers aren't completely out of the ballpark, but I'm still thinking that a guesstimate in the lower part of the range is more likely, especially when you take the Kurdish territory into consideration.

"the government no longer runs hospitals or morgues there"

So where are the death certificates coming from?

You think the people in the enclaves into which Iraq has disintegrated are sending in death certificates? or able to get bodies to the morgues? or have a hospital within range?

Journalists can't leave the Green Zone. The various armies travel the country in armoured convoys... etc etc..

No, the "government" does not have a bureaucracy that works out the figures.

David Tiley, in case you were talking to me, I ask about death certificates because the large majority of interviewees produced them to demonstrate that the deaths were real. So that strikes a discordant note with Mr Gould's comment about no government hospitals or morgues. But it is a minor quibble that I am content to let be.

Hi Jeff,

It may interest you to learn that I have lived in the Soviet Union. I lived in the USA. I lived in Asia. I lived in Africa. And London. For 20 years. Do you think that all of those countries I lived in might have something to do with a foreign policy background?

You are completely deluded as to how foreign policy works.

For example, French (and these days EU) foreign policy, is completely based on working against anything that promotes US power in the world. You would obviously think that's a terrific idea. I'm fine with that view. However, it has meant that the interdictions in Kosovo, Rwanda and now Iraq have been less successful than they should have been. In fact, if you want to pick one country whose intent is truly at odds with what a sane person would identify as 'good' then it would be the French.

People that bag the US for their foreign policy 'failures' invariably can't name the foreign policy of any other nation. And they support the UN!

Oh. Did I mention a stint at the UN? A more despotic, immoral authority you would be hard placed to find.

And if you haven't seen it yet you should check out Richard Horton's dissertation at The Time To Go demo last month. Regardless of your political persuasion it would be tough to think that a fellow that holds the political views that he does could be considered a balanced source.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7BzM5mxN5U

Brett noted:

MarkL: the vast majority of civilians killed in WWII were not killed by area bombing. It actually wasn't a particularly efficient way of killing people, unless ideal conditions prevailed -- eg Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo. Only Germany and Japan were intensively area bombed (partial credit to Britain), and "only" 2.4 million civilians died in those two countries due to the war. Yet over 30 million civlians were killed in the war in all countries. Obviously, there were a lot of other ways to die.

Comment: Of course. Omer Bartov's work on the barbarisation of warfare on the eastern front shows other ways, Rwanda shows yet others, Kahlid's Mesopotamian/Syrian campaign others and so on. What I provided was a measure of the AMOUNT OF EFFORT a technology-based military needs to kill something like the number of persons the lancet has claimed, while using (deliberate)indiscriminate methods. As Iraq's cities do not resemble Cologne 1945, this particular method has not been used. To obtain the numbers needed then requires a similar effort using something else. The trouble is that nobody can identify what that method is.
Therefore it is logical to question its existence, and the Lancet's numbers. We have the same question: how have about 500 people been killed every single day on average for three years, and NOBODY has noticed? The UN, the NGO's, the MSM, Al Qaida, the sectarian militias, the Iraqi press, Iraqi bloggers, NOBODY has noticed! Therefore, it is logical to question their numbers, because either there is an unprecedented failure of vision or the Lancet's numbers questionable. They can only be accepted at face value by those unwilling to maintain a healthy skepticism or willing to uncritically swallow propaganda.

A better parallel to Iraq might be Yugoslavia, with 500,000 civilian deaths during the 4 years of German occupation. Not a lot of bombing, but an extremely intense partisan war.

Posted by: Brett | October 11, 2006 08:37 AM

Comment: Yes, this is another very good parallel, but it was known that a hell of a lot of people were being killed, and all sides knew about it. In this Lancet case, apparently everyone has missed it, and I think that is impossible.

Mark L: From 1940

.....

593,000 german civilians died (AJ Levine, The Strategic Bombing of Germany 1940-1945, Prager, 1992, p.190)

Help us out Mark, what percentage of total German casualties (not juxt civilian casualties) did the bombing fatalities represent?

Also, isn't it remarkable how the civil wars in Bosnia and Lebanon both killed around 100,000 people with no significant use of airpower?

Then we can discuss the Rwandan genocide and the Congolese civil war.

Posted by: Ian Gould | October 11, 2006 09:37 AM

Comment: Germany lost about 8.1 million military dead (including Hiwi's) and 2 million civilian dead during 1939-45. Call it roughly 10 million, so area bombing killed roughly 5.9% of total German losses What is your point if not that mentioned above by Brett? That there are many ways to kill people? Sure there are. My point is that the amount of effort a technology-based military needs to kill something like the number of persons the lancet has claimed while using indiscriminate methods is very significant and cannot be hidden. In Rwanda, the killing was done by mobs using edged weapons - but it still could not be hidden. Same in the Congo - it was NOTICED. The Allies hardly have a million or so crazed machet-men roaming Iraq, and even the alleged massacre at Haditha was NOTICED. So if the Lancet is right, how come nobody has noticed 500 people a day getting killed?

"And no chickenhawks here are coming with any ones at all beyond the likes of MarkLCanberra pushing utterly irrelevant and spurious WWII analogies based on Tom Clancy novels and Pimlico reprints.
Posted by: Nabakov | October 11, 2006 03:07 PM"

Comment: Ah, is the day complete without little nabbikins? How amusing that you missed the point by a country mile.
Again.
You are at least maintining your perfect record.
BTW the reference was AJ Levine, not your own reliable source for all you will ever know about the military. Also BTW, I was made curious by your endless praise of this author Clancy last year, so I actually read two of his books. Well, I tried to, but found them unreadable, hilariously inept, badly written, turgid and appallingly inaccurate - how can you find such drivel so praiseworthy, my dear little fellow?

I guess the first-instance use of ad hominem means you have, as usual, nothing logic-based or substantive to contribute?
Again.

MarkL
Canberra

"We have the same question: how have about 500 people been killed every single day on average for three years, and NOBODY has noticed? The UN, the NGO's, the MSM, Al Qaida, the sectarian militias, the Iraqi press, Iraqi bloggers, NOBODY has noticed!"

How many of those groups have actually had the resources and inclination to carry out a nationwide mortality study? You can't trash the Lancet group's work simply by pointing out that they are the first to properly examine the issue.

The ersatzgruppen in Russia and Poland killed 1 million people in 4 years using only rifles, and no-one noticed. Not only did no-one notice but 60 years of war scholarship have turned up remarkably few accounts of the matter, given the scale of the destruction. There are very few images or accounts available of the work of Hiwis in the murder of Jews, even though in some cases it occurred publicly in market places and town centres. Similarly, Saddam himself is said to have killed 300,000 people but all we have is a bit of grainy footage of a couple of dead children in one village in Kurdistan. Are we to assume it didn't happen? There is still dispute about the number killed in Nanjing, even though it took place in less than a month - shouldn't this be easily documentable? I don't think anyone posting here has been a witness to, or even in the same area as, some of these killings, and would have no idea at all of how easily they are covered up. It took months for anyone to find out what was going on in Cambodia, and when word got out nobody believed it.

Also, the West is seriously misled about how involved US troops are in Iraq and how hard the insurgency is being fought. Here, for example, is an analysis showing that combat intensity in Iraq is similar to Vietnam: http://www.slate.com/id/2111432/

If the US troops are facing the same intensity of conflict as in Vietnam, who's to say the insurgents aren't killing one another at a Vietnam-level rate? They don't have the body armour, the Humvees, the air support to prevent ground-based conflicts chewing through a lot of people, or civilians in the area. I think the people claiming this doesn't match their intuition need to ask themselves a few questions about how many times they have been in conflict and how much their 'intuition' is up to the task of guessing 'what it would be like'. For the entire period of the battle of Stalingrad, for example, when there was no power, constant aerial and artillery bombardment, two armies of >100,000 soldiers facing one another at any one time, as many as 150,000 Russian civilians continued to live in the ruins. Can anyone posting here imagine how they survived or what it would have been like? Doesn't it seem surprising that people can go about their lives in the shadow of such a war? And if they can, is it not possible that a war on a much lower scale could be occurring around civilians in Iraq, with the attendant slaughter and destruction, and no-one in the West would know? There are no fearless journalists from the west travelling to these high risk areas. Also Iraq has one of the highest rates of death for journalists in the world - I don't recall the source but I have heard it compared to Vietnam. Isn't this telling you something about the rate of deaths there?

Finally, a few people have mentioned that the rate of air strikes must be very high for the Coalition to kill all those people, and surely we'd know about that sort of thing? During the 10 years of the sanctions on Iraq the US bombed the Southern regions (in the no-fly zone) on a weekly basis for years, destroying infrastructure and any form of military construction, and no-one ever noticed. There was no footage, no accounts, and it was generally not known in the West that it was happening.

The sad reality is that all it takes is an absence of journalists and an absence of political will and any number of atrocities can be covered up. Iraq has all the ingredients, possibly more so than Vietnam, where for example the US is estimated to have killed millions of people in neighbouring countries (e.g. Laos) without ever declaring war on them and without any pictures ever reaching the rest of the world. No-one posting here is in a position to understand what it would 'feel like', or how it would 'smell', or what their 'intuition' about it should be, so such appeals to emtion are worthless.

'German forces cannot leave these occupied countries until they have put in place an apparatus that will provide security'. But, of course, the vast majority of the French, Dutch and Polish populations would have said, 'Hold on, the occupation can end right now, because that is what we want!'.

Apples to oranges. How about "American forces cannot leave Germany and Japan until they have put in place an apparatus that will provide security."? You see, Iraq was the original aggressor, just like Germany and Japan. The French, Dutch and Polish never aggressed anyone. Your comparison is patently invalid.

"You see, Iraq was the original aggressor"

Ben, you must have travelled from a different dimension where Iraq invaded the US. Here, it was the US that launched an unprovoked, illegal war of aggression against Iraq, then occupied the country.

Ben, you must have travelled from a different dimension where Iraq invaded the US. Here, it was the US that launched an unprovoked, illegal war of aggression against Iraq, then occupied the country.

Lessee, Iraq invaded Kuwait and then was in violation of countless UN resolutions, not to mention the terms of the original cease fire. I know you like to call the war illegal, but you are wrong. Who is the judge of the legality?

Still not much in this discourse but emotion-based commentary.

"How many of those groups have actually had the resources and inclination to carry out a nationwide mortality study? You can't trash the Lancet group's work simply by pointing out that they are the first to properly examine the issue.
Posted by: seriously | October 12, 2006 09:54 AM "

Comment: A good point. Well, the UN does. Iraq Body Count seems to do a decent job. The MSM does. I am not "trash [ing] the Lancet group's work simply by pointing out that they are the first to properly examine the issue".
I am playing the role of a skeptic and pointing out enormous logical flaws in their case. I think that their number is impossible because nobody else has seen anything like the physical military effort needed, the numbers of attacks or physical harm such attacks must cause. Nor has anyone seriously entertained the idea of an extermination campaign by numbers of riflemen using a collection and disposal system like the Einsatztruppen. The Lancet has no logical, rational basis for this beyond a sampling study, on the basis of which they claim that one person in 40 in Iraq has been killed by violent means. This is an unproven HYPOTHESIS. They must offer proof. They have not.

"The ersatzgruppen in Russia and Poland killed 1 million people in 4 years using only rifles, and no-one noticed. Not only did no-one notice but 60 years of war scholarship have turned up remarkably few accounts of the matter, given the scale of the destruction. There are very few images or accounts available of the work of Hiwis in the murder of Jews, even though in some cases it occurred publicly in market places and town centres."

COMMENT: No, the SS knew, the German hierarchy knew, and all the locals knew. The knowledge was not widely distributed - a very different thing. There is actually ample scholarship on this now, and we do know what occurred. This was well covered at Nuremburg and the trials of the Einsatztruppen themselves.

Similarly, Saddam himself is said to have killed 300,000 people but all we have is a bit of grainy footage of a couple of dead children in one village in Kurdistan. Are we to assume it didn't happen?

COMMENT: You are not correct in this statement. We have a LOT of mass graves currently being investigated, as well as an ocean of Mukhabharat records. These are merely not yet available in English, but they sure as hell are available in Iraq. These is a lot of info available on teh mass graves.

There is still dispute about the number killed in Nanjing, even though it took place in less than a month - shouldn't this be easily documentable?

COMMENT: Iris Chang, in 'The Rape of Nanking', does not indicate you are correct on this point.

I don't think anyone posting here has been a witness to, or even in the same area as, some of these killings, and would have no idea at all of how easily they are covered up. It took months for anyone to find out what was going on in Cambodia, and when word got out nobody believed it.

COMMENT: But it is now well known, and it was certainly well known inside Kampuchea when the socialists were butchering a third of the population. Again, you are confusing knowledge about the activity with DISTRIBUTION of that knowledge.

Also, the West is seriously misled about how involved US troops are in Iraq and how hard the insurgency is being fought. Here, for example, is an analysis showing that combat intensity in Iraq is similar to Vietnam: http://www.slate.com/id/2111432/
If the US troops are facing the same intensity of conflict as in Vietnam, who's to say the insurgents aren't killing one another at a Vietnam-level rate? They don't have the body armour, the Humvees, the air support to prevent ground-based conflicts chewing through a lot of people, or civilians in the area. I think the people claiming this doesn't match their intuition need to ask themselves a few questions about how many times they have been in conflict and how much their 'intuition' is up to the task of guessing 'what it would be like'.

COMMENT: Well, I have good knowledge of what is going on there from privileged sources, but the vast majority of the data is available in open source with a 2-5 day delay. Very little is being hidden, but oh my, not much is being reported by the MSM, unless it agrees with the Iraq-is-a-quagmire-Vietnam-disaster meme. It is not a matter of intuition, but of fact. The available facts do not support the Lancet's hypothesis.
The Vietnam analogy is highly misleading. WHEN in Vietnam? Which of the 2 major wars? What part of Vietnam? Merely saying that it is the same is meaningless, because the comparison can range in intensity from The Battle of Hue City in 1968 to patrol work in Phuoc Tuy in 1970

For the entire period of the battle of Stalingrad, for example, when there was no power, constant aerial and artillery bombardment, two armies of >100,000 soldiers facing one another at any one time, as many as 150,000 Russian civilians continued to live in the ruins. Can anyone posting here imagine how they survived or what it would have been like?

COMMENT: We already knew that people are hard to kill; and when you do so in large numbers, you tend to trash entire cities and regions. This supports my earlier point. Where are the levelled Iraqi cities/towns/villages?

Doesn't it seem surprising that people can go about their lives in the shadow of such a war? And if they can, is it not possible that a war on a much lower scale could be occurring around civilians in Iraq, with the attendant slaughter and destruction, and no-one in the West would know? There are no fearless journalists from the west travelling to these high risk areas. Also Iraq has one of the highest rates of death for journalists in the world - I don't recall the source but I have heard it compared to Vietnam. Isn't this telling you something about the rate of deaths there?

COMMENT: But anyone can obtain good-resolution commercial satellite imagery which would quickly reveal these areas of attendant destruction. Nobody has - because they do not exist. So we are back to square one. If the Lancet says 600+K Iraqis have died, but has no evidence beyond statistical sampling, why should anyone believe them? Their hypothesis, it is up to them to PROVE IT WITH FACTS. And they do not seem to be able to.

Finally, a few people have mentioned that the rate of air strikes must be very high for the Coalition to kill all those people, and surely we'd know about that sort of thing? During the 10 years of the sanctions on Iraq the US bombed the Southern regions (in the no-fly zone) on a weekly basis for years, destroying infrastructure and any form of military construction, and no-one ever noticed. There was no footage, no accounts, and it was generally not known in the West that it was happening.

COMMENT: I am sorry, but this was on the news every night it occurred (which was frequently), and was consistently in the media. You are simply not correct on this point.

The sad reality is that all it takes is an absence of journalists and an absence of political will and any number of atrocities can be covered up. Iraq has all the ingredients, possibly more so than Vietnam, where for example the US is estimated to have killed millions of people in neighbouring countries (e.g. Laos) without ever declaring war on them and without any pictures ever reaching the rest of the world. No-one posting here is in a position to understand what it would 'feel like', or how it would 'smell', or what their 'intuition' about it should be, so such appeals to emtion are worthless.
Posted by: SG | October 12, 2006 11:24 AM

COMMENT: And your argument here is actually BASED on appeals to emotion, and so is self-invalidating.

MarkL
Canberra

"Lessee, Iraq invaded Kuwait and then was in violation of countless UN resolutions, not to mention the terms of the original cease fire."

So an invasion 13 years before the counter-invasion was the aggression? Bizarre. And being in violation of UN resolutions is not aggression. It's just illegal.

Iraq was a busted-ass country with no means of being aggressive to other countries, was the subject of sanctions and surveillance, and was being bombed daily in a kind of modern-day seige. It was not an aggressor, and hadn't been for 13 years. It had no chance of being one either.

"I know you like to call the war illegal, but you are wrong. Who is the judge of the legality?"

There was no UN (the ultimate arbiter of international law, flawed though it is) resolution for invasion. Therefore the US invasion was a war of aggression. QED.

"So an invasion 13 years before the counter-invasion was the aggression? Bizarre."

About as bizarre as the Germans invading Poland in 1939, and the Allies counter-invading German held territory in Normandy in 1944.

"There was no UN (the ultimate arbiter of international law, flawed though it is) resolution for invasion. Therefore the US invasion was a war of aggression. QED."

Yes there was a resolution. UNSC Resolution 678. You don't know what you're talking about. QED.

MarkL, when I said "no-one noticed", I meant "the information was not distributed." I.e. people involved knew, but people not involved were not informed. Although many arguments from Germans after the war have been interpreted as self-serving, there is a lot of evidence that a lot of people didn't really know what was going on. It is highly unlikely, for example, that anyone in Japan knew what happened in Nanking (sorry, I had two silly spelling errors in that previous post which you dutifully noticed).

Probably because of its abrupt opening, you seem to have missed the point of this post, which attempted to point out that this 'smell test' argument which various people have posited is entirely based on emotion. No-one claiming that this figure 'seems wrong' or 'smells bad' or is 'against intuition' has any idea of what life is like in a war zone, so it seems unlikely that they would have any idea of what 'smells right'. Would you like to argue a counterpoint with me, that all these keyboard commandos know exactly what it would be like if 500 people a day were dying? That because they've played a few computer games they can roughly guess how obvious or not the presence of this murder would be? That is my point.

You also haven't rebutted some of my examples, for example: 1) do you deny that the western world was unaware of the slaughter in Cambodia until it was too late? What about Soeharto's Indonesia?
2) you seem to think that the US bombing of Iraq during the 10 years of the sanctions was all over the news. Were you watching only al-Arabiyah? What news was showing this?
3)Do you deny the facts presented in the Slate article are correct? You seem to value "facts", but do not accept the assertion that combat in Iraq may be equivalent to the Vietnam average with which the slate article compares it
4) Are you aware that Iris Chang's book is known to contain fraudulent photographs and dubious research, and the controversy surrounding the publication of that book provides an excellent example of academic (as opposed to political) debate as to how to quantify death rates in war?
5) do you deny that slaughter on a much greater scale than that postulated by the Lancet's paper can be performed only with small arms? You claim it can be verified with 'satellite imagery', but this seems to suppose it involves the destruction of buildings and area bombing - which is not what the Lancet paper argues is the main cause; has never been the main cause of most genocides (let alone large scale killing processes); and is not what people here have been arguing is the cause.

I would really appreciate it if you would recognise that this post was not intended to be an argument in support of the paper, but an argument against the "it just dosn't seem right" posturing of some of its critics. I have plenty of good arguments in support of the paper, the main one being: the statistics are valid.

You say this: "If the Lancet says 600+K Iraqis have died, but has no evidence beyond statistical sampling, why should anyone believe them? Their hypothesis, it is up to them to PROVE IT WITH FACTS." In this case, do you reject the conclusions of all of the following surveys:

Newspoll
Gallup opinion polls
The Australian National Household Survey
The US Unemployment figures
The Australian National Drug Strategy Household Survey
?
These survey methods have "no evidence beyond statistical sampling," yet form the basis for almost all of our knowledge about political views, chronic disease, the state of the World's largest economy, and almost all illegal drug use activity in Australia. In some cases these surveys use multi-stage cluster sampling methods which are very similar to those used in the Lancet paper. In some cases (e.g. opinion polls) they ask a smaller number of people.

If you reject these surveys, then fine, reject the Lancet paper. Otherwise, what is your problem?

Dave, you don't know what QED means, because you are using it incorrectly. Comparisons with WWII are specious. 678 did not authorise invasion in 2003 (have you even read it? It is all about Iraq-Kuwait). YOU are the one who knows not what you say, to paraphrase a great man.

MarkL, I have to agree with SG that the bombing raids under the guise of no-fly zones patrolling were hardly front-page or first-item news. In fact, it is very hard to find any mention of them at all in the MSM, and certainly they were not "on the news every night it occurred (which was frequently), and was consistently in the media". Thousands of missions went out - were there thousands of news reports? No.

I can't believe that nobody has pointed out that this total is NOT the number of "civillian deaths" in Iraq. It is the total number of Iraqi PEOPLE killed in Iraq.

To quote the article CITED IN THE POST:
"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. ..."
(emphasis mine)

Also:
"It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group." (emphasis also mine)

The only reasonable thing to say about this study is that more people have died after the US invasion that during Saddam's "reign of terror" in which he killed (at most) 100,000 Kurds.

Does it sound reasonable that we've killed half a million "terrorists" (whatever that means anymore)? Well, are they (rather, were they) people?

Please, don't be a tool. Take a critical look at how this study is worded. Words are important, they have meanings.