OK this is officially quantitation week on The Daily Transcript.
Today's number is provided by Gilbert Burnham's group at The John Hopkins: 655,000 deaths due to the Iraqi war. From the Globe and Mail:
Mr. Bush has previously put the number of Iraqi deaths at 30,000. He reaffirmed that number yesterday."I stand by the figure," he said. "Six hundred thousand or whatever they guessed at . . . it's not credible."
Even some less self-interested and partisan bodies are skeptical of the numbers, partly because they are many times higher than other apparently independent estimates. For example, Iraq Body Count, an Internet-based organization, put the death count at 48,693 yesterday.
But Human Rights Watch defended the study, whose lead author is Gilbert Burnham, co-director of the Centre for Refugee and Disaster Response at Johns Hopkins.
"If there is surprise about the size of the figure, it has more to do with our existing death tolls," said Sarah Leah Whitson, of New York-based Human Rights Watch. "The conventional wisdom is based on shoddy information."
These other "Internet-based" counts are based on news reports. Here are some more stats (from the G&M article):
VIOLENT DEATHS ON THE RISE
PRE-INVASION
Non-violent deaths: 98%
Violent deaths: 2%POST-INVASION
Non-violent deaths: 46%
Violent deaths: 55%POST-INVASION VIOLENT DEATHS BREAKDOWN
Gunshot: 56%
Car bomb: 13%
Other explosions/ordnance: 14%
Air strike: 13%
Unknown: 2%
Accident: 2%
Acciording to NPR's All Things Considered:
John Zogby of Zogby Research was on CNN earlier and he said "I can't vouch for [the study] 100% but I will vouch 95%.
[This one's for you, MOTYR] The numbers per capita make this war more deadly than the Bosnian War, but less than the Rwandan Genocide. Click here to listen to yesterday's All Things Considered.
Now last time a trully scientific figure was reported, it was 100,000 - as reported in the Lancet by the same group in 2004. Now that study was released just prior to the last elections. At the time many "pundits" disregarded it, but following the election some of those critics changed their minds. Listen to this episode of This American Life where a vocal critic of the original study recounts why he originally thought the numbers were off but now believes them.
Will people wake up to the reality there? Americans are upset about the whole war, but I'm afraid that the truth is worse than the vast majority believes.
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Why the change from 100K to 655K?
No first number was the up until the first(?) year after the war. The Second number is the tally up until recently. There is still a war. These figures are not only caused by direct effects of US attack but also include the anarchy caused by the US invasion (thus deaths caused by Iraqi vs. Iraqi). Whether you call this war an invasion or a civil war it was caused by the US invasion.
For example, Iraq Body Count, an Internet-based organization, put the death count at 48,693 yesterday.
The IBC is often reported as though it disputes the Lancet study, but I've never seen a quote from the IBC authors in these reports.
The IBC uses documentary evidence - either media reports or morgue records to come to their total. It should be seen as a minimum number, not the actual count.
Here's a quote from the IBC sight itself (early 2004):
IBC's experience of data-gathering throughout the preceding year shows that reports of additional deaths often continue to emerge many months after the event. Many civilian deaths are almost certainly, as yet, unreported, and even the current IBC maximum cannot be considered to approach a complete and final toll of innocent deaths during 2003.
Yes I totally agree. IBC's count has to be the lower limit. They base their counts on deaths reported in the media - the same media that doesn't even report all the murders here in the US! Again here is what Sarah Leah Whitson, of Human Rights Watch said:
And the IBC count issue was raised *a lot* during the last go-around. It was a staple of the deniers. It's been raised *a lot* now, and is still a staple of the deniers (albeit demoted by super-scientific techniques such as 'the numbers too big, I don't believe it').
By now, use of the IBC as a count-argument to the Lancet surveys is a mark of ignorance of the whole issue, at the very least. This is not to slam people, but anybody who raises that issue has (charitably) shown that they don't know enough to talk about it at even the most casual level, and should be told to go off and read the basics.
The astounding thing about the use of the IBC numbers by critics of the Lancet study is that the IBC numbers are already a huge indictment of the current policy. Nearly 50,000 Iraqis dead is hardly something the president's supporters should be proud to cite. And, of course, the number seriously wounded by the conflict is likely many times that number.