That thud you hear…
… is the reality shoe dropping — the New York Times estimates 600,000 civilian deaths in Iraq, the Guardian 655,000 … and this is a number in flux which includes the possibility of almost 800,000. The official US estimate of 50,000 hasn’t changed for the last year, at least … hasn’t changed because we don’t count THEIR dead, doncha know. We DO count their purple fingers, of course. Anyone who checks in at Information Clearing House has had a heads up on this number — they’ve estimated 250,000 plus for awhile now, and the reports of casualties has gone over the moon in the last months.
The next shoe that should drop but will likely require, again, an independent study is the actual number of allied troops sacrificed to this occupation effort. ICH carries the official number of American dead, today, at 2747. Using the Guardians estimate, that’s approximately 240 Iraqi’s for every US soldier. Does that sound reasonable to you? We know that the minute a soldier is airlifted off Iraqi soil, his/her possible death is not counted in the official number. If the NYT’s headline shocks this nation, today, imagine what an accurate count of US losses would do!
Lies and rumors of lies, in Bu$hCo. I wonder if any reporter will have the cojones to ask about this at the Bushy press conference today. He’s going to talk to us about his new Cold War with L’il Kim while NOT mentioning, I’m sure, the newly positioned strike force in the Persian Gulf eyeing Iran.
Last night I happened to click past FOX News in it’s usual firestorm of punditry with an evil dragon of a woman grilling the token Lefty sacrificial lamb, an attractive bunny, on the Left’s supposed outing of Mark Foley for political purposes so close to an election [no kidding -- it was like Cruella DeVille poking a sharp stick at Miss Sweetness and Light.] The Swiftboaters of the Century are accusing the clueless Left of using their tactics? Please! If we’d been capable of that, we’d be in better stead today.
The bunny handled it well, with a laugh — heartened, I suppose by Wolf Blitzer’s CNN performance yesterday demanding of a Righty accuser that he show proof of such a Lefty plot — none, of course, was forthcoming. MSM is beginning to push back … but not FOX. It’s still Jerry Springer over at FOX — they’re still saying any irresponsible thing that comes into their heads — and I still find it shocking that they can build an entire network on lies and rumors of lies.
[It should also be noted that they're already fighting the Iranian War, picking apart tactics and possibilites -- if you want to know what the Right's obsessing about, click onto FAUX.]
Jude
UPDATE: Raw Story is reporting that in the Rose Garden today “Bush blasted a new study that estimates 655,000 Iraqis died because of the war since March of 2003 as ‘just not credible.’ “
Iraqi Dead May Total 600,000, Study Says
SABRINA TAVERNISE and DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
October 11, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/world/middleeast/11casualties.html
BAGHDAD, Oct. 10 — A team of American and Iraqi public health researchers has estimated that 600,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003 American invasion, the highest estimate ever for the toll of the war here.
The figure breaks down to about 15,000 violent deaths a month, a number that is quadruple the one for July given by Iraqi government hospitals and the morgue in Baghdad and published last month in a United Nations report in Iraq. That month was the highest for Iraqi civilian deaths since the American invasion.
But it is an estimate and not a precise count, and researchers acknowledged a margin of error that ranged from 426,369 to 793,663 deaths.
It is the second study by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. It uses samples of casualties from Iraqi households to extrapolate an overall figure of 601,027 Iraqis dead from violence between March 2003 and July 2006.
The findings of the previous study, published in The Lancet, a British medical journal, in 2004, had been criticized as high, in part because of its relatively narrow sampling of about 1,000 families, and because it carried a large margin of error.
The new study is more representative, its researchers said, and the sampling is broader: it surveyed 1,849 Iraqi families in 47 different neighborhoods across Iraq. The selection of geographical areas in 18 regions across Iraq was based on population size, not on the level of violence, they said.
The study comes at a sensitive time for the Iraqi government, which is under pressure from American officials to take action against militias driving the sectarian killings.
In the last week of September, the government barred the central morgue in Baghdad and the Health Ministry — the two main sources of information for civilian deaths — from releasing figures to the news media. Now, only the government is allowed to release figures. It has not provided statistics for September, though a spokesman said Tuesday that it would.
The American military has disputed the Iraqi figures, saying that they are far higher than the actual number of deaths from the insurgency and sectarian violence, in part because they include natural deaths and deaths from ordinary crime, like domestic violence.
But the military has not released figures of its own, giving only percentage comparisons. For example, it cited a 46 percent drop in the murder rate in Baghdad in August from July as evidence of the success of its recent sweeps. At a briefing on Monday, the military’s spokesman declined to characterize the change for September.
The military has released rough counts of average numbers of Iraqis killed and wounded in a quarterly accounting report mandated by Congress. In the report, “Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq,” daily averages of dead and wounded Iraqi civilians, soldiers and police officers rose from 26 a day in 2004 to almost 120 a day in August 2006.
The study uses a method similar to that employed in estimates of casualty figures in other conflict areas like Darfur and Congo. It sought to measure the number of deaths that occurred as a result of the war.
It argues that absolute numbers of dead, like morgue figures, could not give a full picture of the “burden of conflict on an entire population,” because they were often incomplete.
The mortality rate before the American invasion was about 5.5 people per 1,000 per year, the study found. That rate rose to 19.8 deaths per 1,000 people in the year ending in June.
Gunshots were the largest cause of death, the study said, at 56 percent of all violent deaths, while car bombs accounted for about 13 percent. Deaths caused by the American military declined as an overall percentage from March 2003 to June 2006.
Violent deaths have soared since the American invasion, but the rise is in part a matter of spotty statistical history. Under Saddam Hussein, the state had a monopoly on killing, and the deaths of thousands of Iraqi Shiites and Kurds that it caused were never counted.
While the near collapse of the Iraqi state makes precise record-keeping difficult, authorities have made considerable progress toward tracking death figures. In 2004, when the Johns Hopkins study was first released, authorities were still compiling deaths on an ad hoc basis. But by this year, they were being provided regularly.
Iraqi authorities say morgue counts are more accurate than is generally thought. Iraqis prefer to bury their dead immediately, and hurry bodies of loved ones to plots near mosques or, in the case of Shiites, in sacred burial sites. Even so, they have strong incentives to register the death with a central morgue or hospital in order to obtain a death certificate, required at highway checkpoints, by cemetery workers, and for government pensions. Death certificates are counted in the statistics kept by morgues around the country.
The most recent United Nations figure, 3,009 Iraqis killed in violence across the country in August, was compiled by statistics from Baghdad’s central morgue, and from hospitals and morgues countrywide. It assumes a daily rate of about 97.
The figure is not exhaustive. A police official at Yarmouk Hospital in Baghdad who spoke on the condition of anonymity said he had seen nationwide counts provided to the hospital that indicated as many as 200 people a day were dying.
Gilbert Burnham, the principle author of the study, said the figures showed an increase of deaths over time that was similar to that of another civilian casualty project, Iraq Body Count, which collates deaths reported in the news media, and even to that of the military. But even Iraq Body Count puts the maximum number of deaths at just short of 49,000.
As far as skepticism about the death count, he said that counts made by journalists and others focused disproportionately on Baghdad, and that death rates were higher elsewhere.
“We found deaths all over the country,” he said. Baghdad was an area of medium violence in the country, he said. The provinces of Diyala and Salahuddin, north of Baghdad, and Anbar to the west, all had higher death rates than the capital.
Statistics experts in the United States who were able to review the study said the methods used by the interviewers looked legitimate.
Robert Blendon, director of the Harvard Program on Public Opinion and Health and Social Policy, said interviewing urban dwellers chosen at random was “the best of what you can expect in a war zone.”
But he said the number of deaths in the families interviewed — 547 in the post-invasion period versus 82 in a similar period before the invasion — was too few to extrapolate up to more than 600,000 deaths across the country.
Donald Berry, chairman of biostatistics at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, was even more troubled by the study, which he said had “a tone of accuracy that’s just inappropriate.” ++
Sabrina Tavernise reported from Baghdad, and Donald G. McNeil Jr. from New York
‘655,000 Iraqis killed since invasion’
Sarah Boseley, The Guardian
Wednesday October 11, 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1892888,00.html
The aftermath of a Baghdad bomb attack - a study published in the Lancet estimates that 655,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the war. Photograph: Getty Images
The death toll among Iraqis as a result of the US-led invasion has now reached an estimated 655,000, a study in the Lancet medical journal reports today.
The figure for the number of deaths attributable to the conflict - which amounts to around 2.5% of the population - is at odds with figures cited by the US and UK governments and will cause a storm, but the Lancet says the work, from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, has been examined and validated by four separate independent experts who all urged publication.
In October 2004, the same researchers published a study estimating that 100,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the war since the beginning of the March 2003 invasion, a figure that was hugely controversial. Their new study, they say, reaffirms the accuracy of their survey of two years ago and moves it on.
“Although such death rates might be common in times of war, the combination of a long duration and tens of millions of people affected has made this the deadliest international conflict of the 21st century and should be of grave concern to everyone,” write the authors, Gilbert Burnham and colleagues.
“At the conclusion of our 2004 study we urged that an independent body assess the excess mortality that we saw in Iraq. This has not happened. We continue to believe that an independent international body to monitor compliance with the Geneva conventions and other humanitarian standards in conflict is urgently needed. With reliable data, those voices that speak out for civilians trapped in conflict might be able to lessen the tragic human cost of future wars.”
The epidemiological research was carried out on the ground by teams of doctors moving from house to house, questioning families and examining death certificates. Between May and July this year, they visited 1,849 households in 47 separated clusters across the length and breadth of Iraq. The doctors asked about deaths among members of the household in a period before the invasion, from January 2002 to March 2003, and about deaths since. In 92% of cases, they were shown death certificates confirming the cause.
A total of 629 deaths were reported, of which 547 - or 87% - occurred after the invasion. The mortality rate before the war was 5.5 per 1,000, but since the invasion, it has risen to 13.3 per 1,000 per year, they say. Between June 2005 and June 2006, the mortality rate hit a high of 19.8 per 1,000.
Thus they calculate that 654,965 Iraqis have died as a consequence of the invasion. It is an estimate and the mid-point of a range of numbers that could equally be correct in the context of their statistical analysis. But even the lowest number in the range - 392,979 - is higher that anyone else has suggested. Of the deaths, 31% were ascribed to the US-led forces. Most deaths were from gunshot wounds (56%), with a further 13% from car bomb injuries and 14% the result of other explosions.
“Since 2004, and especially recently,” writes the Lancet editor, Richard Horton in a commentary, “independent observers have recognised that the security situation in Iraq has deteriorated dramatically.” The new study, he continues, “corroborate the impression that Iraq is descending into bloodthirsty chaos”.
Yet, he writes, “absolute despair would be the wrong response. Instead, the disaster that is the west’s current strategy in Iraq must be used as a constructive call to the international community to reconfigure its foreign policy around human security rather than national security, around health and wellbeing in addition to the protection of territorial boundaries and economic stability.
“Health is now the most important foreign policy issue of our time. Health and wellbeing - their underpinning values, their diverse array of interventions and their goals of healing - offer several original dimensions for a renewed foreign policy that might at least be one positive legacy of our misadventure in Iraq.” ++
What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Add comment October 11th, 2006