Time for Another Body Count in Iraq

Under the strange Bizarro rules that right-wing pundits use to interpret politics in the United States, election season is the time when no one is supposed to discuss any of the things that might actually have a serious impact on their voting decision. The Mark Foley scandal was dismissed as an election-season "October surprise" cooked up by Democrats (even though the people who exposed it were Republicans, not Democrats). And James Baker announced that his secret plan to help Bush turn things around in Iraq would not be released publicly until "after the election in order to try and take our report out of domestic politics."

Let's ignore for the moment the fact that this curious delicacy about political bombshells in an election season comes from the same people who chose September 2002 — the beginning of congressional midterm elections — as the moment to launch their public push for war with Iraq. Let's humor the pundits and pretend that there really is some reason why people should hold off on discussing matters of pressing political interest during elections. If that's the case, then now is the moment when those discussions ought to begin. Let's start by talking about the dead in Iraq.

Last month there was very little discussion of the study published in the Lancet, a highly respected British medical journal, which estimated that 650,000 Iraqis have died since 2003 as a result of the war. The Lancet study too was dismissed as an "October surprise," and it disappeared from the news within days of its publication. But now that the election is over, can we finally discuss it?

I was shocked myself when I saw the figure of 650,000. It seemed huge, much larger than I had imagined possible. It is approximately four times the Iraqi Health Ministry's recent estimate, and twice the figure of 300,000 that is often given as an estimate of the number of people killed by Saddam Hussein during his 23 years of brutal rule.

The Lancet study, with Gilbert Burnham as its lead author, was conducted by some of the same researchers from Johns Hopkins University and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad who conducted a previous study in 2004 which estimated that 98,000 people had died. The earlier study was attacked at the time by supporters of the war and was largely ignored by the mainstream news media in the United States, as John Stauber and I noted in our recent book, The Best War Ever: Lies, Damned Lies and the Mess in Iraq (for an excerpt, see the Third Quarter 2006 issue of PR Watch). The new study suggests that some half a million additional lives have been lost in the subsequent two years.

As the Lancet paper explains, this number is an estimate based on statistical sampling of Iraq's population, and due to limitations in the number of people surveyed, it has a fairly wide margin of error. The researchers followed standard scientific procedure and reported their findings using a "95% confidence interval" — a minimum and maximum value derived from statistical analysis which finds a 95 percent probability that the two limiting values enclose the true number. The minimum value in their confidence interval was 392,979, and their maximum value was 942,636, which means that although 650,000 is their most likely estimate, the true number could be substantially lower or higher. Even so, the low end of this range is nearly 400,000, while the high end is nearly a million.

Are these numbers credible? I looked at reactions to the Lancet study from several groups: American political pundits, scientists with expertise in health and mortality research, and Iraqis (as reflected in the views of Iraqis with English-language weblogs). Many of the political pundits (even those with anti-war views) either rejected the study or questioned its conclusions and methodology. The scientists, however, gave it high marks, and most of the Iraqis thought the number sounded like it was in the right ballpark.