INSIGHT Weekly commentary
October 22, 2006
655,000 Dead in Iraq due to War: What the Numbers Mean
The new mortality survey of Iraq that estimates 600,000 deaths by violence is startling, and should alter the way America thinks about this war.
The John Hopkins University researchers were meticulous about the methods used to randomly choose the survey sites and analyze the data. It is state-of-the-art work, and its accuracy is not an issue. The survey is the only scientific account of the war dead. There is no other, and those who publicly dismiss the findings must offer an alternative. There is none. Every other account is deeply flawed in method, and this one is not. It is standard in epidemiology and disaster response.
In the twelve days since the release of the study, no one has been able to debunk it, and much anecdotal evidence has come to light supporting the enormous numbers it estimates. The Health Ministry in Iraq, for example, suddenly raised its mortality numbers for war dead to 150,000, which tracks with the survey numbers since it is widely known that the ministry's numbers are an undercount by three times or more.
Debate and questions are welcome and should be part of the discourse on such an immensely important topic, but, so far, no one has identified errors in the survey, and dozens of qualified scholars have publicly backed it. (For two smart and entertaining discussions, visit Tim Lambert and Juan Cole.)
What, then, of its implications for U.S. policy?
Consider this: Last month, the Washington Post published a survey of Iraqi attitudes toward the U.S. and the war. The survey, conducted by the State Department, revealed that enormous majorities blamed the U.S. for the violence and wanted us to leave Iraq. Another poll from the University of Maryland published the next day confirmed that sentiment and also reported that 60 percent of Iraqis support attacks on U.S. troops. The Johns Hopkins mortality survey and these polls go hand-in-hand. The Iraqi attitudes are difficult to grasp unless the violence people suffer is an enormous, daily threat to them.
The implications of this level of mayhem are profound. Most obviously, the U.S. is not providing security. It is not viewed by the Iraqi people as doing so, and the death rate confirms why these attitudes are so firmly held. The "mission" is not being accomplished, and if trend lines are an indication, the mission is deteriorating rapidly. The debate about withdrawing must be waged in this context.
It is conceivable that the application of force by the U.S. military is making things worse. Again, this is what Iraqis believe. A number of explanations for the violence see insurgent action in particular as "defensive"--that is, the insurgents believe they are defending their communities. Because the U.S. went in with a relatively small number of troops, more force was applied to compensate for those inadequate numbers. (That does not mean, however, that larger numbers would have changed the course of the war.) This strategy has perhaps stirred the insurgency as much as any other plausible factor, and the growing violence then generates itself in a giant feedback loop: the U.S. attacks a village where they think insurgents are harbored, and this produces more insurgents who then act violently, exacting a new U.S. military response, and so on and so on.
Many of the journalistic accounts of the war, such as Thomas Ricks' Fiasco, suggest that this may be what is occurring. At the same time, journalists are only seeing a tiny fraction of what goes on in Baghdad, what Dexter Filkins of the New York Times describes as 2 percent of the entire country, and thus their scope is very limited in seeing the violence, accounting for the dead, or drawing out the broader meaning. As a result, we have very little understanding of how the violence affects everything--politics, ethnic and sectarian divisions, the hundreds of thousands displaced (about 1.6 million or more, another invisible statistic), the many thousands leaving Iraq in droves, the deterioration of the public health care system, and every other dimension of life-and death-in Iraq.
The deterioration of health care is especially worrisome because that means the mortality rate will increase for innocent people, children, and the like. Other reports have staggering numbers of physicians and nurses leaving the country, some 2000 doctors killed since the U.S. occupation, and misspent billions in reconstruction aid. We hear virtually nothing of this in the drumbeat of right-wing incantations about defeating the terrorists or staying the course.
These facts, rather than ideological misapprehensions, are what we need to concentrate on as the discussion of the mortality survey unfolds. Even if there were a large sampling error in the survey--which there does not seem to be--the numbers would be colossal in scale. And it is the meaning of these colossal numbers that we must debate. We now have empirical evidence of the scale of this human disaster. In that light, what is best for Iraq? How can such violence be ended? How can the U.S. carve out a constructive role from the ruins of its intervention?
Let's honor the dead of Iraq by grappling realistically with their tragedy, and forge a way to ensure that this horrific human cost does not continue to mount.
--John Tirman
This is adapted from an article appearing on AlterNet on Oct. 11, 2006.
This is JohnTirman.com