Saturday, October 30, 2004
Civilian Fatalities in Iraq
Yesterday’s startling and detailed report in the New York Times on civilian casualties in Iraq was strangely not followed by discussion on television, either commercial or public. I hope the media remedy this nonresponse. One could imagine that they did not want to be attacked for making yet another attack on the Administration at this late date, particularly when any statistical study carried out in wartime is open to criticism. Perhaps they wanted to check out the data. I have made a preliminary check, and it seems to me that the study has to be taken seriously, even after all the caveats are weighed.
The reported Johns Hopkins study in the journal Lancet was prepublished on the web at this address. It estimates on the basis of a statistical survey that about 100,000 civilians have died as the result of the American-led invasion. (Many of the men may actually have been insurgents, but not soldiers in the usual sense.) Some of these were indirect casualties, caused, for example, by people less able to get timely medical assistance due to the fighting. But the study suggests that the great majority of the “excess deaths” were caused from the air by bombs, helicopter gunships etc. The study points out in an aside that may lead readers to have greater confidence in it, that only three deaths were reported by their interviewees as were attributable to mistakes on the ground by American soldiers In two of these cases the soldiers later apologized.
This study greatly increases the seriously of our undertaking. The highest non-propaganda estimates of civilian deaths I had seen previously were below 20,000. One method of counting based on newspaper accounts puts the figure at about 15,000 (600 in Falluja). This may be found at this site.
The study team took a sample survey of household clusters from January 2002 to date. They interviewed 33 clusters representing about 6000 people, being sure to make the sampling as representative of Iraq as a whole as possible. They looked at death rates from all causes before the America-led invasion and afterwards. Once the death rates were established, then the results were extrapolated to the country as a whole. They found it difficult to work in Falluja (study done in September of this year) and so left it out of their calculation. (They went there anyhow and have what data they could collect.) If Falluja were included, they believe the final figures would be much greater.
This suggests that we are still a long way from being able to use heavy firepower to overwhelm an opponent without causing a high level of casualties among civilian populations. This is not to say that greater precision in the use of firepower, particularly from the air, has not helped. Some European countries suffered mortalities over a period of five years in World War II as high as 10% of their pre-war population. We are speaking here of one and one-half years of war that killed (or caused to die) perhaps 0.35% of the population. Nevertheless, this cost is not at all trivial. We can certainly understand why many Iraqis and others see the war and what goes with it as unjustifiable and immoral.
This suggests once again that after Tuesday’s election, the American Administration must seriously rethink what the war is doing to its position in the world, as well as to the people directly affected. We must consider how we might be able to bring the war to a speedy conclusion. If it does not look as though we can with the forces on the ground bring it to an end, then we must either greatly increase those forces (hopefully with the assistance of other countries) or we must, in consultation with British, Kurdish, and Shiite leaders, together with the Allawi government, devise a means for a relatively quick and orderly exit. We must do all this remembering that if we handle the process poorly we may leave behind a society so torn apart by rivalries new and old that the fatalities discussed here will end up seeming trivial. Our invasion, no matter how idealistic its rationale might have been for many of those initiating it, has opened a Pandora's box. It will be hard to force the lid back on.
Perhaps we should wait until after the January elections. But regardless of the benefit or reality of these elections, we must begin planning now for how we end it, for even in the best case January is likely to bring to power a new government that will be just as unacceptable to many of the insurgents as the Allawi regime is today.
The reported Johns Hopkins study in the journal Lancet was prepublished on the web at this address. It estimates on the basis of a statistical survey that about 100,000 civilians have died as the result of the American-led invasion. (Many of the men may actually have been insurgents, but not soldiers in the usual sense.) Some of these were indirect casualties, caused, for example, by people less able to get timely medical assistance due to the fighting. But the study suggests that the great majority of the “excess deaths” were caused from the air by bombs, helicopter gunships etc. The study points out in an aside that may lead readers to have greater confidence in it, that only three deaths were reported by their interviewees as were attributable to mistakes on the ground by American soldiers In two of these cases the soldiers later apologized.
This study greatly increases the seriously of our undertaking. The highest non-propaganda estimates of civilian deaths I had seen previously were below 20,000. One method of counting based on newspaper accounts puts the figure at about 15,000 (600 in Falluja). This may be found at this site.
The study team took a sample survey of household clusters from January 2002 to date. They interviewed 33 clusters representing about 6000 people, being sure to make the sampling as representative of Iraq as a whole as possible. They looked at death rates from all causes before the America-led invasion and afterwards. Once the death rates were established, then the results were extrapolated to the country as a whole. They found it difficult to work in Falluja (study done in September of this year) and so left it out of their calculation. (They went there anyhow and have what data they could collect.) If Falluja were included, they believe the final figures would be much greater.
This suggests that we are still a long way from being able to use heavy firepower to overwhelm an opponent without causing a high level of casualties among civilian populations. This is not to say that greater precision in the use of firepower, particularly from the air, has not helped. Some European countries suffered mortalities over a period of five years in World War II as high as 10% of their pre-war population. We are speaking here of one and one-half years of war that killed (or caused to die) perhaps 0.35% of the population. Nevertheless, this cost is not at all trivial. We can certainly understand why many Iraqis and others see the war and what goes with it as unjustifiable and immoral.
This suggests once again that after Tuesday’s election, the American Administration must seriously rethink what the war is doing to its position in the world, as well as to the people directly affected. We must consider how we might be able to bring the war to a speedy conclusion. If it does not look as though we can with the forces on the ground bring it to an end, then we must either greatly increase those forces (hopefully with the assistance of other countries) or we must, in consultation with British, Kurdish, and Shiite leaders, together with the Allawi government, devise a means for a relatively quick and orderly exit. We must do all this remembering that if we handle the process poorly we may leave behind a society so torn apart by rivalries new and old that the fatalities discussed here will end up seeming trivial. Our invasion, no matter how idealistic its rationale might have been for many of those initiating it, has opened a Pandora's box. It will be hard to force the lid back on.
Perhaps we should wait until after the January elections. But regardless of the benefit or reality of these elections, we must begin planning now for how we end it, for even in the best case January is likely to bring to power a new government that will be just as unacceptable to many of the insurgents as the Allawi regime is today.
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