April 6, 2007
The following letter was sent to the World Socialist
Web Site by the British-based Iraq Body Count Project in response
to the editorial posted by the WSWS on March 20, entitled "The human costs of four
years of war: The US invasion has caused nearly three-quarter
million Iraqi deaths." The letter is
followed by a reply by Bill Van Auken of the WSWS editorial board.
We found your editorial, "The human costs of four years
of war," of 20 March 2007, generally well constructed and
inspiring. Your editorial shows very clearly how Bush and Blair,
with a toxic mixture of hubris and misplaced religious certainty,
have undermined human life and the complex institutional framework
of Iraq and turned this country into a nightmare in such a short
period of time. On the topic of Iraqi civilian casualties, however,
your editorial badly misinterprets the figures used by various
media. While criticising press reports, you continuously refer
to the figure 60,000 casualties as "unattributed estimates
of 60,000 dead," and [write that] "the source of these
estimates...is not explained." On the other hand, you seem
to accept 655,000 as a "meticulous epidemiological study"
without really explaining why this is the case.
As you know, the source of an estimated 60,000 is the research
undertaken by Iraq Body Count (minimum 59,326 and maximum 65,160
to date). IBC is an ongoing human security project which maintains
and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive
public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq that
have resulted from the 2003 US-led military intervention. The
count includes civilian deaths caused by coalition military action
and by military or paramilitary responses to the coalition presence
(e.g., insurgent and terrorist attacks). It also includes excess
civilian deaths caused by criminal action resulting from the breakdown
in law and order which followed the coalition invasion. Casualty
figures are derived from a comprehensive survey of online media
reports from recognized sources. Where these sources report differing
figures, the range (a minimum and a maximum) are given. This method
is also used to deal with any outstanding uncertainty about the
civilian or non-combatant status of the dead. All results are
independently reviewed and error-checked by at least three members
of the Iraq Body Count project team before publication.
The figure 655,000, which you seem to have accepted without
explaining why, is taken from the Lancet medical journal
in October 2006. This, in our view, is quite problematic and there
is considerable cause for scepticism regarding these estimates.
Firstly, the data presented do not distinguish between civilian
and combatant deaths. IBC’s work is confined to violent civilian
deaths. Secondly, the Lancet researchers visited 47 neighbourhoods
and conducted interviews in 40 adjoining households in each neighbourhood.
Only about 1,800 households containing 12,000 Iraqis were surveyed.
These households reported a total of 302 violent deaths, each
of which has been multiplied by two thousand to provide an estimate
of how many of Iraq’s estimated 26 million population would
have died if this proportion of deaths were representative of
the country as a whole.
The study’s central estimate of over 600,000 violent deaths
seems exceptionally high. Even its lower bound 95 percent confidence
interval of 426,000 violent deaths is shockingly high. It is very
unlikely that incidents of this scale would be so consistently
discounted by the various media in Iraq. Although IBC technically
requires only two sources for every corroborated death in its
database, we actually collect, archive and scrutinize every single
report we can find about each incident before it is added to our
database. For larger incidents, the number of reports can run
into the dozens, including news published in English, in the original,
and others, mostly the Iraqi press, published in translation.
In IBC’s news archive for August 2006, the average-size attack
leaving 5 civilians killed has a median number of 6 reports on
it.
We would hope that, before accepting such extreme figures,
serious consideration is given to the possibility that the population
estimates derived from the Lancet study may be flawed.
The most likely source of such a flaw is some bias in the sampling
methodology such that violent deaths were vastly over-represented
in the sample. The precise potential nature of such bias is not
clear at this point. But to dismiss the possibility of such bias
out of hand is surely both hasty and irresponsible.
The Lancet researchers documented only 300 violent deaths.
Iraq has reached such a sorry state that IBC records 300 deaths
every few days. Do the American people need to believe that 600,000
Iraqis have been killed before they say "enough is enough"?
The number of certain civilian deaths that has been documented
to a basic standard of corroboration by "passive surveillance
methods" surely already provides all the necessary evidence
to consider this invasion and occupation an utter catastrophe
at all levels.
Lily Hamourtziadou (IBC Assistant Researcher)
Bulent Gokay (IBC Research Consultant)
* * *
Dear Ms. Hamourtziadou and Mr. Gokay,
Thank you for your letter. I must state frankly, however, that
the World Socialist Web Site does not believe your criticisms
of the Johns Hopkins study are valid from a scientific standpoint,
and we further believe that, whatever your intentions, your approach
provides a political boost to the authors and perpetrators of
a war which you yourselves oppose.
In its editorial board statement of March 20, the WSWS stressed
that the most important question posed by the four-year-old war
in Iraq—and the one that is most obscured by the mass media—is
"the staggering level of death and destruction...inflicted
upon the Iraqi people."
We noted the widespread use of the figure of 60,000 dead, pointing
out that in all of the media cited the source of this figure was
not given and the way that it was arrived at was unexplained.
The editorial added: "Even if the unattributed estimates
of 60,000 dead were true, it would represent a horrifying slaughter,
representing 20 dead Iraqis for every US soldier killed. The reality,
however, is that the ratio is at least 200 to 1."
Representatives of your organization, Iraq Body Count (IBC),
claim that the press reports are using figures taken from their
research. This may well be the case, but it does not alter the
fact that this source was not cited.
There is no doubt good reason both for why IBC’s total
was reproduced in media reports on the fourth anniversary of the
war, and for the failure to attribute this estimate.
First, there is good reason to believe that the total vastly
underestimates the actual death toll resulting from the US-led
war—which is why it is used by the media. However, the source
of this estimate is problematic for the corporate media on two
counts. The IBC has identified itself as opposed to the war. Second,
any description of IBC’s methodology would raise questions
as to whether the 60,000 figure reflects the real scope of the
carnage unleashed by the US invasion in March 2003.
You go on to take issue with our use of the figures produced
by the epidemiological study published last October by researches
from the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health
and published in the British medical journal, The Lancet.
This study arrived at an estimate of 654,965 as the most likely
toll in terms of "excess mortality" since the US invasion
of 2003.
The gist of your argument seems to be the following: the Johns
Hopkins study produced an estimate that is "shockingly high,"
and the research is suspect because it employed a method known
as cluster surveys, gathering data from more than 12,000 Iraqis
and then extrapolating it to the population as a whole to determine
changes in the mortality rate since the US war began. Instead,
you suggest, your own method is far more reliable.
You then write: "Do the American people need to believe
that 600,000 Iraqis have been killed before they say 'enough
is enough’? The number of certain civilian deaths that has
been documented to a basic standard of corroboration by 'passive
surveillance methods’ surely already provides all the necessary
evidence to consider this invasion and occupation an utter catastrophe
at all levels."
Whether 60,000 or 655,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the
US war and occupation is hardly a matter of indifference. While
the killing of 60,000 would represent a historic war crime, the
deaths of 655,000—fully 2.5 percent of the population—describes
a crime that approaches genocidal proportions. Combined with the
millions turned into refugees and the decimation of the country’s
economy and every aspect of social and cultural life, this level
of killing indicates a practice of sociocide, the systematic
destruction of a people and their society.
The World Socialist Web Site contacted Gilbert Burnham,
a professor of epidemiology and co-director of Johns Hopkins’
Center for Refugee and Disaster Response, who was one of the leaders
of the Lancet study, for a response to your critique.
He wrote: "The basic problem is the body counters are
not epidemiologists or demographers, and do not grasp the central
principle that in very few situations can comprehensive national
estimates be derived from reports of deaths, whether in the newspapers
or even through reports from hospitals, and Iraq is not one of
the countries where these estimates can be made (along with much
or the world). Almost everything we know about mortality, disease
prevalence, causes of deaths in probably 80 percent of the world’s
population is derived from surveys—usually cluster surveys
such as the one we carried out in Iraq. How many people died in
Darfur? In Kosovo? In Congo? What is the death rate in Uganda,
or Cambodia, or Angola? The answer almost without exception comes
from cluster surveys.
"When there is such vigorous denial of a standard demographic
and epidemiological tool as the cluster survey, one needs to look
for other reasons why the results are not acceptable."
Clearly, in relation to media reportage and official statements
on Iraq, the reasons are political. The results are unacceptable
because they expose the magnitude of the crime carried out by
Washington and serve to deepen the revulsion of the people of
the US and the entire world towards a war that the American ruling
elite is determined to continue in order to establish its control
over the region’s oil wealth.
The estimates of 1.7 million dead in the Congo, or 400,000
dead in Darfur—which are no less shocking than the Johns
Hopkins estimates on Iraq—were arrived at through the same
methods as those employed in the Hopkins research. Yet these are
readily accepted by Washington, the United Nations and other world
governments and routinely reported in the media. In Iraq, however,
these scientific methods produce results that are, in the words
of George W. Bush, "not credible."
What of the methods employed by Iraq Body Count? As you yourselves
indicate, IBC counts only those fatalities that are reported by
at least two English-language media sources. It includes a "low"
and a "high" estimate based on discrepancies between
different press accounts.
IBC itself has noted on its web site, "It is likely that
many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the
media. That is the sad nature of war."
Indeed, the paradoxical reality that has characterized every
major conflict is that the intensification of violence is almost
always accompanied by a sharp decline in the percentage of deaths
that are actually recorded. In Iraq, this is due in no small measure
to the inability of reporters, particularly those writing for
the English-language media outlets that are the source of IBC’s
data, to set foot in much of the country.
This point was made recently by the British Independent’s
veteran Middle East correspondent, Patrick Cockburn: "The
difficulty of reporting Iraq is that it is impossibly dangerous
to know what is happening in most of the country outside central
Baghdad. Bush and Blair hint that large parts of Iraq are at peace;
untrue, but difficult to disprove without getting killed in the
attempt." The same argument is advanced in the latest issue
of the American Journalism Review: "The relentless
violence in Iraq has seriously compromised coverage of arguably
the most important story in the world today. Certain facets of
the conflict remain exasperatingly elusive or, at best, thinly
reported. The media’s vital role as eyewitness has been severely
limited."
Under these conditions, press reports cannot possibly produce
an accurate estimate of the total number of deaths in Iraq. Indeed,
as Professor Burnham and other leading demographers have established,
in wars generally, the number of fatalities counted through passive
surveillance methods—reliance on figures reported by the
government or the media—such as those used by IBC rarely
amount to more than 20 percent of those later revealed through
population studies.
You write that the Johns Hopkins study is "problematic"
in part because it failed to "distinguish between civilian
and combatant deaths," as opposed to IBC data, which is restricted
to violent civilian deaths.
It is difficult to discern what is problematic about this approach,
either from a political or a methodological standpoint.
Politically, the deaths—both those of combatants and civilians,
not to mention the thousands of young Iraqi conscript soldiers
blown to pieces in the initial campaign of "shock and awe"
bombardment—all represent the human catastrophe inflicted
upon Iraq by the US war.
Methodologically, the Johns Hopkins study was designed to produce
an estimate of the increase in mortality rates in the wake of
the US invasion, quite a different matter than counting the number
of violent deaths reported by the media.
You dismiss the work conducted in the study, writing: "...the
Lancet researchers visited 47 neighbourhoods and conducted
interviews in 40 adjoining households in each neighbourhood. Only
about 1,800 households containing 12,000 Iraqis were surveyed."
Only? It should be noted that major opinion polls are conducted
regularly to determine the political views of entire populations
in which the samples surveyed represent less than a 10th the size
of the one used in the Iraq mortality study. This is the case
in the US, where the population is more than 10 times as large
as that of Iraq.
Such polls are conducted using random sampling methods, while
the Johns Hopkins team employed the tool of cluster samples, which
are routinely employed in areas beset by war or natural disaster.
More importantly, the size of the sample used was substantially
higher than what is employed in most public health studies used
to evaluate everything from vaccination rates to deaths in natural
disasters. Estimates produced by these studies are regularly accepted
as substantially accurate and serve as the basis for developing
policy.
The study employed a substantially larger sample than was used
in a similar and earlier survey conducted by Johns Hopkins whose
results were also published in the Lancet, in October 2004,
when 7,868 Iraqis were interviewed. Moreover, this time, every
household was asked to produce death certificates to corroborate
their accounts of lives lost since the 2003 invasion. In at least
80 percent of the deaths reported, the interviewers were able
to corroborate the reports with death certificates.
The work of conducting this broader survey involved no small
threat to the lives of the eight Iraqi public health physicians
who conducted the work. One of these physicians expressed the
determination that lay behind this heroic work in response to
a question from the Johns Hopkins magazine: "From
the moral point of view, I have learned that when everybody is
afraid to say the truth, then there should be somebody who volunteers
to say it, on the belief that we are all going to die some day,
either after doing nothing or after doing something. The main
point is that people outside Iraq do not realize the real disaster
we are suffering. Only the Iraqi people know that, simply because
the foreigners are listening to the news while we are living the
events on the ground."
In the end, the new survey did largely confirm the work carried
out two years earlier, but also recorded a horrifying rise in
the mortality rate in 2005 and 2006, the period in which sectarian
killings fomented by the collapse of Iraqi society and the divide-and-rule
tactics of the US occupiers rose dramatically. Thus, while the
Iraqi mortality rate stood at 5.5 per 1,000 before the invasion,
the study showed that it rose steadily afterwards, first to 7.5,
then to 10.9 and, between June 2005 and June 2006, to a staggering
19.8.
As for the estimate of total excess deaths caused by the invasion,
the study provided a range of figures, stating that the survey
had established with 95 percent certainty that the total increased
mortality stood between 392,979 and 942,636, with 654,965 being
the most likely figure, and with the likelihood declining as the
estimate moved either higher or lower.
While the fairly wide range of figures—referred to by
demographers as the "confidence interval"—reflected
the limits of the statistical accuracy of such a study, even the
lowest point on this scale, nearly 400,000, expresses the historical
catastrophe inflicted upon Iraq by the US invasion.
The research was subjected to extensive peer review and found
to represent a scientific and well-founded piece of work.
You urge us to consider the possibility that the study is "flawed"
or that its methodology is "biased" in some way that
"is not clear at this point." Not to adopt this skeptical
position, you warn us, would be "hasty and irresponsible."
What we think would be irresponsible and indefensible would
be for the World Socialist Web Site not to do everything
in its power to make this important study known to the widest
possible audience and to defend it against the political attacks,
gross distortions and pervasive attempts to censor and obscure
its findings carried out by both the Bush administration and the
Blair government, as well as the mass media, particularly within
the US.
We cannot help but add that we do see as genuinely irresponsible
the efforts by IBC to undermine the credibility of this study
and to speculate—with no foundation outside of the "gut"
feeling that the numbers are too high—about its possible
flaws and biases.
No doubt, the tallying of media-reported deaths in Iraq served
a useful purpose under conditions in which the attitude of the
American occupiers was summed up in the remark by Gen. Tommy Franks:
"We don’t do body counts."
Now, however, under conditions in which the governments responsible
for this war and the mass media which helped them promote it are
utilizing IBC’s figure of 60,000 deaths as a means of covering
up the real magnitude of the disaster in Iraq, it seems self-evident
that the principal responsibility confronting IBC would be to
denounce and expose this misuse of its data, which, as the organization
itself acknowledges, leave "most civilian casualties...unreported."
You write: "The Lancet researchers documented only
300 violent deaths. Iraq has reached such a sorry state that IBC
records 300 deaths every few days. Do the American people need
to believe that 600,000 Iraqis have been killed before they say
'enough is enough?’ "
This argument borders on an appeal to irrationalism and backward
prejudices against science that can serve no useful purpose in
the struggle against war and the system that is responsible for
it. That IBC records 300 deaths every few days based on press
reports is hardly evidence that its numbers are more significant
than the statistics gathered and scientifically analyzed by the
Johns Hopkins researchers.
As for whether the American people "need to believe 600,000
people have been killed" in order to oppose the war, this
is obviously not the case. A decisive majority of Americans now
oppose the war, yet it is virtually certain that a random sample
would disclose that a relatively small minority has even heard
of the Johns Hopkins study, given that it was virtually blacked
out by the mass media.
It is indeed important that the American people grasp the magnitude
of the crime that has been carried out in Iraq in order to ensure
that those responsible are held accountable.
Sincerely,
Bill Van Auken
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