There will be a reckoning and a price to pay for this. And it all could have been avoided.
"We estimate that as a consequence of the coalition invasion of March 18, 2003, about 655,000 Iraqis have died above the number that would be expected in a non-conflict situation," said Gilbert Burnham of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the United States.That means 2.5 percent of the Iraqi population have died because of the invasion and ensuing strife, he said.
The team's study, published online by the medical journal The Lancet, estimated pre-war deaths in Iraq at 143,000 a year, and said Iraq's death rate is now 2-1/2 times that of the pre-war period.
"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," Burnham said.
Comments (3)
There are lots of questions about their methodology, but the bottom line is that it's pretty horrific when you consider that Saddam's atrocities were partof the rationale for the invasion of Iraq.
Posted by artistry | October 12, 2006 11:40 AM
NPR reports that the Iraqi Goverment places the deaths related to the war at 30,000.
Posted by Dexter Herron | October 13, 2006 1:28 PM
I'll stick with the arguments of Daniel Davies, who looked closely at the methodology of the study and was very impressed:
The results speak for themselves. There was a sample of 12,801 individuals in 1,849 households, in 47 geographical locations. That is a big sample, not a small one...And the results were shocking. In the 18 months before the invasion, the sample reported 82 deaths, two of them from violence. In the 39 months since the invasion, the sample households had seen 547 deaths, 300 of them from violence. The death rate expressed as deaths per 1,000 per year had gone up from 5.5 to 13.3.
Talk of confidence intervals becomes frankly irrelevant at this point. If you want to pick a figure for the precise number of excess deaths, then (1.33% - 0.55%) x 26,000,000 x 3.25 = 659,000 is as good as any, multiplying out the difference between the death rates by the population of Iraq and the time since the invasion. But we're interested in the qualitative conclusion here.
That qualitative conclusion is this: things have got worse, and they have got a lot worse, not a little bit worse. Whatever detailed criticisms one might make of the methodology of the study (and I have searched assiduously for the last two years, with the assistance of a lot of partisans of the Iraq war who have tried to pick holes in the study, and not found any), the numbers are too big. If you go out and ask 12,000 people whether a family member has died and get reports of 300 deaths from violence, then that is not consistent with there being only 60,000 deaths from violence in a country of 26 million. It is not even nearly consistent.
Posted by fiat lux | October 13, 2006 2:12 PM