The "New Holocaust" in Iraq: Alternet's alternate reality
Whenever I stray too far from what should be the main topic of this blog (The War on Terror), there's always something that gives me a sanity check, reminds me why I started this blog in the first place, and knocks me back on track.
This time it was a nonsensical article at Alternet, which compares the occupation of Iraq to the "Holocaust" and parrots the long debunked claim that "over a million" Iraqis have died since the start of the Iraq war. It hit the front page of Digg, and has thousands of people in a frenzy of self-flagellation, condemning the US and asking: "Why? why? why are Americans worse than the Nazis??" I'm not exaggerating either. Here's an eloquent sample:
George W Bush's grandfather (George Prescott Bush) made millions off of Auschwitz and owned a Nazi Bank that was used by Hitler... And now this fascist family is repeating the same thing in Iraq, only rather than making money off of slave labor, they are making it through private companies like blackwater and halliburton (which is now safe in Dubai) The world is going to view Bush like they view Hitler and Stalin....To start with, the Holocaust/Nazi comparison is not apt anyway, since by far most deaths are Iraqi vs. Iraqi, not by the coalition. And even those killed by the coalition are not part of a deliberate extermination campaign. If it was, all Iraqis would be dead by now. Guaranteed.
But the "over a million" killed claim doesn't hold water either - not by a long shot.
The number of dead are actually based on a poll done by a British group called the Opinion Research Business. Here's the jist of it: They interviewed 1499 Iraqi adults, 22% of them said that one or more people in their household had died a violent death since the US invasion. They then applied that percentage by the total number of households in Iraq, and come up with 1,220,580 dead. The article also backs this up with by quoting the 2006 Lancet study that estimated the dead at that time at about 650,000. But both studies had similar problems, for the following reasons:
1) Reality check. Even if their methodology was rock solid, and the poll conducted in the most objective way possible, the astronomically high total of dead itself causes glaring problems. Compare the number to other wars; it's way too high, even when compared to wars that included millions of combatants, major battles, and deliberate targeting of civilians! In the entire history of United States from 1776 to present, the nation lost exactly 770,650 (copy of totals here and here) lives to all their wars combined. Keep in mind this includes devastating conflicts like WWII or the American Civil War. So the ORB poll figure in Iraq is far higher than the total number that America has lost in every single war it has ever fought? For another example in Iraq, the total number of combined deaths from the eight-year Iran-Iraq war are estimated only between 500,000 to 1 million. Keep in mind that during all these previously mentioned wars, there were plenty of single battles that resulted in thousands of deaths in a single day (D-Day, Iwo Jima, Gettysburg, etc), yet there haven't been any battles anywhere near this scale ever recorded in the Iraqi occupation. If you just want to compare civilian vs civilian deaths, the same problems emerge: Britain in WWII suffered years of targeted bombings and rocket attacks of civilian population centers, but only 60,000 civilian deaths after six years of war. Italy, which suffered bombings by both sides as well as a heavy land campaign, suffered about 80,000 civilian deaths
(source here). So you really have to wonder: where is the invisible war, worse than any war in the past, that is causing all this additional carnage?
Of course, there are plenty of abductions and secret killings in Iraq, but according to the actual poll data (p.3), 35% of these killings were caused by car bombs, explosions, or aerial bombardamant, all of which are hardly "secret", and are very difficult to hide from the public. Doing the math, these would account for about 437,000 of those killed, which by itself is too high a figure to believe.
2) Moreover, where are all these people buried? There are no mass graves in Iraq, other than the ones from the Saddam era, and he only killed 600,000 at the very highest estimate. He couldn't hide many of those, even with tightly controlled media and government communications. So with journalists from every nation reporting from Iraq, not to mention millions of Iraqis, coalition soldiers, and their blogs, over a million recent deaths would be impossible to hide; we should find entire fields of dead bodies (a la Khmer Rouge's Cambodia). Yet they exist nowhere. In fact, gravediggers in Iraq are even having trouble finding work these days!
3) Under the "rule of three" (where normally three people are wounded in modern war for every one killed), there are literally three million seriously wounded Iraqis that never sought hospital treatment. I can't say this enough: it just doesn't wash. And that's not all.
4) Iraqi Body Count (a vehemently anti-war organization) only estimates the numbers of dead between 77-84 thousand, a figure that is not perfect but far more realistic (their chart is above). They issued a devastating critique of the Lancet report, including the observation that, if it were true, then: "Half a million death certificates were received by families which were never officially recorded as having been issued".
5) I can't speak for the management of the OBC poll, but the Lancet study was rife with bias amongst its leadership. The editor of the Lancet derisively called the occupation of Iraq "democratic imperialism". Les Roberts, the study's author, has often gone on record openly speaking about his opposition to the war. The issue of Lancet in which the first study of deaths appeared, began with an editorial by an Arab doctor, denouncing the occupation of Iraq and the coalition forces.
6) There is another problem that no one else has mentioned: financial incentive. These researchers literally walked to Iraqi homes door-to-door and asked them about household deaths. In my experience, the average Iraqi wouldn't understand why a Westerner would care about this; it wouldn't occur to them that some people simply want to know. What Iraqis do understand, however, is that the US often pays out thousands of $$ in cash reparations to families of those accidentally killed by coalition forces. They also tend to divert building projects to areas that have been hardest hit in the war. So with that in mind, the average Iraqi has several reasons to answer "yes" and no incentive to answer "no" when polled on this question.
The author also brings out a clever-sounding answer to criticisms of these studies:
Amazingly, some journalists and editors - and of course some politicians - dismiss such measurements because they are based on random sampling of the population rather than a complete count of the dead. While it would be wrong to blame anyone for their lack of education, this disregard for scientific methods and results is inexcusable. As one observer succinctly put it: if you don't believe in random sampling, the next time your doctor orders a blood test, tell him that he needs to take all of it.Unfortunately for the author, he has a PhD in economics, so he can't use lack of education as an excuse. His analogy is what is inexcusable: it just doesn't apply. As a liquid, blood flows through your entire body and any viruses or trace elements become fairly evenly distributed all around. People however, are not evenly distributed all over the map, and instead live in clusters. You might have heard of these; they are called often "cities" or "towns"...
More importantly for our purposes here, the violence in Iraq also tends to cluster in certain areas more than others. Hit any one of these areas for your survey and the numbers will be wildly inflated (or deflated).
Bonus:
So who was the author of this hit piece? It was written by a Professor Mark Weisbrot (bio here), a Professor of Economics who founded his own research company and writes left-of-center newspaper columns. Far be it from me to criticize someone with a PhD, but he's not an epidemiologist, or a military or Middle East expert. In fact, I can't find anything that says he has even traveled to the Middle East or has any special knowledge of Iraq other than what he reads in the papers. In other words, he's not just residing in the Ivory Tower, he's in the very penthouse apartment.
I should also remark on the web site that reported this. On Alternet's "about" page, you can read a little of their purpose, and then scratch your head and wonder just what alternate reality they inhabit:
The right-wing media machine: Virtually everyone who has a stake in our political future agrees that when compared to the radical conservatives and the religious fundamentalists, the progressive sector lacks media capacity. The scope of conservative media is vast, including Fox News, Sinclair, major right-wing talk radio market penetration, many newspapers, a fast-growing religious broadcasting system, and sophisticated use of the Internet and new technologies."The progressive sector lacks media capacity"?? You could take the entire "vast" right media, lay it on one side of a scale against the left-leaning media (Associated Press, Reuters, CNN, The Soros Group, ABC News, CBS, MSNBC, PBS, Time Warner, The NY Times, The Guardian, The BBC, The LA Times, The Washington Post, etc, etc - not to mention non-English language media such as Univision, Stern, Spiegel, Al-Jezzera, etc) and the right-wing side wouldn't even tip the scale in the slightest.
Interested in reading more? Click on any label below to read related articles, bookmark this site, or subscribe to my RSS Feed
7 comments:
The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the - Web Reconnaissance for 11/26/2007 A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day...
I looked for another source for total US war deaths, and found this site -
http://www.militaryfactory.com/american_war_deaths.asp
which gives a much higher total than you give in yours. Your argument from incredulity seems less robust when you see that in the four years of the American Civil War (a war that took place on US soil, rather than simply involving US troops) that there are estimated to have been over 600,000 DEATHS - which is of a very similar order indeed to the total estimated deaths by the Lancet in four years. Considering how much more efficient modern armies are at killing, in this respect at least it makes the Lancet appear to have been underreporting.
Do you think methods for calculating fatalities have got worse over time? For me, as long as there aren't big methodological problems with the current surveys, I'd be tempted to trust them more than 19th century attempts to get casualty numbers. As other people have pointed out, this methodology has been applied in many modern warzones and the results haven't been questioned.
There is one question for me about the Lancet report that hasn't been answered sufficiently clearly however, and you raise it in your post - where did all these 'unofficial' death certificates come from?
To Steve: first of all, thank you for a well thought out rebuttal without resorting to insults. But not surprisingly, I disagree. Not with your militaryfactory.com numbers though; the US deaths from both sources are essentially the same, the only difference is whether you count the non-combat deaths into the total.
It is true that modern armies are more efficient at killing, but there is the other side of the coin; today they are also far better at protecting themselves as well. For example, the Iraq War has seen by far the widest use of body armor since the Middle Ages.
But in any case, this doesn't really apply here anyway, because it isn't the modern coalition armies that are doing most of this killing, it's by far mostly Iraqi vs. Iraqi.
And not only the lack of death certificates, but once again, the lack of any recent mass graves, the lack of any major battles at all (even Fallujah in 2004 was tiny compared to major engagements in WWII), and the lack of a proportionate number of wounded are all hints that the numbers are pure science fiction.
The feeling is mutual - I'm relieved that your response doesn't sound like that an internet nutcase either!
I'm a bit confused by one aspect of your response. When you say "the only difference is whether you count the non-combat deaths into the total", and when you remark that there have been no major battles in the mode of the biggies of the Second World War are you saying that you don't believe that the Lancet count includes non-combat deaths? If this is the case, you have misunderstood it. To poach from wikipedia: 'the studies estimate the number of excess deaths caused by the occupation, both direct (combatants plus non-combatants) and indirect (due to increased lawlessness, degraded infrastructure, poor healthcare, etc.).' This would include those deaths that were only very indirect results of the invasion, so mass graves and battles - presumably between American troops and Iraqi insurgents? - aren't a necessity. This is a death-toll which reflects a shattered infrastructure as well as direct violence.
You say that most of the death is Iraqi on Iraqi - an assertion that I haven't looked at closely enough to have much of an opinion on - but whether its true or not doesn't undermine the studies findings - this is a measure of excess death that has resulted from the invasion, and the means of killing don't have to be blast damage from American bombs or bullets fired from American guns.
In your first post you cited iraqbodycount as a more realistic figure, but to me it can only be considered the absolute starting point for assessing Iraqi deaths - because it is only a record of violent deaths that have been reported in two seperate English language media sources (I think) - so the amount of deaths that a) the media don't have access to and b) are caused by poor sanitation, destroyed hospitals, etc... will - must - be significantly greater than the iraqbodycount figure. Do you disagree with this assessment of iraqbodycount?
About the "non-combat deaths", I was talking about the 700K+ figure I mentioned in the article for all US deaths in history. Those are combat deaths only. I know that the Lancet deaths are from all causes. But mass graves/battles are a necessity, because 1) The ORB poll asked about violent deaths only, and 2) Other than violence, there haven't been any reported means to otherwise spike Iraqi deaths since the invasion, such as a mass epidemic.
The number of Iraqi vs. Iraqi killings are significant if you try to explain the bizarrely high number of the poll's death in Iraq as due to the efficiency of modern armies. The vast majority of Iraqis are murdered by things like AK-47 bullets or a crude car bombs. Nothing very high-tech here.
Iraqibodycount is not perfect, but their numbers are far more consistent with similar guerilla conflicts of the past, as well as other circumstantial evidence (such as the number of graves & death certificates). I'm sure they miss some deaths, but I'm also sure they double count some as well, since they use both media and officially reported deaths to count their numbers. I know they cross-check, but they are only human, and the variations of every person's Arabic names (not to mention variations when transliterating them into English letters) means that I'm certain some are counted twice.
Okay. I apologies for the delay in responding.
1) I think you are saying that if there aren't mass graves, then there can't be a million dead. If we take this assertion as fact, what do you think would be the highest death-toll figure that would be reasonable without mass-graves? I'm interested as to know when mass graves would become a necessity for you - and why this is.
2)Talk of Iraqi on Iraqi deaths is a red herring to me, because neither the Lancet and ORB proport to measure deaths by high-tech American military - they simply measure deaths. And excess deaths after the invasion are excess deaths that appear to be caused. I don't think there is much dispute that a too many women and children have been killed by American munitions in Iraq in the last few years.
3) I saw this (admittedly unsourced) table on a website a while ago. If you dispute its claims, I can chase up the poster and see from where he derived his information. But if this were to be true, would you continue to consider the deaths in Iraq as you see them to be average for this kind of conflict?
War/Country against Civillian Deaths Per Day (rough est)Vietnam 700
WWII Soviet Union 5200
Darfur 270
Enduring Freedom/Iraq(Lancet) 460
Enduring Freedom/Iraq(Bush's est)27
WWII/China 3200
WWI/Russia 1100
WWI/Germany 422
Second Congo War 1944
Its a very good website.
The posting are really interesting.
We can share our views.
=============================================================
Harry
Social Bookmarking
Post a Comment