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.
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