The link doesn't work.

I've followed the argument over the number of Iraqi deaths (Lancet vs. IBC) and am agnostic about it. But taking into consideration that IBC is an undercount, it's probably in the hundreds of thousands by now--whether low hundreds or high hundreds or all the way up to a million I wouldn't guess.

Thanks, link fixed.

I think the most significant fact in all of the (generally preposterous) arguing about this issue is that the U.S. has refused to support a study itself. That really tells you all you need to know. If I remember correctly, this is something you've pointed out many times yourself.

to say IBC is undercount is an amazing understatement ( correct ? ) !
they are depending on ENGLISH language newspapers in a NON-english speaking society . which is nonsense ( and i wonder some time even these liberals still have thing for days when sun did not set under Victoria ... ) . add to that disfunction in news media during civil war / wars in general .
if they were really honest they would have put it up in BIG BOLD letters at the TOP of their web site and made sure to point it out every time some major news media uses them as authoritative source .
what they do instead is go after Lancet study.. seems a lot more than an NGO guarding the turf to me ...

I still agree with myself on that.

to say IBC is undercount is an amazing understatement ( correct ? ) !
they are depending on ENGLISH language newspapers in a NON-english speaking society . which is nonsense ( and i wonder some time even these liberals still have thing for days when sun did not set under Victoria ... ) . add to that disfunction in news media during civil war / wars in general .
if they were really honest they would have put it up in BIG BOLD letters at the TOP of their web site and made sure to point it out every time some major news media uses them as authoritative source .
what they do instead is go after Lancet study.. seems a lot more than an NGO guarding the turf to me ...

To be fair to IBC, they do acknowledge in the March 2006 press release that the identity of the killers of most civilians was unknown. They don't seem to be acknowledging in the March 2007 release that the 536 figure might be way off.

ONE CHILD IS TOO MANY.

Off topic--Glenn Greenwald's July 5 post is an uncharacteristically stupid one. Bush ruined America's global reputation, so that must mean other American presidents didn't do anything really really bad like President Bush.

It just depresses me to read smart people saying things like this.

why is it that, even here, in this sober and thoughtful environment, there is still this underlying sense of "agnosticism" about the Lancet estimate, a feeling that it can't be right. And yet, still, no one has convincingly demonstrated any flaw in the methodology.

How would a Lancet v. IBC debate even be possible? They're not even pretending to ask the same question, why would anybody expect them to get a remotely similar answer. Delta mortality is way different from net civilian corpses identified by untrained Western press agents who just happen upon them as they file their transcriptions of acronymed officials from O'GA's Pub deep in the Green Zone.

JFP assumes the latter is in some measure capable of tracking the scale of former to get the estimate. I suppose it's better than nothing.

Ooops!
This was meant to belong on this post, not the most recent one:
Jonathan,
A million here, a million there... So, who's counting?
Maybe someone at the Hague is. Let's hope so. War Criminal's need to be punished. All of them. For EVERY crime! EVERY time!
A millions little piece's of death means at least a million different crimes.
Let's get to work...
Indict. Convict. Incarcerate...
NO PAROLE!!!

There, that's better....

Americans aren't good at math.

the USA is not part of the International Criminal Court for this very reason, c u n d gulag. Half the current Bush cabinet would be in there along with Tony Blair and his minions(not to mention quite a few democratic luminaries like wesley clark and maddy albright and maybe slick billy hisself).

besides, since when have imperialists admitted their guilt? it was their dooty to liberate those wacky iraqees, damnit!

I love the use of the word "unofficial", as if that somehow meant something. Oh, it's not an "official" estimate, so we shouldn't lend it as much credence. It doesn't come from a government mouthpiece with an obvious agenda, so we shouldn't trust it. It might have been a university-run study published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal with rigorous standards for publication, so we shouldn't be as ready to believe it.

Look, much of the skepticism about Lancet2 has absolutely nothing to do with technical criticisms of statistical methodology. There are people who come right out and say they think the survey team on the ground made up the data. That's a terrible thing to say, so instead there's all this bogus crap about main street bias. But the suspicion is there. So how do you prove it wrong? I could emote with everyone else about how awful it is to make a charge without proof, but then I'm making the charge that the US military is killing far more civilians than it lets on, without being able to prove it, so the emoting can go in several different directions, you know.

Well, in science when one group comes up with a startling measurement, it's expected that other teams of scientists will try to replicate it. People may try to pick apart or defend the methodology of the study, but everyone understands that what is really needed is other groups to try and replicate the result. But not in this case. Nobody in the US government seems willing to do this, so that's evidence that they think the number is much higher than what the press has reported.

On the other hand, if there are tens of thousands of civilians killed by US forces each year, as Lancet2 implies, then why aren't anti-occupation forces smuggling out evidence of this to Arab media? We're not talking about some technologically backwards Laotian villages in the 1960's being bombed flat by US planes with little or no possibility of the peasants being able to smuggle evidence of this to the outside world. That's an honest question and if someone can answer it I will become much less of an agnostic. I lean more towards Lancet2 than IBC, but I don't dismiss arguments from IBC if I think they are sensible no matter how much I may dislike IBC. I've been wondering about this since last October.

We had already surpassed the Nazi Germans brutality during the Cold War. I guess we (our leaders) decided we had to extend the lead to cement our legacy as the greatest human disaster in the history of the planet.

I just dunno...

To Donald Johnson, I would point out that the Lancet report merely specifies "excess deaths", which is different from US-caused casualties. This might suggest a reason why no one is smuggling out the information as propaganda to the Arab media - no one else has done systematic studies, and since both sides have killed plenty of people themselves, neither is convinced that they wouldn't come out worst in a pissing match. So it behooves both of them to ignore or, in the case of the US, downplay the numbers.

Donald, I'm not sure what you're looking for when you ask why anti-occupation forces aren't smuggling evidence of massive civilian deaths to the Arab media. What would this evidence look like? The high number of civilian fatalities don't come from villages being secretly wiped out. They come from a daily routine of aggressive American patrols, terrorist car bombs, air strikes, etc. . ., each of which kills "just" 1-20 people, but which add up to a lot when they occur daily, in large numbers, and across an entire country. The Arab world is already well aware of the fact that these things occur a lot in Iraq, and that a good percentage of the deaths come directly from an American firing a gun or launching a missile (and that they all stem from the American decision to invade).

There is certainly room for reasonable debate about the numbers (although no amount of reasoning will get it down anywhere close to the Bush claim of 30,000). But I'm not sure why it's important to figure out whether the number of Iraqi occupation-related deaths is obscenely gigantic or merely horribly enormous.

"why aren't anti-occupation forces smuggling out evidence of this to Arab media"

They're smuggling it out to the Western media. Health Ministry officials have had to go anon to report their actual numbers since shortly after the invasion (a directive from somewhere on high stopped the release of their information which itself was a serious undercount), and the government has been caught out by the press multiple times for lying about the numbers.

"civilians killed by US forces"

Why would you choose this metric? Distinguishing between who killed who or the status of somebody who was killed is virtually unknowable: the aggressors in the war insist that it's a great humanitarian mission, changes in mortality rates would seem to be the only statistical grounds regarding the cost in lives on which to assess that claim.

The Lancet2 study it claims that a large fraction (at least 30 percent or so) of the violent deaths were caused by coalition forces. That's roughly 200,000 dead.

The point of the Schwartz link is to say (as Autumn Harvest points out) that with all the daily patrols the US conducts, it's possible there are large numbers of deaths that occur every day. Maybe so.
I'm a little surprised there's not much more direct evidence of this--it ought to be in the interest of the more rational insurgents (leaving aside the Al Qaeda types) to point this out. Photographs, lists of people killed, that sort of thing. This is essentially the IBC argument--if we were killing at this level the word would get out. Whether that's right I don't know.

As for why it matters, it depends on which moral question you are asking. Obviously the Iraq War was and is a human catastrophe whether the death toll is 100,000 or 1 million. Bush is the one who started it all and in a just world he'd be on trial for crimes against humanity. The numbers don't matter too much on that point. He's a bigger criminal if it's 1 million, but still a monster even at IBC levels.

Where they do matter is on the question of what specifically our forces have done. If you buy IBC's approach, the US killed about 7000 civilians in the opening two months, and a few thousand since. In 2005-2007 the rate is 1 or 2 a day, they claim. In contrast, Lancet2 implies the number might be literally hundreds of times greater. If that's true, then the press is doing a criminally bad job covering the war (no surprise) and the whole debate about keeping troops over there to provide security is based on an obscenely false premise--that US troops are not themselves one of the leading causes of death in Iraq and that they can fight a guerilla war in an alien cultural environment while inflicting only a tiny fraction of the civilian deaths that the insurgents cause.

So, yeah, I think it's extremely important for Americans to know how many people our own forces are killing (and while I'm at it, this includes Iraqi insurgents.) This also bears on any future arguments about future "humanitarian" interventions.

The Lancet2 study it claims that a large fraction (at least 30 percent or so) of the violent deaths were caused by coalition forces. That's roughly 200,000 dead.

The point of the Schwartz link is to say (as Autumn Harvest points out) that with all the daily patrols the US conducts, it's possible there are large numbers of deaths that occur every day. Maybe so.
I'm a little surprised there's not much more direct evidence of this--it ought to be in the interest of the more rational insurgents (leaving aside the Al Qaeda types) to point this out. Photographs, lists of people killed, that sort of thing. This is essentially the IBC argument--if we were killing at this level the word would get out. Whether that's right I don't know.

As for why it matters, it depends on which moral question you are asking. Obviously the Iraq War was and is a human catastrophe whether the death toll is 100,000 or 1 million. Bush is the one who started it all and in a just world he'd be on trial for crimes against humanity. The numbers don't matter too much on that point. He's a bigger criminal if it's 1 million, but still a monster even at IBC levels.

Where they do matter is on the question of what specifically our forces have done. If you buy IBC's approach, the US killed about 7000 civilians in the opening two months, and a few thousand since. In 2005-2007 the rate is 1 or 2 a day, they claim. In contrast, Lancet2 implies the number might be literally hundreds of times greater. If that's true, then the press is doing a criminally bad job covering the war (no surprise) and the whole debate about keeping troops over there to provide security is based on an obscenely false premise--that US troops are not themselves one of the leading causes of death in Iraq and that they can fight a guerilla war in an alien cultural environment while inflicting only a tiny fraction of the civilian deaths that the insurgents cause.

So, yeah, I think it's extremely important for Americans to know how many people our own forces are killing (and while I'm at it, this includes Iraqi insurgents.) This also bears on any future arguments about future "humanitarian" interventions.

Sorry about the double post.

Forgot to reply to buermann--I've read stories about the concealed numbers and the ones that came out and so far as I can tell, no set of numbers from any source has come close to verifying the kind of killing Lancet2 reports. We're talking about an average of over 15,000 killings a month (total, not just US-caused). Might be true, but the numbers that the Health Ministry does or does not choose to release don't seem to come close to these, AFAIK. The usual claim by Lancet2 defenders is that most of the death statistics probably aren't properly counted and sent to Baghdad in the first place, because of the chaotic situation in Iraq.

The health ministry numbers would miss all kinds of war related deaths, particularly in rural areas and cities the coalition has effectively shut down (such as the numerous urban centers surrounded by earthen walls and evacuated), and the numbers they release are - as far as I can tell - identified as counts of civilian deaths, further reducing the count by whatever standard they're using to exclude unworthy combatants from the toll.

Think they'll find any MASS GRAVES after we are gone?

All the official and media numbers (basically the same thing) are bound to be undercounts. The only question is whether it's a factor of 2 or 3 or 5 or 10 or whatever.

At the end of the day, we were far more brutal to El Salvador, Nicaragua and Chile than we've been to Iraq. That's just a fact. The reality is that Iraq is/was a foreign military asset in the Cold War/Iran quagmires and Latin America was ultimately defenseless and their population was deemed expendable by the Nixon Administration(I don't think Bush has even made such a stance on record). And they also voted for the "irresponsible" candidate to steal a word from Kissinger.

I wonder if you would be so willing to convict and blame if one of your children was killed by these murdering arab b strds.