Death by Numbers
Andrew Bolt
17nov04
A recent claim that
100,000 Iraqis have died since the war in Iraq, mostly at the hands of
Americans, is misleading, statistical junk.
JUST days before Americans voted for a president, Britain's Lancet
medical journal rushed out a survey with the best bad news from Iraq any
activist could want.
The invasion and
"occupation" had killed at least 100,000 Iraqis, the survey's authors
claimed.
Their toll of the dead in
post-Saddam Iraq was stunning – about five times higher than any credible
survey or count had found.
What's more, the survey
claimed most victims had died violently – usually killed by Americans –
"and most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and
children".
The editor of Lancet,
Richard Horton, then grabbed this excuse for a political sermon:
"Democratic imperialism has led to more deaths, not fewer." Iraq's
liberation was "a failure".
The study's lead author,
Les Roberts of Baltimore's John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,
added: "I was opposed to the war and I still think that the war was a bad
idea."
Yes, he'd been against the
war when he thought of doing this survey. He'd also insisted Lancet
could only publish its results if it did so just before the US election. Even
its authors, it seems, rated this survey highly for its propaganda value.
Sure enough, its savage
claim – shorthanded to "Americans killed 100,000 civilians" – became
news around the world and is repeated again and again by "anti-war"
activists, cartoonists and commentators who've shown no interest in checking if
this astonishing figure could indeed be true.
Age columnist Professor Robert Manne, for instance, this week quoted the survey with
relish and dismissed its critics by claiming even "the right-of-centre Economist
magazine has praised the study unreservedly".
Oh, really? The
Economist said the survey was "open to dispute", "not
perfect", "subject to imponderables", and "extrapolates
heroically from a small number of samples". I guess that's
"unreservedly" – if you really, really don't want to hear the facts.
But take a closer look at
the Lancet survey and you'll find its claims are unbelievable. Junk. Preposterous.
How could its claim of
100,000 deaths so easily have become the new gospel?
Just ask yourself: Have
more than 180 Iraqis, mainly women and children, really died every day, on
average, for the past 18 months, usually at the hands of the Americans?
If so, where are all the
funerals? Where are the pictures? Where are the news reports from the Iraqi
media, or pro-extremist outlets such as al-Jazeera
and the BBC? And where are the American soldiers,
reeling from the killing of so many children, to tell the TV cameras of their
horror?
But few of the commentators
who seized on the survey bothered to ask such basic questions, or even to heed
Human Rights Watch, which warned: "The numbers seem to be inflated."
Nor did they wonder if it
was wise to put their faith in a survey whose authors were so unsure of their
results that they had to admit they had 95 per cent confidence that the true
death toll from the invasion was only somewhere between 8000 and 194,000.
That's right – the toll
could in fact be as low as 8000. Or even lower.
No one can be happy that any
innocents have died in Iraq and each death is to be bitterly regretted.
Yet trying to work out the
real casualty figures is not just a pitiless haggling over the dead. Surely, in
trying to judge whether this liberation was worth the suffering, we must know
how much suffering to take into account. We need to know how many lives were
lost in liberating Iraq, just as we need to guess as best we can how many we
may have saved from Saddam, his successors, his terrorist dependents and his
imitators.
And that's why this survey
lets us down so badly.
Its researchers interviewed
7868 Iraqis in 988 households in 33 neighbourhoods
around Iraq, allegedly chosen randomly, and asked who in the house had died in
the 14 months before the invasion and who in the 18 months after.
They then figured out the
death rate before the invasion and the (allegedly higher) one after.
They then concluded there
had been 100,000 extra Iraqi deaths since the invasion – by applying the
difference in the two rates to all Iraq's 24 million people.
But this meant the
researchers had to get two things right that they seem instead to have got
wrong – the death rates both before and after the invasion.
Why are these figures
important? Because a low death rate before the war, and a high one after, would
allow the researchers to "prove" the war was costing many thousands
of lives.
And
bingo. According
to the survey, Iraqis before the war were dying at the rate of just five in
1000 people each year. The death rate among infants was around the average for
the region – about 29 in 1000.
But what evidence we have
tells us these pre-war death rates were actually much higher. Dated United
Nations figures suggest the overall death rate was well over seven in every
1000 – or close to, if not higher than, the present rate of 7.9 in every 1000
that the Lancet survey suggests.
But even more persuasive
are 2002 figures from UNICEF, which in a much bigger survey of 24,000
households found the infant mortality rate in Iraq before the war was actually
a tragic 108 deaths per 1000 infants.
This is more than three
times higher than the Lancet survey claims was the case – and double
what even the survey claims is the infant mortality rate today.
How could the anti-war
activists forget? Remember, before the war, anti-American propagandists such as
John Pilger denouncing this "genocide" of Iraqi children and blaming
it on the United Nations sanctions demanded by those evil Americans?
We know now, in fact, that
Saddam Hussein, with the help of corrupt officials in the UN, France, Russia
and China, had stolen more than $US20 billion of oil money meant to feed his
people and pay for their medicines, and malnutrition in his shattered economy
was rife.
All that, thank God, has
changed for the better since the liberation. The best figures – including
statistics from the Iraqi Health Ministry – suggest many thousands of Iraq's
children are in fact alive today who'd have died under Saddam.
The Lancet survey
seems just as shaky in calculating Iraq's present death toll.
It interviewed some 240
people in Fallujah before the recent fighting there,
and worked out that these 30 households had lost 52 dead due to violence,
mostly women and children killed by the Americans.
The researchers did not ask
for proof of the children's deaths and admit they were reluctant to ask for
proof of all the adults' deaths, either, "because
this might have implied that they did not believe the respondents, perhaps
triggering violence". Were the Iraqis likewise scared to tell the truth?
So was that figure – of
some 240 people losing 52 dead – credible as a sample of Fallujah's
death rate?
Put it this way. Fallujah is a city of about 285,000 people.
If the Lancet survey
of its residents is right and one in six people have been killed since the
invasion, then nearly 50,000 residents died violently even before this month's
fighting.
If we assume that the
American casualty rates of seven wounded for one dead apply to civilians, too,
then more people have been killed and wounded in Fallujah
than actually live there.
So where are the mass
graves? Why didn't Fallujah empty months ago, as the
survivors fled the utter carnage? How is it that the Americans could kill a
sixth of its people through aerial bombing, and wound the rest, yet leave most
of the houses untouched?
Truly, these statistics are
unbelievable. I suspect the study's authors thought so, too, which may be why
they left the Fallujah figures out – calling them
unrepresentative – when they calculated Iraq's death toll since the invasion.
But the survey techniques
they used to give clearly wrong figures in Fallujah
are the same ones they used in the other 32 clusters of households that they
interviewed elsewhere in Iraq.
Did they give any better
information?
In fact, the Iraqis in the
remaining clusters came up with just 21 violent deaths between them – only two
of women, and four of children. These deaths, if true, are the ones that the
survey used to calculate a death rate that had them claiming at least 100,000
other Iraqis also died because of the war.
Note how terribly small
this sample is and how easy to manipulate, accidentally or not, to produce
wildly differing results.
Note that most of these
dead are not women and children, nor necessarily civilians. The gloating
headlines this survey has inspired of a massacre of the innocents in Iraq, with
Americans to blame, are almost all wild guesses and almost all certainly wrong.
But saying all this won't
make much difference. Too many commentators seem too desperate to believe the
worst of the Americans and to belittle the liberation of Iraqis from a tyrant.
That desperation means even
junk surveys such as this will find many eager believers, ready to hear the
very worst. And to recklessly repeat it.
©
Herald and Weekly Times