The death toll in Iraq: 655,000

The British medical journal The Lancet has published a report which estimates that 655,000 people have been killed as a result of the invasion of Iraq.

30% of these (so about 200,000) are thought to have been killed by the US/UK-led “coalition”. But recall what the Nuremburg judgement said about the crime of aggression:

"to initiate a war of aggression…is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”.

In other words, when you start a war of aggression you're not then just responsible for the killing you do yourself. You share responsibility for all the subsequent killing that takes place, because it takes place within a situation that you created voluntarily.

So these estimated 655,000 deaths are on us. And we can add this to the million Iraqis, half under the age of five, that UNICEF estimates were killed by our sanctions during the nineties, which one UN official, resigning in disgust, described as "a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide". The total now enters the same ballpark as the toll of the Armenian genocide under the Ottomans and, with a following wind, could catch up with the toll under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia within the next couple of years.

And no, plainly Bush and Blair are not Pol Pot. But I doubt that many dead or bereaved Iraqis would be particularly moved to draw a distinction. The fact is these people are just as dead, and its still our fault.

The report, from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, has been examined and validated by four separate independent experts who all urged publication. It uses recognised scientific techniques for estimating excess mortality. I understand that the Bloomberg School of Public Health is the leading and most prestigious public health research school in the world.

By contrast - and as Middle East expert Juan Cole points out in a commentary on the report that's well worth reading - the other prominent estimates available on the death toll are likely to be serious underestimates. They're based on morgue records and media reports which can't be remotely comprehensive given the hellish situation in Iraq at the moment.

Probably the most widely cited toll is that compiled by Iraq Body Count, which estimates a "maximum" of 48,693 deaths at time of writing. It bases its figures on media reports. But according to New York Times journalist Dexter Filkins "98 percent of Iraq, and even most of Baghdad, has now become 'off-limits' for Western journalists." According to Filkins, many situations are even too dangerous for Iraqi reporters employed by the western media. He says that "most of the Iraqis who work for us don't even tell their families that they work for us" for fear that exposure could cost them their lives. Its plain that any death toll based on reports collected under these conditions can only represent a bare minimum of the actual total.

You can read some good critical writing on Iraq Body Count here, here and here.

Cole warns that attempts will be made to bury this report. This is what happened two years ago, when the same researchers estimated 100,000 killed as a result of the invasion of Iraq by that stage. Then all manner of people (not epidemiologists, but editorial writers, columnists, politicians etc) piped up to challenge the findings. The findings, having been "challenged" by an assortment of amateurs with a political agenda (including the those politicians directly responsible for the deaths), were then deemed to be "controversial" and banished to what George Orwell described in '1984' as the "memory hole".

Imagine if you will a peer-reviewed report, using accepted scientific techniques, estimating a death toll for the USSR's war in Afghanistan, being dismissed as "controversial" by the Western media on the basis that the findings were challenged by the Kremlin and Pravda. Or the conclusion that smoking causes cancer being dismissed as "controversial" because on the one hand the entire medical community thinks it does but on the other hand Big Tobacco and some of its media lackeys disagree.

The UK pressure group Medialens (who use Chomsky's famous "Propaganda Model" as their starting point) have produced an excellent and illuminating commentary on how that previous Lancet report was buried by the Western political class. You can read part 1 here, part 2 here and part 3 here. They detail the responses they received when they challenged those who had attacked the report with the scientific merits of the methodology that was used. They also facilitated debate between one of the report's authors and some of those critics. The extent to which the critics are out of their depth is almost embarrassing. Yet, as Medialens show, it was the critics that carried the day and shaped the public perception of the report, not the people with the scientific expertise which would actually qualify them to make a judgement on the matter.

Medialens point out that the same lead author, using the same techniques, had previously reported that 1.7 million people had died as a result of conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which finding had then been cited by Tony Blair, Colin Powell, and major newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, none challenging the findings. In fact, the UN Security Council called for all foreign armies to leave the DRC and doubled the country's UN aid budget, using the study as justification. Report author Les Roberts observed that "it is odd that the logic of epidemiology embraced by the press every day regarding new drugs or health risks somehow changes when the mechanism of death is their armed forces."

I also recommend this article by Stephen Soldz, which gives some excellent informed comment on the methodology used by the researchers.

Those of us who are concerned should note the techniques that were used by the press and politicians last time and work to ensure that this time around the Lancet's findings can not be so easily buried. If editors fail to cover the story we should contact them and complain. If editors fail to cover the story with due prominence we should contact them and complain. If journalists juxtapose the reports' findings with criticisms from people who know nothing of the relevant science we should contact them and complain. And we should repeat this behaviour relentlessly until the Lancet report is acknowledged for what it is: the best estimate available of the death toll in Iraq.

If we fail to do this, hundreds of thousands of innocent people will effectively have been killed twice: once by policies enacted by our freely elected governments, and a second time by our refusal to acknowledge that most of the deaths even occurred.