Iraqi deaths under occupation

I’ve now had the chance to start reading the latest, very disturbing Lancet study of the mortality rate inside Iraq since the US invasion. The researchers, who were from the very well-regarded Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, and Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, conducted a face-to-face household survey of a near-proportional national sample of 40-household clusters: 1,849 households comprising 12,801 people.
Extrapolating from this sample, they calculated that with 95% certainty, the number of “excess deaths” suffered in Iraq between March 19, 2003 and the end of June 2006, over what would have occurred had the pre-war mortality rate been sustained, was between 393,000 and 942,000, with the best estimate being around 655,000.
These are shocking figures, by any measure. These researchers used the same methodology used during their earlier study, two years ago, which at that time found around 100,000 excess deaths.
In the interviews, the household heads or their spouses were asked about all the births and deaths in the household in the period between January 2002 and June 2006, with the cause of death (if known), and the production of death certificates where possible. They later divided the reported deaths up into four time periods of roughly 13-14 months each: (I) January ’02 – March 18, ’03; (II) March 19 ’03 – April ’04; (III) May ’04 – May ’05; and (IV) June ’05 – June ’06. If you go to the bottom of p.4 of the Lancet study, you will see that the crude mortality rates reported during these four time periods were as follows:

Period I (pre-war)– 5.5 deaths per 1,000 people/year
Period II– 7.5 ….
Period III– 10.9 …
Period IV– 19.8 …

So you can clearly see not only that the numbers are large but also that they have been growing steeply throughout every year the US has stayed in Iraq.
That is an extremely important finding. It corrobrates what has been evident to all of us who follow the daily news reports.
So where are the arguments of those who, one year ago, or two, or three, were claiming that the US “owes it to the Iraqi people” to stay in Iraq to “help fix the mess we inadvertently made there” (the so-called “Pottery Barn rule)…. ??
As I’ve been arguing here all along, yes, the US does owe the Iraqi people a lot. But maintaining our military and political presence in the country is not the way to make their lives better.
I would go further on this issue with my old friend and colleague Juan Cole, who has made this argument numerous times– as well as the related argument that “the US cannot leave Iraq now because of all the mayhem and killing that would follow such a pullout.” But at least today Juan had the grace to write this:

I once warned that a precipitate US withdrawal could result in a million dead a la Cambodia or Afghanistan. Little did I know that the conditions created by the US invasion and occupation have all along been driving toward that number anyway!

All I can say, Juan, you had no excuse not to know. So now, do you have the further courage needed to say, “Well yes, maybe for the sake of the Iraqi people the US military should pull out of the country in the fastest way possible”?
As for the reactions of US pols to the publication of the study’s results, here’s what Reuters reported that the much-respected (!) public-health researcher and social scientist George W. Bush said today:

“I don’t consider it a credible report. Neither does General (George) Casey (top U.S. commander in Iraq) and neither do Iraqi officials.”
Casey, at a separate Pentagon briefing, said he had not seen the study but the 650,000 number “seems way, way beyond any number that I have seen. I’ve not seen a number higher than 50,000. And so I don’t give it that much credibility at all.”
Bush said, “I do know that a lot of innocent people have died, and that troubles me. And it grieves me.” But he called the study’s methodology “pretty well discredited.” [Like he would know what a credible methodology would look like? What a sad, sick joke. ~HC] Last December, Bush estimated 30,000 Iraqis had died in the war.

That would probably have been based on the Iraqi Body Count, which today is reporting that “between 43,800 and 48,700” Iraqis have verifiably been killed from direct violence since the invasion. But the IBC’s methodology is notably not an epidemiological approach; and indeed it relies on extremely tight reporting criteria. Namely, that to be counted at all, any death or group of deaths must have been reported in two separate public media and must have been directly attributable to physical violence.
But given the huge difficulty of newsgathering in Iraq, and of news distribution, this methodology has been becoming more and more useless as a way of counting exactly how many Iraqis have lost their lives due to the mayhem in their country since March 2006.
Personally, I want to be conservative in my use of the latest Lancet figures. So I think I’ll tend to “use” them by saying something like “almost certainly, more than 400,000 Iraqis have lost their lives because of the US invasion and occupation of their country.”
Should we, though, “blame” the US occupation for all these deaths? Yes, we should, since under the Geneva Conventions an occupying army assumes direct responsibility for the welfare of the population that comes under its control. So even though many Iraqis have been killed since March 2003 by other Iraqis (and the study makes clear that that proportion has been increasing), it still remains the case that the breakdown of the political system and of public order that allowed those killings to proliferate is directly attributable to the policies pursued by the occupation forces, and the occupation administration therefore has to bear responsibility for them. Which is what the Geneva Conventions say.
One quick comparison here: If the US had suffered the same rate of “excess deaths” that Iraqis have suffered since March 2003– if the latter were 400,000 excess deaths– then the US would have suffered 4.43 million excess deaths since March 2003. Imagine how traumatized we would all feel.
To my Iraqi friends: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I have done all I can over the past four years to, first, prevent the invasion of your country from happening, and then to work for the speedy and total pullout of our occupation troops. I guess that, like the whole of the US peace movement, I will just have to redouble my efforts.