Re: [Marxism] Trapock press release on Iraqi war deaths

[Les Schaffer <schaffer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis Proyect quoted:
> This come on the day when a new Lancet study shows that 655,000
> Iraqis have died due to the war.

note below the academic debate over the "political" nature of reports on 
this genocide.

Les

======

News
Published Nature online: 11 October 2006; | doi:10.1038/news061009-9

Huge Iraqi death estimate sparks controversy
Authors of study deny accusations of political bias.

Jim Giles

Have over 650,000 people, or 2.5% of the population, really died in Iraq 
as a result of the US-led invasion?

That's the conclusion of a study published in The Lancet this week. But 
the number has attracted criticism from other researchers who say the 
result is a major over-estimate, and may have been published for 
political reasons.

The team behind the figures strongly denies the criticisms. They stress 
that their methods are well established, and the assumptions they use 
are validated by other data.

The new number comes from a survey of 1,849 households in 16 regions of 
Iraq. Teams of questioners organised by the Al Mustansiriya University 
in Baghdad asked people about household members that had died between 
January 2002, before the invasion, up to July 2006. They documented 82 
deaths in the period before the invasion, and 547 during the conflict.

An extrapolation of this data suggests that the number of deaths per 
thousand people per year has leapt from 5.5 to 13.3 over that period. 
Across the whole country, say the researchers, that figure equates to a 
total of 654,965 more deaths than would have been expected from 
pre-invasion rates. Just over 600,000 of those were caused by direct 
violence, the team adds.

The figure is much bigger than previous estimates.

Conflict figures

"I doubt it is large as they say," says Jon Pedersen, a social scientist 
at Fafo, an independent research centre is Oslo, Norway. Pedersen helped 
run a United Nations study that concluded between 18,000 and 29,000 
people died as a result of violence between the start of the war and May 
2004.

He says that violence has become more frequent since his study, but 
doubts whether the real number can be so much bigger than media reports 
suggest. Iraq Body Count, a website that collates mortality figures from 
media sources, puts the current figure at around 45,000.

"We are told about at least 30 to 40 deaths per day just from news 
reports," says Pedersen. "But 500 per day is very different."

Pederson also points out that the pre-invasion death rate recorded by 
the Al Mustansiriya team is very low. Figures from the United Nations 
Children's' Fund from before the war put the number at around 13 deaths 
per thousand per year. If correct, this suggests almost no increase that 
can be attributed to the conflict.

But Gilbert Burnham, co-director of the Center for Refugee and Disaster 
Response at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland and a member 
of the team that helped design the study, says that neither criticism 
stands up to scrutiny. He says that pre-war mortality figures from other 
sources, such the US Central Intelligence Agency, are in line with his data.

Reports of deaths, adds Burnham, were backed up by a death certificate 
in 92% of the 629 cases they collected. "We recorded what people told 
us," he says. "We're not making up deaths."

Election countdown

Burnham's group is having also to fight off criticism that its work is 
somehow political in nature. When he released a previous estimate of 
Iraqi death tolls in 2004, one team member said that they had wanted to 
get the result out before the US presidential election, so that "both 
candidates would be forced to pledge to protect civilian lives in Iraq". 
The quote was then used by supporters of the Iraq war to brand Burnham's 
research as politically biased.

With mid-term US elections due next month, Burnham's team is open to the 
same accusations. Debarati Guha-Sapir, director of the Centre for 
Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters in Brussels, says that 
Burnham's team have published "inflated" numbers that "discredit" the 
process of estimating death counts.

"Why are they doing this?" she asks. "It's because of the elections."

"Absolutely not," replies Burnham. He says that the paper has been 
delayed and that he hoped to have it out in July or August. "In our team 
we have some people who are opposed to the war and some who are in 
favour," he notes. He points out that Iraq has been in the news 
constantly over the past year, and so his team would have been accused 
of playing politics no matter when the paper was published.

References

  1. Burnham G., et al. The Lancet, doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(06)69491-9 
(2006).

http://www.nature.com/news/2006/061009/full/061009-9.html


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