Iraq Body Count Responds To Lancet Study
Iraq Body Count, the anti-war website which has been tracking civilian casualties in Iraq since the U.S. invasion, has responded to the recently-released Lancet study which is claiming approximately 650,000 civilian casualties in Iraq since the invasion.
Here’s a key excerpt:
On average, a thousand Iraqis have been violently killed every single day in the first half of 2006, with less than a tenth of them being noticed by any public surveillance mechanisms. . . .
If the Lancet extrapolation is sound, this would imply a further 920 violent deaths every day (1000 minus 80) which have been recorded by neither officials nor the media. As these are averages, some days would see many more deaths, and others substantially fewer, but in either case, all of them would remain unnoticed.
If we consider the Lancet’s June 2005 – June 2006 period, whose violent toll it estimates at 330,000, then daily estimates become lower but would still require 768 unrecorded violent deaths for every 67 that are recorded. The IBC database shows that the average number of people killed in any one violent attack is five. Therefore it would require about 150 unreported, average-size, violent assaults per day to account for 768 deaths. . . .
One possible way of explaining such a very large number of small-scale unreported assaults is to suppose that many of these are the result of “secret” killings which have resulted from abduction, execution by gunfire, or beheading. But 42% of the 330,000 Lancet-estimated violent deaths in this final 13-month period are ascribed to “explosives/ordnance”, car bombs, or air strikes, all of which carry a fairly heavy and hardly ’secret’ toll (and will generally create at least 3 times as many wounded). . . .
Lancet estimates 150 people to have died from car bombs alone, on average, every day during June 2005-June 2006. IBC’s database of deadly car bomb incidents shows they kill 7-8 people on average. Lancet’s estimate corresponds to about 20 car bombs per day, all but one or two of which fail to be reported by the media. Yet car bombs fall well within the earlier-mentioned category of incidents which average 6 unique reports on them.
In other words, the Lancet study is crap. Unless you want to believe that there are 19 or 20 car bombings in Iraq per day that go unreported by the media.
And then there’s this:
In 87% of cases where deaths were reported, the survey team asked to see death certificates, leading to the Lancet authors’ statement that “92% of households had death certificates for deaths they reported”. Assuming, as the authors do, that this is representative of the population as a whole, would imply that officials in Iraq have issued approximately 550,000 death certificates for violent deaths (92% of 601,000). Yet in June 2006, the total figure of post-war violent deaths known to the Iraqi Ministry of Health (MoH), combined with the Baghdad morgue, was approximately 50,000.
Lancet, for the purposes of their study, is assuming that officials in Iraq have issued over half a million death certificates, yet in reality officials in Iraq have only issued death certificates that amount to 1/10th of that number.
One tenth.
If that doesn’t make you question the veracity of this study, I don’t know what will.
In the conclusion of their statement, Iraq Body Count states that in order for the Lancet study to be true the following would also have to be true:
- incompetence and/or fraud on a truly massive scale by Iraqi officials in hospitals and ministries, on a local, regional and national level, perfectly coordinated from the moment the occupation began;
- bizarre and self-destructive behaviour on the part of all but a small minority of 800,000 injured, mostly non-combatant, Iraqis;
- the utter failure of local or external agencies to notice and respond to a decimation of the adult male population in key urban areas;
- an abject failure of the media, Iraqi as well as international, to observe that Coalition-caused events of the scale they reported during the three-week invasion in 2003 have been occurring every month for over a year.
So which do we believe? The Lancet study conclusions or the realities of the list above?
Personally, I subscribe to Occam’s Razor: The simplest explanation is likely the most accurate one. Which, in this case, means that the Lancet study is probably just plain erroneous. When you add into that the fact that this Lancet study was released in an October right an election (just like the last Lancet study that wildly overestimated the number of civilian casualties in Iraq), you begin to see that the study is not just erroneous but likely contrived as well to influence politics.
But that probably won’t stop the anti-war left/Democrats (along with their allies in the media) from using it to make their points against the war in Iraq.
Proof
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