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The other side of the story, so to speak, is that not everyone agrees with this count. Regardless, the war was unnecessary to begin with and even if the count were just 1, it would be too much. I agree with those who say these studies are often politically motivated, but I say they are also necessary to wake people up.
From the story:
"They're almost certainly way too high," said Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington. He criticized the way the estimate was derived and noted that the results were released shortly before the Nov. 7 election.
"This is not analysis, this is politics," Cordesman said.
The work updates an earlier Johns Hopkins study _ that one was released just before the November 2004 presidential election. At the time, the lead researcher, Les Roberts of Hopkins, said the timing was deliberate. Many of the same researchers were involved in the latest estimate.
They're a lower limit anyway.
The count includes civilian deaths caused by coalition military action and by military or paramilitary responses to the coalition presence (e.g. insurgent and terrorist attacks). It also includes excess civilian deaths caused by criminal action resulting from the breakdown in law and order which followed the coalition invasion.
It also includes excess civilian deaths caused by criminal action resulting from the breakdown in law and order which followed the coalition invasion.
Everything has political implications, and reality has a liberal bias. Those whom the Gods wish to destroy They first make mad. -- Euripides
It's a lot easier to read in Auto Format, but I'll also take the opportunity to correct a couple of mistakes:
"Not everybody agrees with this count"
More "he said, she said" in action.
I think it is possible to make a [good] critique of the study's methodology, but no-one has so far. They [the researchers publishing in the Lancet] have used the standard methodology for estimation in disaster zones, which was used for the Pakistan earthquake, the tsunami etc. Mr. Cordesman specialises in high-level strategic analysis and has no visible credentials to analyse death estimates...
In this setting however, he came across like a reasonable individual. Witty and entertaining.
If those 500 deaths a day were spread evenly between Iraq's 18 governorates, it averages out to 27 or 28 per day, per province. The Baghdad morgue alone averaged 60 per day in July, according to this story and quite a few others reporting on the same figures (1815 bodies in the month of July, followed by 1500 in August). (The Baghdad morgue handles bodies only from Baghdad and the surrounding areas; other cities have their own morgues.)
Granted, not everywhere in Iraq is equally violent, and not every month has been equally violent, but all of this does point to the real number of deaths being within the study's expected range.
But let's look at it another way. Even if we accept George Bush's 30,000 figure, that's still an average of roughly 900 deaths per month over the 33 months between March 2003 and December 2005, when Bush's statement was made. That's about 30 per day. (And never mind that that figure excludes the shocking increase in violent deaths during 2006, after the February bombing of the Al-Askari Mosque in Samarra.)
Not long after the 2003 invasion, the US Department of Defense estimated that Saddam's regime had executed 300,000 people during Saddam's 24 years in power. That's an average of 12,500 a year, or 1,042 a month, or 34 a day.
So even by George Bush's own figures, the daily death toll in December last year was approaching Saddam's daily average of executions. (Never mind what happens to the numbers when we assume Bush was lowballing and the DOD exaggerating....)
Now... getting back to the study in The Lancet: If we take even the low end of the study's range, we still end up with more violent deaths in Iraq in the last 39 months than there were people executed during 24 years of Saddam's rule. If we take the mid-range estimate, it's twice as many.
Mission accomplished?
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