story here and here. None of this is good for even the most cynical defenders of American geopolotical and economic interests. Its certainly no good for American security against "terrorism." Even from the most cynical 'Merika-owns-the-world point of view possible, this a greater failure than even the most strident opponents of the Iraq war predicted.
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10 responses to “Eleven years, one million dead, and $2 Trillion later, Iraq is slowly falling under the control of al Qaeda”
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Last time I looked, that “1 million dead” figure was pretty contentious.
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I guess its contentious in the same way that anthropogenic climate change, the theory of evolution, and the age of the earth are contentious. Its true that all of those claims are likely to provoke argument. To my knowledge there have been four peer-reviewed scientific studies of the number of excess deaths due to the Iraq war, each of which related to different periods of time, and each of which produced numbers between half a million and 1 million (and none of which covered anything close to the entire relevant period.) The most authoritative is surely the second Lancet survey, which found a 95% confidence interval of 392,979 to 942,636 excess Iraqi deaths up through the middle of 2006. (and which erred on the conservative side in every way possible.) Given that, I think it would be shocking if the 1 million figure (for the entire 11 year period) were off by more than a factor of 2 to the the upside.
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If you had said “hundreds of thousands dead” (which is what the data you’re quoting does justify calling uncontentious) I wouldn’t have objected.
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Fair enough. And you’re certainly right that there is no reason to resort to hyperbole on these issues. But I also think your last comment overlooks the fact that the study I’m citing covers the matter up through July of 2006. IF you look at the IBC, which counts documented violent deaths covered in the press, as opposed to scientific estimates of deaths from all invasion-related causes (“excess” deaths), they report more deaths since July of 2006 than before it. So doubling the Lancet numbers oughtn’t be that contentious. And in a way this is precisely the point of reminding ourselves of the present state of affairs in Iraq: the catastrophic damage of the war has continued to accrue well past the time when we and the press have mostly lost interest and moved on to other concerns and other wars.
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I don’t really disagree. Though I think the very methodology of “excess deaths” becomes complicated this far after the war: we’re comparing present-day Iraq to the counterfactual situation where Saddam hadn’t been removed eleven years ago, and it’s very difficult to know what that situation would be like or even how to define it. (At one extreme: maybe the Arab Spring wouldn’t have happened, in which case theoretically you could chalk up the casualties of Syria and Libya to the war as well. At the other extreme, there could have been a full-scale civil war in Iraq just as in Syria, and/or a recurrence of the kind of brutal suppression of revolt that Saddam’s government has used in previous cases, in which case there’d be six-figure casualty counts from that to set against the cost of the war.)
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I suppose all causal attributions in sufficiently complex situations are like this. If I break a window into your house while you are on an extended trip, and rain water comes in and damages your property, its fair to say that my breaking of the window caused your damage, without being morally certain that, had the house not been flooded, it wouldn’t have caught fire instead. (Though I would say that that brutal suppression of revolt by Saddam would have been extremely unlikely. We had already obliterated his advanced weapons and airpower a decade earlier, were imposing no-fly zones all over the country, and would almost certainly have mounted a Belgrade-style attack against him if he tried this. That was one of the most tragic things about this war, we had already subdued him and put him on his best behavior just ten years earlier.) But in any case, I’m comfortable saying the war caused 1M deaths without being sure that some else would not have caused the same number of deaths in its absence.
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That doesn’t seem quite right. Or rather: it seems fine for direct-casualty counts like IBC, but not for excess-death counts like the Lancet count. The latter compare the actual situation, which has all manner of causal influences driving it, to the prewar status quo.
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Well, yes: it presumes that the invasion is responsible for the major changes in the causes of death. I suppose its further presumes that violence and degradation of infrastructure drive the overwhelming majority of that and that the changes in those two factors are overwhelmingly driven by the invasion. I can see an obvious philosophical worry abou that, but not a particularly practical one.
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Ok, fair enough, I still think there’s something methodologically problematic here but I may be wrong and in any case it’s not really important: your basic point was never sensitive to the precise number.
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To be perfectly fair to the Lancet study people, they only used this methodology three years after the invasion, when it might seem more scientifically respectable to employ the counterfactual analysis you are worried about. My doubling of their number is not what I would call “methodologically respectable” but it seems like a reasonable back of the envelope number for a blog post.
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