When Les Roberts and his team published their Lancet study on Iraq Mortality back in October, they knew it would be controversial. The study estimates that 655,000 Iraqi civilians have died since the beginning of the war, a figure that dwarfs all other estimates. Official U.S. and UN estimates mark the total at closer to one tenth of that number.
In January, the Iraqi government added its own count — 50,000 civilians dead since 2003. If that were true, Roberts wrote in a recent op-ed in The Independent, New Orleans would be a more dangerous place to live than Iraq.
Not surprisingly, Roberts’ op-ed has re-ignited the controversy over The Lancet study, especially in Europe. Two articles, one in the British journal Nature, and one in London’s The Times, have recently been published; Nature‘s article rehashes many of the old arguments about sampling methodology, The Times just rehashes the Nature article, and Les Roberts says the author never asked his team for comment. We called him last night to respond to the new criticisms.
The two main criticisms which were in both the Nature article and The Times article are completely without merit. They said there wasn’t enough time to have done the interviews. We had eight interviewers working ten hour days for 49 days, they had two hours in the field to ask each household five questions. They had time.
The other criticism was that our people stayed close to the main streets of towns to conduct their surveys. They say that bombs disproportionately go off near the main streets — the car bombs, the IEDs. But the vast majority of these deaths are Iraqis shooting Iraqis, or from coalition forces. I’d have to check the figures, but I think less than 15 percent of deaths are from car bombs and IEDs.
Les Roberts, in a conversation with Open Source, March 5, 2007.
A few bloggers have lept to The Lancet team’s defense. Roberts is particularly fond of Tim Lambert’s close reading of the controversy over at Deltoid.
For a more high-concept treatment of the quantification of war, take another listen to our show with Les Roberts from December. Chelsea’s questions from that post still hit home:
Once you get into the thousands and tens of thousands does it really matter? Does it matter how these numbers break down? How many men, women and children have died and how? Do these numbers change the way you look at this war, or any war? At what point does a body count become a metaphor for the atrocity of war?
Chelsea Merz, The Quantification of War, December 19, 2006.
A similar concern with counting the dead is found in Mahmood Mamdani’s recent article that appears in the London Review of Books (“The Politics of Naming”), which is in regards to Darfur. Mamdani (currently at Columbia, I believe) argues that Western intervention (both military and humanitarian) is both a form of colonialism and threatens to send Sudan into a large-scale civil war. He also argues against categorizing Darfur as genocide. His piece is intriguing and potentially controversial–have a read.
Did Leopold II of Belgium kill 15 million or 20 million in the Congo?
Why does it matter?
People are being killed now….make it stop.
Hmmm…. ‘Once you get into the thousands and tens of thousands does it really matter?’ — I’d respond that it matters (to you) if your mom, or dad, or brother or sister is one of the dead. One of the reasons The Holocaust still resonates is because so many family members survived and moved to the United States, media hub of the world, and spoke out — loudly. And one of the most obvious reasons Leopold’s crimes are forgotten is because the relatives of the victims never got hold of a megaphone. It’s absolutely important to realize that PREMATURE death at the hands of another has significance — but it is only the living that can give that significance to the life and death of the deceased. Those who kill (usually) treat those they kill as a pile of dead meat, like road kill on a freeway. The role of the surviving family is really important! Stalin understood this too well, so he simply made entire families disappear so no one was left who could remember them… Some might say that the failure of the American military is that it allows family members to survive and mourn their dead — and to get angry!
Thanks Tom B. I disagree with Chelsea’s comment above and Greta’s repeating of it. I don’t know what home it hits. It signifies indifference. Consider some of the counts of sacred American deaths– three thousand on 9/11; six hundred thousand deaths during the civil war. Now imagine some foreigner saying, what does it matter whether the number is that, or off by a factor of ten. Similarly, imagine being indifferent as to whether the Holocaust killed 6 million or 600,000.
As Roberts puts it: “How can the US and Britain pretend they understand the level of resentment in Iraq if they are not sure if, on average, one in 80 families have lost a household member, or one in seven, as our study suggests?”
I had respected the Iraq Body Count, though I detest the fact that they continue, after all this time, to feature a B-2 bomber on the front page, rather than some other image of humanity (have they not visited a single victims’ memorial in the free world?). Recognizing each victim, in some fashion, by recognizing that they are part of the count.
But reading the column from Roberts in the Independent has changed my mind. It is certainly likely that the Iraqi government has been downplaying the statistics– more likely than there be less of a violent death rate than in former Soviet states Columbia ro South Africa.
There are certainly excellent reasons- political reasons- to deny Roberts’ body count. How does one create frothing at the mouth over the carnage of Saddam Hussein, if the “relief’ to his vicious oppression results in ANOTHER enormous pile of corpses? ^..^