New blog option to be added soon to Planet Preterist

Yeah, Ozark,

Of course the exact number at any point in time cannot be known, but if you look at the article cited previously, you may conclude, as I have, that the 100,000 is a conservative statistical probability. As the conflict drags on the data will undoubtedly become easier to estimate.

But, whatever the true number is, it's bad for everybody. I mean, military units may boast that their casuality rate is one-tenth or one-hundredth that of their enemy, but the Iraqi people, like the Vietnamese, and the Palestinians are poor indigeneous people fighting wealthy foreign invaders.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=6565%20

I'll clip a few sections from the article below.

Peace to you,
C. Livingstone

"In interpreting this estimate, the researchers, like all good researchers, give an estimate of its precision. This is done by providing what are known as 95% confidence intervals. These mean that, 95% of the time, the true value is between the lower and upper limits of the confidence interval (remember, these are estimates). Given the nature of the study, the confidence intervals for this 98,000 estimate are broad, from 8,000 to 194,000. Thus, it is 95% likely that the true rate of excess deaths is between 8,000 and 198,000...

"These data help explain the large confidence intervals (mentioned above) around the mortality estimates. Most likely a major reason the confidence intervals are so large is the inclusion of the Kurdish region and the reversed pattern in Sulaymaniya. It would have been reasonable to have analyzed the data for non-Kurdish Iraq separately, which would undoubtedly have resulted in a higher estimated relative risk and confidence intervals for estimated deaths with a considerably greater lower bound (above the 8,000 reported in this paper). The fact that the authors did not do so, as well as their exclusion of Falluja from the excess deaths estimate, is a sign that they were conservative in their data analysis; that is, they did not make post hoc (knowing how they would affect the results) decisions in order to inflate the mortality estimate.

"In addition to noting that the Kurdish region is included in analyses, it is important to examine areas of the country that were not included. By excluding Falluja from the estimate of excess deaths, the authors are in fact excluding all of Anbar Governorate. Now, Anbar Governorate includes both Falluja and Ramadi, as well as some of the areas near the Syrian border where "foreign insurgents" are alleged to have entered Iraq. An examination of news accounts from Iraq, or of US casualties[22] will show that a large proportion of all fighting in Iraq occurs in Anbar, as this Governorate has been in the forefront of fighting since the first month of the occupation.[23] Thus, excluding this Governorate could easily lead to a serious underestimation of Iraqi deaths.

"It should also be noted that Najaf, scene of fierce fighting and massive US bombing in April and August 2004,[24, 25] was also not sampled (see Table 1 in the paper). Further, while the Baghdad slum known as Sadr City, a stronghold of Moqtada al-Sadr -- and site of furious fighting and US bombing for months -- was included in the sample, the area sampled there "by random chance was in an unscathed neighborhood with no reported deaths from the months of recent clashes" (p. 7). Thus, many of the areas with the most intense fighting were either excluded from key analyses (Falluja) or were not sampled (Ramadi, Najaf), or while part of a sampled area did not have their violent section sampled. This fact suggests that the mortality rate for the country as a whole may, in fact, be far higher than the authors estimate (the authors in fact state this possibility). In any case, these exclusions, combined with the inclusion of the Kurdish region with the Sulaymaniya outlier, increase the likelihood that the rate of excess deaths is NOT near the lower level of the stated confidence interval of 8,000.

"One of the surprising findings is that, of the 61 violent deaths attributed to Coalition forces in this study, only three involved actions by ground forces. The other 58 deaths were attributed to "helicopter gunships, rockets, or other forms of aerial weaponry" (p. 7). These results strongly suggest that the air war has been even more intense than is often suggested.

"On the other hand, it is possible that at least a few of these deaths may actually be due to insurgent actions. There have been a number of reports of Iraqis blaming American helicopters or missiles for attacks actually carried out by insurgents.[26-28] Thus, it is possible that not all the violent deaths attributed to Coalition actions may be due directly to those actions. Of course, one could still argue that the US and its allies, by invading Iraq on false pretenses and continuing a long-term occupation of the country, bear primary moral responsibility for deaths occurring as a consequence. Nonetheless, one should exercise some caution in attributing all these deaths to Coalition actions. It should, however, also be remembered that even official statistics from the Iraqi Ministry of Health (before the US-installed government ordered them to stop releasing statistics on Iraqi casualties[29]) document that the majority of reported casualties are due to Coalition actions, rather than those of the insurgents.[30]

Conclusion

"This study is an extremely well-conducted and analyzed piece of research. Like most high-quality research, it has potential limitations and the paper's Discussion section details possible interferences with the accuracy of the results. The authors argue convincingly that none of these limitations invalidate their basic findings of high excess deaths following the invasion and occupation of Iraq. In fact, they argue, based on arguments somewhat different from those I present here, that the real number of excess deaths may be even higher than their 98,000 estimate..."