January 10, 2008
On Surge Anniversary, New Survey Shows Different Iraqi Death Toll
On this, the one-year anniversary of President Bush's televised address announcing the so-called surge strategy, the White House and congressional backers of the surge are praising the security gains made over the past year by the increased presence of U.S. troops in Iraq.
"Conditions in that country have been utterly transformed from those of a year ago, as a consequence of the surge," Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Joseph Lieberman, I/D-Conn., wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed this morning. "The number of car bombings, sectarian murders and suicide attacks has been slashed. American casualties have also fallen sharply, decreasing in each of the past four months."
During that time, Iraqi deaths have also decreased, although the numbers are still distressingly high. And a new study [PDF] published online today by the New England Journal of Medicine adds another layer of mystery to the question of just how many Iraqis have fallen since the U.S. invasion began nearly five years ago.
The new estimate, compiled by researchers from the Iraqi government and the World Health Organization, puts the death toll from violence at about 151,000 from March 2003 to June 2006. Conducted over the past two years, the survey stands in sharp contrast to a widely reported 2006 study [PDF] that estimated about 654,965 Iraqis had died in the war within a similar time frame -- a claim that quickly became a political lightning rod in the congressional elections that year.
Last week's National Journal cover story explored the political fallout from that survey, which was conducted by Johns Hopkins University researchers and published in the British medical journal The Lancet. When it was released less than a month before the midterm elections, the Lancet study (and the Bush administration's dismissal of it) became a rallying cry for anti-war lawmakers, candidates and voters. As NJ's Neil Munro and Carl M. Cannon write:
Editorials in many major newspapers cited the Lancet article as further evidence that the invasion of Iraq was a bad idea, and the liberal blogosphere ridiculed Bush for his response. Prominent mainstream media outlets quoted various academics who vouched for the study's methodology, including some who said they had reviewed the data before publication.Within a few weeks a backlash rose, although the contrarian view of the study generated far less press attention than the Lancet article. In the ensuing year, numerous skeptics have identified various weaknesses with the study's methodology and conclusions. Political blogs and academic journals have registered and responded to the objections in a debate that has been simultaneously arcane and predictable. The arguments are arcane because that is the nature of statistical analysis. They are predictable because that is the nature of today's polarized political discourse, with liberals defending the Lancet study and conservatives contesting it.
Another survey that differs greatly from the Lancet measure is the Iraq Body Count project, which estimates that about 47,668 Iraqis died from violence during the first three years of the war. The IBC is based on media reports of civilian deaths and does not take combat deaths into account.
Today's Iraq Family Health Survey falls in between the Lancet and IBC numbers, putting the toll at about 151,000, with violence becoming "a leading cause of death" for all Iraqi adults and "the main cause of death in men between the ages of 15 and 59 years during the first 3 years after the 2003 invasion." The results are based on "a national representative survey of 9,345 households that collected information on deaths in the household since June 2001." The Washington Post reports that the Lancet survey used similar methods, but IFHS "surveyors visited 23 times as many places and interviewed five times as many households."
The difficulty of conducting surveys in wartime and the discrepancy between the IFHS and the two other estimates are noted in today's study. In their analysis, the researchers concede that "all methods presented here have shortcomings and can suggest only that as many as 50% of violent deaths may have gone unreported."
The New York Times points out another shortcoming of the new numbers: "The study ended four months after the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine in Samarra helped set off a wave of killings throughout Baghdad and other mixed Sunni-Shiite areas" and thereby "missed the period of what is believed to be the worst sectarian killings, during the latter half of 2006 and the first eight months of 2007."
Meanwhile, the relative quiet with which the new study is being received in Washington and in the media -- compared with the furor over the Lancet article -- is indicative of how much the public's mood toward the war has changed in just a little over a year. Back in late 2006 -- when violence in Iraq was reaching its apex -- the Lancet study came just in time to add fuel to the already incendiary political debate over the war. By contrast, today's study comes at a time when security gains in Iraq are prompting many Americans and American politicians to shift their focus to domestic concerns, other foreign conflicts and, of course, the frenzied presidential primary cycle.
U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Summer M. Anderson
Posted at 3:35 PM
Posted to:
Campaigns, Iraq, Middle East, President Bush
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