The Wall Street Journal
October 11, 2006
Iraqi Death Toll
Exceeds 600,000,
Study Estimates
By NEIL KING JR.
October 11, 2006; Page A4
WASHINGTON -- A new study asserts that roughly 600,000
Iraqis have died from violence since the U.S.-led invasion in March
2003, a figure many times higher than any previous estimate.
The study, to be published Saturday in the British
medical journal the Lancet, was conducted by the Johns Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public Health by sending teams of Iraqi doctors
across Iraq from May through July. The findings are sure to draw fire
from skeptics and could color the debate over the war ahead of
congressional elections next month.
The Defense Department until 2004 eschewed any effort
to compute the number of Iraqi dead but this summer released a study
putting the civilian casualty rate between May and August at 117 people
a day. Other tabulations using different methodologies put the range of
total civilian fatalities so far from about 50,000 to more than
150,000. President Bush in December said "30,000, more or less" had
died in Iraq during the invasion and in the violence since.
The Johns Hopkins team conducted its study using a
methodology known as "cluster sampling." That involved randomly picking
47 clusters of households for a total 1,849 households, scattered
across Iraq. Team members interviewed each household about any deaths
in the family during the 40 months since the invasion, as well as in
the year before the invasion. The team says it reviewed death
certificates for 92% of all deaths reported. Based on those figures, it
tabulated national mortality rates for various periods before and after
the start of the war. The mortality rate last year was nearly four
times the preinvasion rate, the study found.
"Since March 2003, an additional 2.5% of Iraq's
population has died above what would have occurred without conflict,"
the report said. The country's population is roughly 24 million people.
Human Rights Watch has estimated Saddam Hussein's regime killed 250,000 to 290,000 people over 20 years.
The Lancet study, funded largely by the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology's Center for International Studies, said while
the percentage of deaths attributed to the U.S.-led coalition has
decreased over the past year, coalition forces were involved in 31% of
all violent deaths since March 2003. Most of the deaths in Iraq,
particularly in the past two years, have been caused by insurgent,
terrorist and sectarian violence.
Overall, the study found 55% of deaths since March
2003 were due to violence. Of that subset, 56% resulted from gunshots;
car bombs and other explosives accounted for 27%, and airstrikes caused
13%. The rest were due to other factors.
Paul Bolton, a public-health researcher at Boston
University who has reviewed the study, called the methodology
"excellent" and said it was standard procedure in a wide range of
studies he has worked on. "You can't be sure of the exact number, but
you can be quite sure that you are in the right ballpark," he said.
A similar, smaller study by the same team in 2004 put
the number of deaths at the time at 9,000 to 194,000. That report drew
fire for the breadth of its estimate. In part to offset such criticism,
the researchers said they picked the largest sample possible for this
survey, after considering the high level of danger involved in sending
teams door-to-door in Iraq.
The study's lead researchers, Gilbert Burnham and Les
Roberts of Johns Hopkins, have done studies in the Congo, Rwanda and
other war zones. "This is a standard methodology that the U.S.
government and others have encouraged groups to use in developing
countries," said Mr. Burnham, who defended the study as "a
scientifically extremely strong paper."
This study, "The Human Cost of the War in Iraq," puts
civilian fatalities at 426,369 to 793,663 but gives a 95% certainty to
the figure of 601,027.
Hamit Dardagan, co-founder of Iraq Body Count, a
London-based human-rights group, called the Lancet study's figures
"pretty shockingly high." His group tabulates the civilian death toll
based on media reports augmented by local hospital and morgue records.
His group says it has accumulated reports of as many as 48,693 civilian
deaths caused by the U.S. intervention.
Mr. Burnham said the disparity between his survey and
tabulations like Iraq Body Count are largely because of the heavy media
and government focus on Baghdad and a few other cities. "What our data
show is that the level of violence is going on throughout the country,"
he said.
Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros, a Defense Department
spokesman, said the Pentagon doesn't comment on reports that haven't
been publicly released. Nonetheless, he said, "the coalition takes
enormous precautions to prevent civilian deaths and injuries," adding
that "the Iraqi ministry of health would be in a better position, with
all of its records, to provide more accurate information on deaths in
Iraq."
Since 2004, the Pentagon has collected data on
civilian deaths in incidents where coalition forces were involved.
According to its August civilian-casualty report, those figures show
that the daily civilian death rate has increased nearly sixfold, to
almost 120 this summer from about 20 in early 2004. The Lancet study
cites the Pentagon's numbers to back its own findings, saying the
mortality-rate increases in both tabulations closely parallel one
another.
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I don't agree with several of the moves Fr. Araujo makes in his excellent post below. For example, in parsing Ratzinger's nota bene, he quotes from Ratzinger's reaction to a document by the US Bishops that was addressing, not the question of voting, but the question of how Catholics should behave when they hold public office. These are very different questions. While there is a logical gap between what is immoral and what should be illegal, there is an even greater gap between how one votes and what actually becomes illegal. (Consider, for example, in the abortion context, the implications of George W. Bush's failed nomination of Harriet Myers for the Supreme Court; Reagan's nomination of O'Connor and Kennedy; and Bush Sr.'s nomination of David Souter for arguments that pro-life Catholics MUST vote Republican because of abortion.) In light of these differences, it seems to me that statements made by the magisterium with regard to the behavior of public officials can not be applied unproblematically to the evaluation of the behavior of voters.
That said, I think that, conceding the reasonable point that not all issues are to be weighed the same, reaosnable Catholics can disagree about the weight to be given particular issues, including within that calculus their own assessment of the likelihood that their vote will result in legal change (see my point above about supreme court nominees) and their own assessment of the likely effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of legal change with respect to a particular issue. While Fr. Araujo assumes that abortion should be the most weighty issue due to the gravity of its evil, it seems to me that the calculation is far more complicated than merely concluding that, because abortion is such an important moral question, it must be presumptively decisive in determining how to vote. The fact that abortions are carried out in private and that they will therefore likely continue to occur in great numbers even if it is legally prohibited mitigates against the weight to be assigned to abortion in comparison to evils perpetrated directly by the state, such as the death penalty, waging of an unjust war or the advocacy of torture. To be clear, I am not here taking a position that abortion is less significant than these other issues, but I do think the analysis is more complicated than merely weighing the gravity of the moral harm of abortion itself. The voter is entitled to consider these other factors as well.
Even assuming that I agreed with Fr. Araujo that the circumstances that would justify voting for a pro-choice candidate must be "extraordinary and compelling," reasonable Catholics can obviously disagree about what constitutes "extraordinary and compelling"
circumstances (and I don't take Fr. Araujo to be arguing to the contrary). For my part, I would have to say that I think the current circumstances merit that characterization under almost any definition.
I would like to offer a short response to Michael’s inquiry Damon Linker’s perspective on “the liberal bargain” and whether, as Michael suggested, it disenfranchises the Catholic citizen.
I begin with the self-admonition that I may need to learn more about the origin of “the liberal bargain.” But, at first blush, it appears to be based on one type of social contract theory in which the participants have actually negotiated and mutually assented to this bargain.
So far so good, but the Linker thesis needs a bit more scrutiny. First of all a significant condition is attached—a condition that Damon Linker provides and requires. This, in my estimation, has an important effect on the nature of the bargain. Moreover, the condition appears to be beyond negotiation to such an extent that it negates the ability to bargain. The condition also is premised on an important assumption: that the believer, in this case the Catholic citizen, has the “ambition to political rule in the name of [one’s] faith.” In Linker’s view that has been expressed in the Linker-Douthat exchange, there seems to be no possibility that the Catholic citizen desires to participate in the work of the polis by proposing rather than imposing views that are based on the Catholic citizen’s beliefs, which are based on reason. Linker insists that the Catholic citizen’s views based on faith are irrelevant because they are inextricably tied to “theological questions and disputes.” Again, Linker makes an assumption that denies the possibility that reason—right and natural—has formed the Catholic citizen’s views.
What Linker has reserved and claimed for his perspective is apparently denied to those who hold particular religious views that differ from or disagree with his own.
I wonder what Linker thinks about the views of the ardent environmentalist or the zealous advocate for “equality”? Surely these individuals consider their political views as articles of a type of faith. So, could one use Linker’s argument to conclude that these views must also be declared “irrelevant”?
If Dr. Linker has made an offer in his version of “the liberal bargain,” it seems to be one that needs to be refused--at least by the Catholic citizen who employs reason to conclude that his or her views have much to contibute to the betterment of society and common life in the polis. RJA sj
