How Many Dead Iraqis?

The group of U.S. and Iraqi public health researchers who reported in 2004 that nearly 100,000 Iraqis had died due to the U.S. invasion and occupation recently published a follow-up study in the respected medical journal The Lancet.

Both studies were based on house-to-house interviews of Iraqis in dozens of neighborhoods across the country. In both cases, researchers asked households about births and deaths, pre-invasion and post-invasion, and were asked for death certificates of family members -- which they almost always were able to produce. And, in both cases, U.S. government officials and reporters ignored and/or dismissed the study results.

The follow-up study estimated 655,000 "excess" Iraqi deaths, from the March 2003 invasion through July 2006. The researchers caution that the chaos of war makes it difficult to track mortality rates, but point out that such "cluster survey" reporting is widely used -- and widely accepted by U.S. officials and news outlets, when applied to less politically charged situations.

Study co-author Les Roberts said on Democracy Now!:

[T]his cluster survey approach is the standard way of measuring mortality in very poor countries where the government isn't very functional or in times of war. And when UNICEF goes out and measures mortality in any developing country, this is what they do. When the U.S. government went at the end of the war in Kosovo or went at the end of the war in Afghanistan and the U.S. government measured the death rate, this is how they did it. And most ironically, the U.S. government has been spending millions of dollars per year, through something called the Smart Initiative, to train NGOs and UN workers to do cluster surveys to measure mortality in times of wars and disasters. ...

I think that ... the U.S. press sort of follows public opinion. ... [When] the 2004 study came out, Tony Blair was asked three times in the week that followed, "What do you think of this estimate that 100,000 Iraqis had died in the first 18 months of occupation?" No one asked George Bush about how many civilians had died or about our study for 14 months after the study came out. And then, when he was asked, it was just by a member of the public in a forum in Philadelphia.

And now, within about four hours of the study coming out, [Bush] was asked directly, he was forced to respond, there was a dialogue going on. So, I think that the nation, as a whole, is more ready to honestly talk about Iraq, and that’s led the press to be more able to honestly talk about Iraq.

Although Roberts says he sees better U.S. media coverage of the 2006 study, compared to the 2004 one, the most thorough and informative coverage of the new study that I've seen comes from BBC News.