A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.
The estimate, produced by interviewing residents during a random sampling of households throughout the country, is far higher than ones produced by other groups, including Iraq's government.
It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group.
The surveyors said they found a steady increase in mortality since the invasion, with a steeper rise in the last year that appears to reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the news media and civilian groups. In the year ending in June, the team calculated Iraq's mortality rate to be roughly four times what it was the year before the war.
Of the total 655,000 estimated "excess deaths," 601,000 resulted from violence and the rest from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 unexpected violent deaths per day throughout the country.
The survey was done by Iraqi physicians and overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. The findings are being published online today by the British medical journal the Lancet.
The same group in 2004 published an estimate of roughly 100,000 deaths in the first 18 months after the invasion. That figure was much higher than expected, and was controversial. The new study estimates that about 500,000 more Iraqis, both civilian and military, have died since then -- a finding likely to be equally controversial.
This is certainly an astounding number to consider. The survey can examined here. In reading the survey, the researchers certainly took a lot of pains in eliminating the bias that can creep in and distort the results--the survey was conducted by doctors fluent in both English and Arabic, the surveyors requested death certificates when deaths were reported, and the surveyors certainly asked about in-migration and out-migration of Iraqis. The researchers took the pains to eliminate as much bias as they could from the survey. In fact, the WaPost reports that:
The recent survey got the same estimate for immediate post-invasion deaths as the early survey, which gives the researchers confidence in the methods.
These guys did their job. One little statistic here does stand out. In the original paper, the researchers noted that the number of post-invasion deaths due to violence were at 601,027 (426,369 -– 793,663)
Now let's go to the Bush administration's response to this survey. Here is the CNN story on the survey:
President Bush slammed the report Wednesday during a news conference in the White House Rose Garden. "I don't consider it a credible report. Neither does Gen. (George) Casey," he said, referring to the top ranking U.S. military official in Iraq, "and neither do Iraqi officials."
"The methodology is pretty well discredited," he added.
Last December, Bush said that he estimated about 30,000 people had died since the war began.
When pressed whether he stood by that figure Wednesday, he said, "I stand by the figure a lot of innocent people have lost their life. Six hundred thousand -- whatever they guessed at -- is just not credible."
President Bush still claims that 30,000 people have died since the war began, while also rejecting this latest survey's death rate. And Bush's reason? It's too many deaths. Of course, if we take the researcher's lower numbers of violent deaths at 426,369 as a "credible" number here; it is still over ten times the number of Iraqi deaths that Bush is claiming have occurred since the war began.
Why am I not surprised here?
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