From: The National
So many', wrote TS Eliot, reflecting on the waste land left by the
First World War. "I had not thought death had undone so many."
This
notion is unlikely to cross the minds of those surveying the
devastation left by the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The most frequently
quoted fatality figure - about 115,000 Iraqis killed - is shocking. But
compared to major conflicts of the past century, it is a relatively
modest toll. The 1916 battle of the Somme alone killed three times as
many. More than that were killed by a single atomic bomb dropped on
Hiroshima during the Second World War.
Former British prime
minster Tony Blair, and then-US vice president Dick Cheney, were perhaps
conscious of this when they expressed "no regrets" on the 10th
anniversary of the war last month.
That the perpetrators of an
aggressive war should accept the lowest costs for their folly is
unsurprising. What is less explicable is why so many supposed critics of
the war are crediting the same estimate. Brown University's Costs of
War project and the Centre for American Progress's Iraq War Ledger use
it as their main source.
This is particularly puzzling when there
are two peer-reviewed epidemiological surveys that give a far more
comprehensive accounting of the war's human cost. A Johns Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public Health Survey published in the Lancet, and
the Iraq Public Health Survey published in the New England Journal of
Medicine, gave figures of 655,000 and 400,000 excess deaths
respectively. (Both were concluded in June 2006, a month before the
violence peaked, suggesting the actual toll is even higher).
It is
odder still that when epidemiological surveys have come to be accepted
as the standard method for estimating conflict fatalities - the method
has been used without controversy in Congo, Bosnia and Darfur - an
exception is made in the case of Iraq.
The method involves a
household survey to establish current mortality rates and comparing them
with pre-war ones. The difference, extrapolated for the whole
population, yields an estimate of the number of people who would still
be alive had the war not happened.
By comparison, the most
commonly cited source, the UK-based online initiative Iraq Body Count
(IBC), uses a passive surveillance method to estimate what it calls
"violent civilian deaths", relying mainly on media reports, initially
only in the English language. Current total: between 111,842 and
122,326.
Distinguishing a civilian from a combatant in an urban
war zone is itself a fraught business. But the IBC methodology makes two
further assumptions that raise questions: that war kills only by
violence, and that the media records every death in every part of the
country.
If we accept the first assumption, then we would also
have to revise our estimates of history's other major atrocities. Those
who died of exhaustion or starvation during the Nazi death marches
cannot be considered casualties of war using IBC criteria since they did
not die of violence. One would also have to omit those who died in the
Warsaw Ghetto uprising since, by virtue of taking up arms, they
forfeited their right to be counted.
War in most cases means
collapse of state institutions and health care systems; it means social
disintegration, food shortages and lawlessness. It kills by starvation,
scarcity, contamination, shock, abandonment - and a host of other causes
that don't involve bullets. There was a four-fold increase in traffic
accidents alone in the years following the invasion of Iraq. IBC's
methods make no allowances for such consequences. MORE
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