How it begins:
” Munaf says. In Iraq, no one wants to drive near the Americans. Posted by DeLong at October 29, 2004 01:30 PM | TrackBackCJR November/December 2004: Baghdad Diary: Tuesday, August 17: The chartered Royal Jordanian aircraft, the only civilian flight to Iraq, nose-dives down onto the Baghdad airport runway in spiraling corkscrew turns. The force of gravity pulls me forward from my seat and I nervously clutch the armrests. It feels like a prolonged crash. I gaze out the window at the dusty horizon lined with palm trees as the plane rocks to forty-five-degree angles right and left. Airplanes can’t land here without these evasive maneuvers, because rockets and mortars are fired at them every day. It’s hard to believe that until only four months ago we could still travel to Iraq by car.
My team of driver and translator, Munaf and Haaqi, wait for me at the nearest U.S. military checkpoint to drive me to Baghdad. The highway from the airport to the center of town is short, but one of the most dangerous roads in Iraq. Insurgents hide in the date farms and attack military convoys with rocket-propelled grenades. I sit in our recently purchased armored car and feel relatively safe. I remind Munaf to stay in the center of the road to avoid hitting one of the landmines. A few minutes later, we find ourselves driving directly behind a convoy of American Humvees and tanks. I panic. The Americans could get attacked at any moment and we don’t want to be caught in the crossfire. “Hang back, hang back,” I tell Munaf. He slows down but the cars behind us don’t want to pass, either. “I can’t stop because the Americans will get suspicious and shoot,
http://www.juancole.com/2004_10_01_juancole_archive.html#109902941049326214
Juan Cole
The Lancet, a respected British medical journal, reports that the US and coalition forces (but mainly the US Air Force) has killed 100,000 Iraqi civilians since the fall of Saddam on April 9, 2003. Previous estimates for civilian deaths since the beginning of the war ranged up to 16,000, with the number of Iraqi troops killed during the war itself put at about 6,000.
The troubling thing about these results is that they suggest that the US may soon catch up with Saddam Hussein in the number of civilians killed. How many deaths to blame on Saddam is controverial. He did after all start both the Iran-Iraq War and the Gulf War. But he also started suing for peace in the Iran-Iraq war after only a couple of years, and it was Khomeini who dragged the war out until 1988. But if we exclude deaths of soldiers, it is often alleged that Saddam killed 300,000 civilians. This allegation seems increasingly suspect. So far only 5000 or so persons have been found in mass graves. But if Roberts and Burnham are right, the US has already killed a third as many Iraqi civilians in 18 months as Saddam killed in 24 years.
The report is based on extensive household survey research in Iraq in September of 2004. Les Roberts and Gilbert Burnham found that the vast majority of the deaths were the result of US aerial bombardment of Iraqi cities, which they found especially hard on "women and children." After excluding the Fallujah data (because Fallujah has seen such violence that it might skew the nationwide averages), they found that Iraqis were about 1.5 times more likely to die of violence during the past 18 months than they were in the year and a half before the war. Before the war, the death rate was 5 per thousand per year, and afterwards it was 7.9 per thousand per year (excluding Fallujah). My own figuring is that, given a population of 25 million, that yields 72,500 excess deaths per year, or at least 100,000 for the whole period since April 9, 2003.
Posted by: lise at October 29, 2004 02:16 PM@lise:
there is a comment on that study by Fred Kaplan in Slate
http://www.slate.com/id/2108887/
which would probably not have earned him a passing grade in Stats 101, but he is right to point out that the standard errors of this estimate are huge (the study reports a 95% confidence interval from 8,000 to 194,000), so maybe the older 16,000 figure is more trustworthy. By the way, as a European living in the US, I am also stunned that across the political spectrum, public discussion about the Iraq war is almost exclusively framed in terms of US losses and budget deficits.
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