SubscribeWhatever one's opinion of its possible limitations, the 2006 Iraq mortality survey produced epidemiological evidence that coalition forces have failed to protect Iraqi civilians... If, for the sake of argument, the study is wrong and the number of Iraqi deaths is less than half the infamous figure, is it acceptable that "only" 300,000 have died? Last November, with no explanation, the Iraqi Ministry of Health suddenly began citing 150,000 dead, five times its previous estimate. Is that amount of death acceptable? In January, the United Nations reported that more than 34,000 Iraqis were killed violently in the last year alone. Is that acceptable?Regarding The Number, the result of what one of the study's authors calls an episode more deadly than the Rwandan genocide... [more within]
Anjana Ahuja has written an extraordinarily one-sided article attacking the Lancet study. She drags out the same criticisms that were covered in the Nature story, but even though she cites the Nature piece, she carefully avoids mentioning the Lancet authors' replies, or the opinions of the researchers supporting the study. Ahuja also makes many factual errors, even going as far as claiming that one of the interviewers contradicted Burnham when, in fact, they supported him. All of Ahuja's errors are in the direction of supportting her case, suggesting that she is biased.London Times hatchet job on Lancet study
...While we will undoubtedly never know the full extent of the human costs of the U.S. air campaign, just a few dogged reporters assigned to the air-power beat might, at the very least, have offered some sense of this one-sided air war. Since this has not been the case, we must rely on the best available evidence... If the 655,000 figure, including over 601,000 violent deaths, is anywhere close to accurate -- and the study offered a possible range of civilian deaths that ran from 392,979 to 942,636 -- this would equal approximately 78,133 Iraqis killed by bombs, missiles, rockets, or cannon rounds from coalition aircraft between March 2003 when the invasion of Iraq began and last June when the study concluded.The Pentagon's Secret Air War in Iraq
The similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of the number of civilians killed over the past three years is roughly similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries, closely linked to the official military, which is said to be their main source of arms. The victims too are by and large identified as members of groups, rather than targeted as individuals. But the violence in the two places is named differently. In Iraq, it is said to be a cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency; in Darfur, it is called genocide. Why the difference ? Who does the naming ? Who is being named ? What difference does it make ?The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency See also the references to Rwanda within.
The price tag for the Iraq War is now estimated at $700 billion in direct costs and perhaps twice that much when indirect expenditures are included. Cost estimates vary - Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz puts the total cost at more than $2 trillion - but let's be conservative and say it's only $1 trillion (in today's dollars).The Cost of the Iraq War: Can You Say $1,000,000,000,000?
As a number of other commentators have recently written, this number - a 1 followed by 12 zeroes - can be put into perspective in various ways. Given how large the war looms, it doesn't hurt to repeat this simple exercise with other examples and in other ways...
There are many comparisons that might be made, and devising new governmental monetary units is one way to make them.
Consider, for example, that the value of one EPA, the annual budget of the Environmental Protection Agency, is about $7.5 billion. The cost of the Iraq War is thus more than a century's worth of EPA spending (in today's dollars), almost 130 EPAs, only a small handful of which would probably have been sufficient to clean up Superfund sites around the country.
Or note that the annual budget for the Department of Education is about $55 billion, which puts the price tag for Iraq at about 18 EDs. Just a few of these EDs would certainly have put muscle into the slogan "No child left behind."
And since the annual budgets of the National Science Foundation and the National Cancer Institute are $6 billion and $5 billion, respectively, the $1 trillion war cost is equivalent to 170 NSFs and 200 NCIs.
No doubt a couple of those NSFs could have been used to develop cheap hybrid cars and alternative fuels. Scientific progress is by its nature unpredictable, but some extra NCIs might also have lead to breakthroughs in cancer treatment.
The cost of the war can also be expressed as approximately 28 HS's, where HS, the annual budget for the Department of Homeland Security, is about $35 billion. Really securing the ports and chemical plants would have only eaten up a few of these HS's. A few more could have been usefully spent in Afghanistan.
One last and rather tiny governmental monetary unit functions almost as spare change and has the ungainly acronym NHTSA. It stands for the annual budget of the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, which is approximately $670 million, or about two-thirds of $1 billion. The Iraq War has cost about 1,500 NHTSA's, several of which could probably have reduced the more than 40,000 Americans killed annually on our roads.
Of course, using these nonstandard monetary units isn't quite appropriate when trying to come to terms with the more than 3,000 U.S. soldiers killed, the 20,000 wounded, and the number of Iraqis killed and wounded. The latter number is staggering, whether you subscribe to the figures put out by Iraq Body Count or those published in Lancet or to other even higher estimates.
Gilbert Burnham has just given a talk at MIT on the Lancet studies on deaths in Iraq...Here are the video [.ram] links for broadband and dial-up.
Some of things he mentioned:
USAID (which has expertise in cluster sampling) was told to look for holes in the study, but couldn't find any.
They will soon release the data (with identifying material removed) to other researchers...
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posted by y2karl at 10:33 PM on March 7, 2007