A Controversial Report From Johns Hopkins Researchers Estimates Iraq Civilian Death TollBy Edward Ericson Jr for Baltimore City Paper
On the Friday before the election, Oct. 29, a startling claim hit the pages of mainstream newspapers like The Washington Post and The Sun, only to be dismissed out of hand and, apparently, forgotten.
The Lancet, a respected British medical journal, printed the results of the first and only scientific canvassing of Iraqis to determine how many had died as a result of the U.S. invasion and occupation. The conclusion: 100,000. At least.
The study, designed and led by a pair of researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, estimated the Iraqi death toll to be at least six times the tally published by
Iraqi Body Count, the Britain-based nonprofit that compiles news reports of civilian casualties. the Lancet figures were so high that a Brookings Institution analyst, quoted in The Sun, deemed them “preposterous.”
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The study was done by teams of interviewers who fanned out across Iraq, visiting 33 neighborhoods in 11 cities, knocking on doors and interviewing the occupants of 990 households. The researchers asked the families if anyone who had lived in the house had died in the preceding years, covering a period both before and after the U.S.-led invasion. By comparing the death rate before and after the military attack, the research team calculated the number of “excess deaths” attributable to the war.
This is the same methodology Roberts used in 2000 to estimate that the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo claimed at least 1.7 million lives. That estimate made the front page of The New York Times, without caveats about Roberts’ political beliefs.
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At least one scientific study counting Iraqi civilian deaths was published by the U.S. military in the New England Journal of Medicine in July, although that study was not designed as a casualty count. That study, called “Combat Duty in Iraq and Afghanistan: Mental Health Problems, and Barriers to Care,” surveyed U.S. soldiers returning from active duty about their combat experience, in order to correlate battle experience to mental-health issues. Surveying them anonymously, the researchers asked if the soldiers had been ambushed, shot at, handled dead bodies, been wounded, etc.
Of 1,650 or so soldiers and Marines in Iraq surveyed, more than 900 claimed kills of at least one “enemy combatant.” Remarkably, more than 330 reported that they had been “responsible for the death of a noncombatant.”
Writing for The Nation magazine, reporter Jefferson Morely extrapolated those numbers to the ground-combat units in Iraq, concluding that ground-combat troops alone would have been responsible for at least 13,881 civilian deaths so far.
The study’s lead researcher, Dr. Charles Hoge of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, did not answer an e-mail seeking comment for this story.
The Hopkins researchers say they had not seen Hoge’s study. “That will be interesting to look at,” Roberts allows, adding, “I don’t think you could validate one
by another, just like you can’t necessarily validate the Iraq Body Count numbers” using The Lancet.
Roberts and Burnham don’t plan to return to Iraq soon, but if more data becomes available, estimating Iraq’s casualties with “a lot more statistical power” will be more likely, Burnham says. The job, according to these researchers, is essential to creating a free Iraq.
“I think the whole concept of civilization is increasing your spheres of empathy,” Roberts says. “Some argue that not being able to count births and deaths is a marker for a failed state.”
All you who support this war can go to hell. These people are dead because of you.
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