I’ve put off this promised update because up until today, it seemed as if there was nothing to add. The Human Rights Watch/US State Department figures of 300,000 murders in the period 1988-2003, the majority of which occurred during 1988-91, seems to be settled. However, Johann Hari has published an article in today’s Independent which seems to be working on a much higher figure for the other crucial number I was looking for; the likely number of deaths in 2003 if the war had not taken place. Sourced to the Human Rights Centre in Kadhimaya, via the Iraqi Prospects Organisation (a UK-based Iraqi exiles organisation), the claim is that analysis of the Ba’ath Party archives reveals that there would have been 70,000 killings if the war had not taken place.
Update, below fold
My instinct is that I don’t believe this number, and I’d certainly like to see something closer to a primary source. I don’t see how the kind of work that the Kadhimaya HRC has been carrying out (mainly providing Iraqis with the bad news about what happened to relatives of theirs who had been disappeared) could have provided this sort of information.
Also, the number 70,000 is too big. It would be substantially more than the number of killings in the Shia revolt of 1991, and equal to almost a quarter of the entire 1988-2003 death toll. As recently as January (in an article entitled “War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention : I reiterate my remarks of last year about “squatters on the moral high ground“), Human Rights Watch reiterated their view that there was no “ongoing or imminent” mass slaughter in Iraq; they certainly would have regarded 70,000 killings as a mass slaughter. So if this 70,000 number is on the level, it’s brand new information, and it’s very important indeed.
Once more, I’d be very grateful for any help from readers on this one; in particular, the Kadhimaya HRC doesn’t have a website and the Iraqi Prospects Organisation has a Flash interface which my computer doesn’t like, so I haven’t been able to chase up primary sources as efficiently as I’d like.
Update Thanks very much to a reader who I’ll name as soon as he confirms it’s OK for me to do so. With his help and some correspondence of my own with the IPO, I’ve established to my own satisfaction that a) the HRC is a credible organisation using sound methodology and b) that their work is at a very preliminary stage indeed (to be honest, I have no idea why I happily assumed that a skeleton staff had managed to computerise ten million records in a year). I agreed with IPO that the sensible thing to do is not to publicise (and hence risk politicising) the HRC’s work in this area at this early stage. So for the time being, I’ll be sticking with the 300K Human Rights Watch number, but remaining aware that a much higher number is out there.
{ 18 comments }
Matthew 04.15.04 at 6:05 pm
I asked Hari for further information on Wednesday morning, but I haven’t had a response yet. I’ll let you know when I do.
What actually is the web address for the Iraqi Prospects Organisation? I couldn’t find it on google or A9.
james 04.15.04 at 6:10 pm
http://www.iprospect.org.uk
GMT 04.15.04 at 6:14 pm
“Iraqi exiles”?
Have we learned nothing? Exile groups obligingly provided the info that justified the invasion. Anyone remember that data?
dsquared 04.15.04 at 6:19 pm
I think it’s pretty unfair to tar all Iraqi exile groups with the brush of the Chalabi gang. AFAICT, the IPO is made up of about five or six young Iraqi students living in the UK. That’s light years away from the mob of chancers and fraudsters that the US took under their wing.
Matthew 04.15.04 at 6:22 pm
I also contacted the group to ask if there was any further information available. I’ll keep you posted. It certainly is an eye-opener if true. I wonder if it is somehow related to war planning?
Rajeev Advani 04.15.04 at 9:05 pm
As much as I’d like to believe it did play a role in war planning — being a proponent of liberal interventions — I think the 70,000 figure would surprise Wolfowitz as much as Daniel.
Ben Keen 04.15.04 at 9:10 pm
I recall that in the ’98–’02 time frame there were a lot of claims being made about deaths in Iraq owing to insufficient food and medicine as a result of the sanctions and the (inefficient and corruptly administered?) Oil for Food program.
I realize that this isn’t what’s being talked about here, but is there any good information on whether things are better now apropos food and supplies than then, and whether it makes a difference?
It seems tricky to me to extrapolate a regime’s direct kill-rate based on past behavior because that depends on hard to predict political factors – but estimating the number of deaths averted through open trade in food & supplies and equitable distribution of the same seems less difficult to me.
My personal guess is that absent naked rebellion the Hussein regime killed far more people through deliberate corruption and neglect than through more direct actions. I also think this is probably the case in North Korea.
GMT 04.15.04 at 10:55 pm
dsquared: admitted, but I think the designations “Iraqi,” and “exile” say an awful lot about any organization’s position, perspective, and aims (even now).
Cuban exiles, anyone?
Also, there is a market for scary stories about Saddam. One could even make a career out of it.
So, 70,000? Now? Right. And rape rooms, and Salman Pak, and baby incubators, and people-shredders and, um, what’s that other thing?
Oh yeah: weapons of mass destruction
Heard any scary stories about the Templars?
dsquared 04.15.04 at 11:11 pm
I must admit that my default postion is to be suspicious of all exile groups, but the small amount of checking I’ve been able to do puts IPO in the clear. NB that Hari refers to them as having had “their families gassed”, which if he means it literally would suggest that they’re of Kurdish extraction & thus unlikely to be connected with the Chalabis.
By the way, while I’m in Percy Pedantic mood, “rape rooms” doesn’t belong on your list above; unlike the other scare stories, there really were rape rooms in Saddam’s Iraq.
Detached Observer 04.15.04 at 11:36 pm
Daniel,
Back when I first read your position on the Iraq war — you generally supported it but thought it would be something that Bush would thoroughly mishandle and so you favored putting it off — I thought it was pretty nonsensical. I thought, why exactly would Bush bungle it?
I have to say, its been making more and more sense every day since the war had ended. In fact, it seems oddly prescient now…
No Preference 04.16.04 at 12:47 am
It seems tricky to me to extrapolate a regime’s direct kill-rate based on past behavior because that depends on hard to predict political factors – but estimating the number of deaths averted through open trade in food & supplies and equitable distribution of the same seems less difficult to me.
It did not require a war to fix that. We could have relaxed the sanctions. The sanctions hit so-called “dual use” goods required for public health very hard. The US regarded just about everything more complex than a sack of rice as “dual use”.
Terry Martin 04.16.04 at 1:54 am
I’m a Soviet historian and have done work on the Stalinist repressions. People always ask me how many people Stalin killed. It seems like an easy question to answer but it’s actually exceedingly difficult. We can say with considerable confidence that around a million were executed, but beyond that we get into things like callously creating the conditions of mass famine and not providing relief, or deporting large numbers of people many of whom die of typhus, or incarcerating people in concentration camps where many die of overwork and being underfed, etc. It becomes entirely a matter of judgement.
This is just to say, that I am 99.9% confident that the number 300,000 is arbitrary, and that when historians study this x years later, they will come up with different numbers depending on different assumptions and that they’ll view the existing guesses as comically oversimplified.
But while we’re at it, I’ll add my further ten cents that this focus on how many of one’s own citizens one has arbitrarily murdered is too narrow a focus. The Nuremberg trials did get one thing right: conspiracy to commit aggressive war is a crime against humanity. No matter what number you put together for murders by Stalin it doesn’t come remotely near to the 28 million Soviet citizens who died as a result of the aggressive war that Hitler waged, not to mention the millions and millions of other citizens killed as a result of his war, including millions of Germans.
This simply has to be put into the calculus of Saddam’s crimes, his two aggressive wars that led to millions of dead Iranians, Iraqis, and a smaller number of Kuwaitis and “coalition soldiers”.
I, by the way, also opposed the war because I have a healthy respect for the annihilation wars bring and don’t particularly favor waging wars for what the egregious Thomas Friedman called a “long shot” that it might start a domino effect of democratization.
TMorgan 04.16.04 at 3:32 am
I have long wondered about that number. But there is no way I believe that Saddam Hussein or even the Baath party was going to take a personal interest in killing 70000 people in 2003. When would they find the time to govern? Who would they get to kill that many people – even Nazi’s were having breakdowns over a few hundred machine gunned victims, thats why they went to Zyklon. That would have to indicate major military actions using artillery on towns, and they haven’t got away with that since we let the shi’ite revolution we encouraged get crushed.
That number is as high as “normal” estimates of the number of people we let Hussein kill with helicopters after GWI. That is a death rate as high as in the worst years of the Iran Iraq war that we encouraged and prolonged.
I would put money down that they are including all deaths due to sanctions and all instances of murder in Iraq, assuming they didn’t just pull a good “big lie” number out of their ass.
TMorgan 04.16.04 at 3:33 am
I have long wondered about that number. But there is no way I believe that Saddam Hussein or even the Baath party was going to take a personal interest in killing 70000 people in 2003. When would they find the time to govern? Who would they get to kill that many people – even Nazi’s were having breakdowns over a few hundred machine gunned victims, thats why they went to Zyklon. That would have to indicate major military actions using artillery on towns, and they haven’t got away with that since we let the shi’ite revolution we encouraged get crushed.
That number is as high as “normal” estimates of the number of people we let Hussein kill with helicopters after GWI. That is a death rate as high as in the worst years of the Iran Iraq war that we encouraged and prolonged.
I would put money down that they are including all deaths due to sanctions and all instances of murder in Iraq, assuming they didn’t just pull a good “big lie” number out of their ass.
TMorgan 04.16.04 at 3:33 am
I have long wondered about that number. But there is no way I believe that Saddam Hussein or even the Baath party was going to take a personal interest in killing 70000 people in 2003. When would they find the time to govern? Who would they get to kill that many people – even Nazi’s were having breakdowns over a few hundred machine gunned victims, thats why they went to Zyklon. That would have to indicate major military actions using artillery on towns, and they haven’t got away with that since we let the shi’ite revolution we encouraged get crushed.
That number is as high as “normal” estimates of the number of people we let Hussein kill with helicopters after GWI. That is a death rate as high as in the worst years of the Iran Iraq war that we encouraged and prolonged.
I would put money down that they are including all deaths due to sanctions and all instances of murder in Iraq, assuming they didn’t just pull a good “big lie” number out of their ass.
TMorgan 04.16.04 at 3:34 am
Damn, I didn’t think any of them posted. Sorry.
sacha 04.16.04 at 3:35 am
A simple question which I hope someone more educated then I am can answer:
I think many of us would agree that Saddam’s regime had to be brought to an end somehow, but that is of course the question: How? Putting blinders on for a second, assuming that Saddam’s regime really was our most pressing global humanitarian concern, how would anyone here propose ousting him in hindsight? Or, assuming that war was a neccessity, how we could have waged the war differently so as to have avoided this disaster?
Is it possible to tamper with a nation to good ends? Is it ever possible to avoid Vietnams, or Israels, or Chiles, or Afghanistans (and so on…)
wbb 04.16.04 at 4:48 am
A fair start to ousting a dictator militarily is to tell the world and the oppressed that that is the purpose up front. People might then be better disposed to your actions.
Who’s going to complain about being liberated if that is truly and transparently what is happening?
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