Comments on: The Lancet study; a reply to Her Britannic Majesty’s Foreign Secretary

By: Flaffer

Flaffer — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 22:05:38 +0000

Sebastian, You seem to miss the point: it does not matter WHOM IS KILLING WHOM! The rate of violent death in Iraq has soared since the occupation, even if it is the case that insurgents killing Iraqis is a large percentage of the ones doing the killing. The moral question is simple: would the high rate of death have been there if the US had not invaded? Would there be insurgents killing Iraqis? No. So even given that there is the possibility that a percentage of the dead were killed by insurgents, insurgents are FIGHTING the OCCUPIERS. You beg the moral question here.

By: Jason McCullough

Jason McCullough — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 01:10:08 +0000

INSURGENTS DETONATE NUCLEAR WEAPON IN BAGHDAD Warbloggers, Bush cheer elimination of “thousands of insurgents”

By: GT

GT — Sun, 05 Dec 2004 19:23:58 +0000

Sebastian, You really need to read the study. You keep getting basic facts wrong. The objectibve of the study was NOT to measure how many insurgents vs civilians were killed or how many were killed by the US and how many by the insurgents. While those are interesting questions they were NOT what the study addressed.

By: Sebastian Holsclaw

Sebastian Holsclaw — Sat, 04 Dec 2004 20:26:16 +0000

I’m not confused, though I was imprecise. They did not sufficiently attempt to account for such deaths. And of course, now that I want to verify my thoughts about the study, the damn Lancet site is ‘experiencing difficulty’ with the page. Argh. In any case, my impression when I read the study a month ago, was that it was not sufficiently accounting for the civilian/combatant distinction which is crucial if you are going to bother with the problem, nor did it sufficiently account for the killed by insurgents/killed by US forces distinction which is important if you are going to bother with the problem. Also there is the problem of getting results which are almost a full order of magnitude higher than even highly anti-US groups, which suggests to my statistical mind that you should be wary of the 5% outlier. In short, they did not sufficiently investigate any of the issues which I would find morally interesting—and the LANCET headlines regarding civilian deaths (even though they made no such determination) dramatically (and I use the word intentionally) illustrate that they were aware of the moral issues I care about, but did not fully investigate them.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Sat, 04 Dec 2004 11:49:29 +0000

Sebastian, have you read the study yet? They did count people who had been killed by the insurgents – it’s just that only a very few survey respondents referred to household members having been killed by insurgents. When these deaths were recorded, they weren’t “eliminated” – they were put in the count along with the rest. You seem a bit confused about this point.

By: Kevin Donoghue

Kevin Donoghue — Sat, 04 Dec 2004 11:36:48 +0000

It is a study of mortality, not morality. As has been pointed out often enough, doctors don’t distinguish between blameless AIDS victims and those whose lax morals and carelessness killed them. Nor should they. The Lancet doesn’t do moral theology, sophistry, or whatever it is that persuades people a war is just if many of the people who die are no loss.

By: Sebastian Holsclaw

Sebastian Holsclaw — Sat, 04 Dec 2004 09:47:18 +0000

Did we mention yet that Lancet made no effort to exclude those killed by the insurgents? Or is that also a number with no moral significance? These numbers were reported as ‘civilian deaths’ even though they show no such thing. That didn’t happen by accident, and it makes me very suspicious that they reported civilian deaths even though they did not take pains to exclude insurgent deaths.

By: MQ

MQ — Fri, 03 Dec 2004 22:42:49 +0000

Glad people are at least arguing about the major issue with the study—we don’t know how many deaths were civilian. But as others above have pointed out it does appear that the majority of violent deaths in the sample were civilian. Also, as I recall, the study only counted deaths that had occurred to people who had lived continuously as a member of the respondent household for 2+ months. This would not of course eliminate all insurgent or combatant deaths. But it would elimiante Iraqi soldiers who died in the initial invasion and also some or all of the foreign terrorists who came into Iraq after the war to fight. So not all violent deaths due to teh war were counted—they did make some effort to eliminate soldiers from hte count. We also have the Fallujah undercount issue. All of this adds up to many tens of thousands of civilian deaths. There have been a lot of eyewitness reports of indiscriminate shelling and shooting to back this up. Not a pretty picture any way you cut it.

By: Donald Johnson

Donald Johnson — Fri, 03 Dec 2004 18:07:04 +0000

Probably more than half of the violent deaths in the study are of innocent people, some killed by us and some by them. 28 of the 73 violent deaths were children, (4 outside Fallujah) and all of them supposedly killed by American air strikes. Something that struck me somewhat belatedly on looking at the time chart was the fact that the Fallujah neighborhood was hit repeatedly. There were deaths in April (of course) and in August and September and one or two other months. So I suppose there are two possibilities—A) the neighborhood contained an exceptionally important target that for some reason had to be hit over and over again, and there were no others like it in Fallujah. By some fluke the study team picked this neighborhood, one where over 20 percent of the people (including 24 children) died from these bungling attempts to destroy the target. B) A great many neighborhoods in Fallujah have been hit like this, over and over again, because the US used Vietnam War style tactics and is bombing anyplace where guerillas might be hiding and consequently the death toll in Fallujah is far higher than even the antiwar types have said. Incidentally, if most of the male deaths are insurgents as some want to believe, then as others have pointed out, maybe a great many Fallujans are insurgents. No doubt this is why the US forced males of military age back into the city rather than allowing them to flee. The nerve of some male Iraqi trying to flee a war zone, like he might be innocent or something. Choice B seems intuitively more likely to me. Is there a sensible choice C? Lying Iraqis, I suppose.

By: Dan Hardie

Dan Hardie — Fri, 03 Dec 2004 17:55:17 +0000

Sebastian, let me refer you to the facts of the Fourth Geneva Convention: CONVENTION IV Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War , 12 August 1949. Article 4. Persons protected by the Convention are those who, at a given moment and in any manner whatsoever, find themselves, in case of a conflict or occupation, in the hands of a Party to the conflict or Occupying Power of which they are not nationals. Article 136. Upon the outbreak of a conflict and in all cases of occupation, each of the Parties to the conflict shall establish an official Information Bureau responsible for receiving and transmitting information in respect of the protected persons who are in its power. Each of the Parties to the conflict shall, within the shortest possible period, give its Bureau information of any measure taken by it concerning any protected persons who are kept in custody for more than two weeks, who are subjected to assigned residence or who are interned. It shall, furthermore, require its various departments concerned with such matters to provide the aforesaid Bureau promptly with information concerning all changes pertaining to these protected persons, as, for example, transfers, releases, repatriations, escapes, admittances to hospitals, births and deaths. I’ve added emphases, but otherwise I’ve merely reprinted the texts of Geneva Convention IV, Articles 4 and 136. The source is here, but print sources I’ve checked give you the same: http://www.genevaconventions.org/ The texts I have quoted have not in any way been superseded- the additional protocols of 1975 do not disqualify or suspend the above provisions in any way. (In fact the additional protocols add to the rights of guerrillas, and for that reason are disliked by a great many in the Pentagon and the British military.) Now on any reasonable reading that I can see of the texts I have quoted above: i) The population of Iraq at this moment ‘find themselves, in case of a conflict or occupation, in the hands of a Party to the conflict or Occupying Power of which they are not nationals’. Therefore they are, by the clear and unambiguous provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention, Article 4: ‘Persons protected by the Convention’. ii) Therefore, the Occupying power- which is a Coalition under the operational control of a US Army General- ‘shall establish an official Information Bureau responsible for receiving and transmitting information in respect of the protected persons who are in its power.’ Furthermore, the occupying power shall ‘require its various departments concerned with such matters to provide the aforesaid Bureau promptly with information concerning all changes pertaining to these protected persons’ including especially ‘admittances to hospitals, births and deaths.’ iii) The Coalition under US Army Command is not doing this- so far as I know. Am I wrong? Therefore we are using sources like the Lancet study because the US Army and its allies in Iraq are breaking the clear and unambiguous requirements of the Fourth Geneva Convention, by not furnishing figures of the ‘admittances to hospitals, births and deaths’ of protected persons. If private soldiers can be expected to follow the Geneva Convention- and believe me, they are- then I expect no less of the high military and civilian authorities running the occupation of Iraq. Don’t give me macho talk about how real men don’t follow Geneva Conventions, unless you want to tell me that I am not a ‘real man’. The US Army should be publishing death figures for civilians under its occupation and is not. End of discussion. Direct your complaints to the proper address: your Senator, your Congressman, the Secretary of Defense.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Fri, 03 Dec 2004 17:18:57 +0000

If it were 100,000 excess deaths all part of the insurgency I would suggest it was a good figure not a bad Really? If the US Army had already killed about 1.5% of the adult male population of Iraq as “insurgents” (which would imply a much higher figure for active insurgent forces, and a higher figure still for the proportion of the population which supported the insurgents), then you’d consider that things were going really well? Of course you wouldn’t. The single factual conclusion of the study is that the invasion has made Iraqis die with a greater frequency, not a lower frequency. I assess this as meaning, with decent support from pretty much every other source of information we have, that the invasion has made conditions worse for Iraqis, not better. A substantial proportion of war supporters, yourself included, have claimed for some while that the purpose of the war was to make conditions better, rather than worse, for Iraqis[1]. I therefore conclude that the war has failed to achieve its purpose and some sort of audit is in order to establish whose fault that is and sack them. [1] And yes, at the time, you said “Iraqis”, not “Iraqis who broadly agree with a Western liberal-democratic agenda”. This was because your lot believed (without evidence) that the vast majority of Iraqis did support a liberal-democratic agenda and I seem to remember you personally called me a racist for suggesting that sizeable numbers of them did not and would be prepared to have a fight about it.

By: Sebastian Holsclaw

Sebastian Holsclaw — Fri, 03 Dec 2004 16:56:23 +0000

“The state of the game, as far as I can see it is pretty much as we left it at the last CT summary; the Lancet editors mischaracterized the 100K excess deaths as civilian, but the study itself is sound science.” The problem is, that is a huge mischaracterization. For instance, if it were reported as 100,000 excess deaths all of which were combatants attacking US troops it would just be a report about how good the US military is. If it were 100,000 excess deaths all part of the insurgency I would suggest it was a good figure not a bad figure. If it were 100,000 deaths, all civilian it looks bad. By failing to even make a good estimate about which catagory the deaths belong to, the study becomes useless for making any kind of moral judgment—UNLESS YOU BELIEVE THAT DESTROYING THE INSURGENCY AND/OR FOREIGN MILITANTS IS IMMORAL. And if you believe that, you don’t need the Lancet study. I think the US Army will admit that they kill people.

By: GT

GT — Fri, 03 Dec 2004 15:07:14 +0000

Bob, 30K+ combatant deaths? Where did you get that from? It was only a few months ago that the US government was saying there were only 5k insurgents to begin with.

By: GT

GT — Fri, 03 Dec 2004 15:04:26 +0000

Bob, 30K+ combatant deaths? Where did you get that from? It was only a few months ago that the US government was saying there were only 5k insurgents to begin with.

By: Per Klevnas

Per Klevnas — Fri, 03 Dec 2004 14:31:14 +0000

You may be interested in a detailed discussion of the FCO response available on http://www.iraqanalysis.org/briefings/