In January 2004, Tim Blair linked to Martin Roth, demanding a retraction from Australian teachers unions, which had said in an advertisement before the war “War on Iraq will kill tens of thousands of innocent children and their families. Many more Iraqis will suffer disease, hunger and homelessness.” (Roth cited an estimate of “only” 5000 deaths.)
But now Tim is reporting favorably on a study which estimates 24000 civilian deaths in the first year of the war. The Tims Tim[1] likes this number because it’s so much less than the widely cited estimate of 100 000 excess deaths published in the Lancet last year[2].
Still, given that Tim B. now agrees that the teachers unions were right to predict tens of thousands of deaths (and in fact it seems likely that tens of thousands of deaths had already occurred when he wrote his post), it’s time for a retraction of his own criticism. Self-correcting blogosphere and all that.
These fights about numbers are unedifying, but necessary. Supporters of war as a policy instrument need to be reminded that the policy they advocate will cause the deaths of many innocent people. Sometimes this is necessary to prevent even worse calamities, but war ought always to be a last resort.
fn1. This seems to a be a Tim-magnetic topic. There’s some further comment from Tim Worstall who wonders why the report hasn’t received more attention.
fn2. I’ll leave to Tim Lambert to explain in more detail the differences in time periods covered and concepts of “excess death”.
John Quiggin 
I found myself sitting opposite a RAAF lieutenant at a dinner last night, shortly off to Baghdad. We debated the war. I thought I could get him to agree to 10,000 civilian casualties as a minimum, but he insisted even this was a gross overestimate, put into circulation by leftwing academics and journalists. He was vaguely aware of the Lancet study, but the most concrete thing he knew about it was that it had been discredited. One can probably assume his ideas are representative of ADF personnel.
It’s not civilians, but all war related deaths, including insurgent/military deaths.
It’s also not children, but people of all ages.
And, it’s people killed by all sides, not just coalition inflicted deaths.
Finally, it doesn’t just cover the invasion and overthrow of Saddam, but also the period of the insurgency*.
The overthrow of Saddam itself did lead to around a 100-200 coalition deaths, maybe a few thousand Iraqi military deaths and maybe a few hundred Iraqi civilian deaths.
The coalition could then have left, but chose not to, in order to protect ordinary Iraqis from the insurgency and foreign terrorists, who by my reckoning are the ones bearing the primary moral responsibility for deaths caused by terrorism and the insurgency.
“War on Iraq will kill tens of thousands of innocent children and their families” is a phrase that I understand to refer to the invasion and direct coalition action (ie small arms fire and bombings), not to children being blown up in a market place by a suicide bomber a year after the invasion or to increased traffic accidents due to a surge in second-hand car imports.
Martin Roth cites a figure for “men, women and children civilians killed by the US, British and Australian forces”. “Killed by” as in shot by a coalition soldier or blown up by a coalition bomb. Not “kiled by” as in killed by any cause with the moral blame (rather arguably) linked in some fashion to the invasion.
*On the other hand, it doesn’t cover all of the insurgency, does not include families where all members died and it isn’t clear what the category “war related” exactly contains. The Lancet study counted all causes of death, and additional traffic accidents due to a tripling of Iraq’s stock of automobiles would therefore have been part of the overall figure.
Since you’ve brought up the matter of retractions, perhaps you’d like to clarify the following:
My questions: Also, in removing the original post you rendered any outside links to it – possibly from antagonistic sources – obsolete. If you aren’t removing original sources when updating in an effort to avoid dissenting comments, why then do you update in this way? Can you think of anyone else who removes original posts when updating?
JQ’s reply: JFB, moving a post doesn’t break links or delete existing comments and it doesn’t ‘remove the existing post’. Your other points have been answered above. I suggest you take the time to learn a bit about how blogs work before engaging in further debate on this topic.
See at: http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/000567.html#comments
Hi James,
it all depends on what you mean by a “civilian casualty”. If you mean innocent civilians killed by coalition small arms fire or bombs, 10,000 is not acceptable as “a likely minimum”.
The Iraqi Body Count includes a lot more than that:
http://www.iraqbodycount.net/database/
They include for example:
Iraqi military/police killed by insurgents (or possibly ordinary criminals)
Civilians killed by car bombs
Civilian workers murdered by insurgents
You’ll find that on the one hand, people will include even deaths from traffic accidents to get to as high a number as possible (eg the Lancet study), and then on the other hand, commentators misperceive the estimate as representing those killed by coalition small arms fire and coalition bombing (in the case of the Lancet, said misperception can be blamed to quite some degree on the Lancet itself).
Direct counts of civilians killed by the coalition based on this more restrictive definition are somewhere in the thousands. The coalition has no reliable way of rapidly verifying how many they’ve killed and whether those were innocent civilians or insurgents/terrorists.
That requires detailed investigations of each case, a task that’ll require years and an atmosphere in which people will provide accurate answers, not something you’ll get when you send US soldiers or US contractors out to ask questions at the moment when there is doubt. When there isn’t doubt, it’s not so much an issue. People who are clearly innocent are putting claims in and getting compensation, though I think the number of claims granted for innocent people killed by coalition forces may be below a 1000.
Heiko,
The actions of the insurgents were a foreseeable (and foreseen) conseuqnce of the invasion of iraq.
Quick question: do you agree that Hitler is ultimately responsible for the deaths of German civilians killed in allied bombing raids during World War II?
Heiko, the 24,000 number that Blair seems to have accepted is for war-related deaths. It doesn’t include traffic accidents. The ad didn’t say just say children — it said children and their families. The ILCS found that 18% of the war-related deaths were children. The survey just covered the first year after the war started so when Blair made his post in Jan 2004, most of the deaths had already happened.
And yes, it includes those killed by the insurgency. But they are still dead, and they wouldn’t have been if we hadn’t invaded Iraq. Which was the point of the ad.
Hi Tim,
it’s unclear to me what exactly “war related” deaths does include. The report is unfortunately not very clear on that (though it is clear that no distinction is made between civilians and combatants).
Traffic accidents are clearly included in the Lancet’s excess death figure.
The ad’s wording is vague, it’s not clear to me what kind of deaths they are referring to here. It can be read as tens of thousands of children (killed by coalition weaponry) and also large losses among their families. Or in the other extreme, tens of thousands of deaths with some connection to the invasion.
What Saddam would have done, if he had been left in power, and what the world would look like now, is pretty speculative. It’s even more speculative what’ll happen further out into the future (and what would have happened had Saddam been left in power).
Hi Ian,
Hitler was a ruthless dictator who started WWII for territorial gain, we (ie the coalition countries) acted in Iraq to help people there and to remove the threats posed by a dictator to people living outside of Iraq.
That difference in intent rather matters to me. That’s why I am not a murderer when I do first aid and accidentally kill somebody in the process, or when I swerve after a mechanical failure of my brakes to avoid hitting a crowd of people with my car, and instead kill a child.
As for the case in question, Hitler’s misdeeds didn’t absolve the allied forces from their responsibility to consider civilian suffering disproportionate to their military objectives, just as Saddam’s atrocities, or those committed by terrorists in Iraq now, don’t absolve the coalition from theirs.
In this case Heiko, the first aid analogy only works if there were a dozen doctors present urging you not to move the patient.
Some people just will not accept the truth no matter which way it is told. We (USA,UK & AUS) are responsible for all deaths, except accidental ones, since the first shot was fired.
Heiko has addressed the particulars, I think.
I’ve already written that my prediction, as it applied to the post-Saddam phase, was wrong; other massively wrong predictions were also recently reviewed.
I’ve got a feeling that no accurate guesstimate of war-related civilian deaths in Iraq from 2003 to (pick future date of your choice) will ever be known, but most of the figures quoted here appear to be ridiculously low.
A century ago in warfare, about 8 soldiers were killed to every civilian non-combatant on or near the battlefield. Today, however, those figures have changed places and about 8 non-combatant civilians are killed for every soldier.
Taking the figures from the website Iraq Coalition Casualties (http://icasualties.org/oif/), I find that there have been 4087 Coalition servicemen and women, contractors (who are in Iraq performing logistical and other tasks that used to be done by soldiers) and Iraqi army and police.
Assuming that an equivalent number of ‘enemy’ combatants have been killed brings a total of belligerent casualties of about 8,500.
Using that as a base, and adding the generally-accepted ratio of civilian to military deaths, you get a figure of about 68,000 civilian non-combatant deaths between May 2003 and now — nearly three times greater than the 25,000 figure that TB is grudgingly accepting and others are still insisting is way too high.
I don’t think TB is accepting that figure for civilian non-combatant deaths, because it’s for all war related deaths, both civilian and combatant.
Estimates for combatant deaths on the Baathist/insurgent/terrorist side run much higher than 4000 (eg strategypage), typically in the low ten thousands. I don’t see anything hard and fast about the ratio of combatant to non-combatant deaths. Because the coalition has not been indiscriminately carpet bombing the place, I find a 1 to 10 ratio of non-combatants to combatants reasonably credible (coalition inflicted deaths), for insurgent/terrorist inflicted deaths I think it’s running around 4:1 or thereabouts, ie the vast majority of the victims are civilians.
It’s rather hard to get good and impartial data on the ratio of coalition inflicted combtant/non-combatant deaths, for the obvious reason that insurgents/terrorists do not wish to be identified as such by the authorities, making a count virtually impossible under present circumstances, particularly so if that count were to be done by the coalition.
Heiko, I posted the questions on my blog. It is perfectly clear that accidents are not included since they are a separate category. Neither is the ad unclear. It is strange how are having such reading difficulties.
Lancet/ILCS roundup
Jim Lindgren agrees
with me that the ILCS supports the Lancet study. He also raises some concerns about some of the numbers in Lancet study:
I find it somewhat odd that heart attack and stroke deaths are up 64%
in the later period, and accident…
The straightforward answer to what the UNDP survey includes is whatever answer they got from their interviews with the five categories disease, traffic accident, war related, pregnancy and other. So far so good, but that still leaves a fair bit of interpretation as to what is “war related”.
I gather that to compare with the Lancet study you added up 9 coalition caused deaths ex Fallujah, 2 anti coalition forces caused deaths ex Fallujah, and decided that the 1 death caused by the former regime during the invasion was not “war related”, and neither were the 2 violent deaths of unknown origin or the 7 criminal murders, or any accidents (not all accidents are traffic accidents, and those that are may still be “war related” and it’s unclear how the interviewers would have dealt with such a war related traffic accident in their tallying – it is noticeable how you elsewhere choose to mention exclusively reasons for increased accidents related to the poor security environment, but leave out more positive ones, like the greater availability of second hand cars) or the 3 deaths due to home births that the authors of the Lancet study describe as “plausibly linked to the conflict”.
You should realise that this comparison is ill founded due to the small number of deaths in this vague “war related” subset. A single bombing incident in the Lancet study is responsible for over a quarter of what you classify as their “war related” death toll. Just two bombing incidents together make up nearly half (5 out of 11).
This is ridiculous. The study’s sample is far too small for these kinds of extrapolations. The UNDP doesn’t “validate” the Lancet study, it shows what a poor effort it really was by comparison. The UNDP looked at over 2000 clusters, not just 33, a number so small that 2 claimed, self-reported and unverified incidents did nearly double their extrapolated “war related” death toll.
What the UNDP does is confirm my view that a number in the ten thousands has been killed violently and that we do not have sufficient information to judge other mortality trends. It doesn’t say how many of those were insurgents. But I gather that for you it doesn’t matter whether an excess death is that of a child killed by a US soldier, or a terrorist suicide bomber being shot by US forces before being able to kill anybody, as in both cases the US is equally morally culpable for another death and making things “worse”.
Finally, of course the ad is unclear, if you include “families” in the toll to get to tens of thousands that could include virtually everybody killed, ie also combatants, and you can nearly equally easily make the phrase “the war will kill” fit excess deaths and therefore make it include things like traffic accidents.
I for one took the sentence to easily be understand as referring to children killed by coalition forces through bombs or small arms fire in the event of an invasion. I find use of the phrase “innocent children and their families” to stand in for all war related deaths (otherwise we don’t get to ten thousands from the UNDP numbers) very dubious terminology.
Returning to the topic of the post, the teachers union ad clearly referred to all kinds of death and loss arising from war, not just direct casualties from combat.
The idea that you can start a war, then disclaim responsibility for all but the most immediate consequences is morally wrong. It’s particularly bizarre when it comes from people who are happy to claim credit for tenuously related events in far-off countries like Libya and Ukraine.
I suppose all children are innocent (at least very young children are), and everbody in Iraq will have some innocent children as relatives (if in some cases rather remote family). I still find the phrase “innocent children and their families” being equivalent to all deaths, including those of suicide bombers, high ranking Baath officials and soldiers, rather dubious.
Responsibility, yes, in some fashion, but intent matters enormously. I find it most appropriate to consider the coalition intervention in Iraq a matter of fellow humans helping each other out, and I find it morally repugnant to absolve terrorists from their moral culpability by automatically laying all of the blame squarely at the feet of the coalition forces based on the notion that “they started it all”, when I’d say it’s rather more appropriate to say that the Baath and islamist terrorists “started it all” .
If we hadn’t acted so resolutely, Saddam would have destroyed the entire world with his weapons of mass destruction, his vials of anthrax and his nuclear bombs. Then the death toll would have been worth talking about!
Oh, wait…
One question: Why do the numbers actually matter? I mean really.
Wilful,
Don’t worry. you didn’t post in vain. Give it 6-12 months and you’ll be able to re-use that post with minimal changes to apply to Iran, or North Korea; or Venezuela, or Syria or….
…or Australia. That’s why we should worry about this mindset. One day the Americans will require us to hand over an alleged terrorist without delay from a proper hearing or anything, and he won’t even be here, so they’ll come in and occupy the place.
“Why do the numbers actually matter? I mean really.”
A good question. As I said, these disputes aren’t particularly edifying. On the other hand, supposing the results had come out the opposite way, that there were very few casualties in the war and its aftermath (say, a couple of hundred), and that these were more than offset by reductions in deaths from crime, infant mortality and so on. It would be hard in such circumstances for most people to maintain a position that the war was wrong, at least in hindsight.
By contrast, few people before the war would have supported it if they had known it was going to lead to tens of thousands of civilian deaths (hence the vigour with which Tim B attacked those who predicted this), and most people who accept the facts conclude that the war was a mistake (or worse) after all.
What we do know is that many claims about the costs and benefits of war were made by both sides of the argument and the veracity of some of these claims is unravelling. The pro-war side were wrong about the actual existence of WMD and perhaps underestimated the state of Iraqi infrastructure(perhaps the effectiveness of sanctions?) and perhaps the difficulties of post war reconstruction vis a vis resistance. The anti-war side were wrong about a Stalingrad scenario, the number of casualties and refugees, and underestimated Iraqis desire for democracy and the willingness of the US in particular to facilitate it. There is some debate about the knock-on effects of that democracy now. One imponderable WRT death counts is the extent to which an Iraqi democratic flypaper, has concentrated certain fundamentalist initiated death tolls in Iraq, that would have occurred elsewhere.
In any case, it’s a bit like some bright spark pointing out a couple of years after WW2, that the Allies could have stopped at the borders of the Axis powers, formed their League of Nations and instituted economic sanctions and no-fly zones on those contained therein. You could argue that policy definitely would have saved some lives too.
I suppose all children are innocent (at least very young children are) ..
Heiko Gerhauser, can you please put an upper age bound on the very in your rather imprecise phrase very young children?
I find it most helpful when counting the deaths of children in unprovoked warfare – at least when confining the causes to small arms fire and very high aerial bombardment to put a limit at 9 years of age. (However I have seen studies that put the limit at 12 but those studies typically include air fighter attack as well which I find distorting of the true picture.)
observa: “[the antiwar side] underestimated Iraqis desire for democracy and the willingness of the US in particular to facilitate it.”
This comment might appear less foolish had Iraqis’ raging thirst for elections held under occupation actually been anywhere near the centre of pre-war debate. And since the overwhelming message of those elections was for the US to get out, now, it’s hard to share your optimism about the US’ willingness to play facilitator. Indeed, one suspects that the curious strategy of facilitating Iraqi democracy by denying Iraqi democracy will continue for some time, with the usual of donning rah-rah shorts and waving of bloodied pompoms.
wbb,
well, my son is now just over three weeks, and sometimes I wonder how innocent he is …
I just find it misleading to lead with ‘ “the war” will kill “innocent children” ‘, when what you actually mean (by inserting “and their families”) all deaths, including those of suicide bombers shot before they can blow up … innocent children.
John,
I agree it’s not nice to discuss death and it makes a difference, so there’s a need to do it anyway.
I also accept that you’d (with hindsight) favour the overthrow of Saddam, if it had only resulted in a few hundred civilian deaths, followed pretty immediately by a stable government reducing other mortality.
I don’t put the bar that high. I think it may be acceptable (for the invasion to have been justified, with hindsight) for the establishment of a stable government to take a few years with a less than stable situation in between resulting in tens of thousands of deaths. In my calculus, I figure, among other reasons, that an internal overthrow could easily have cost hundreds of thousands of lives (the last attempt after Gulf War I did after all take several hundred thousand Shiites to their graves).
I would, however, find it much, much harder to accept 100,000 innocent civilians (largely women and children) killed by American bombs. Who does the killing and with what intent makes a very large difference to me.
I think it makes a difference to you too.
These moral decisions are difficult enough, so much more so, when the facts get blurred.
And the facts don’t point to 100,000 innocent bombing victims at the hands of American air power, they point to of the order of 40,000 war related deaths (UNDP study extrapolated), with the majority of those likely combatants, and a large number of the innocents taken by terrorist bombings, assassinations and downright criminal activity.
They also point to the use of excessive force at checkpoints, with probably several thousand deaths, a significant fraction of which could have been avoided through better training and planning.
And finally, by my reckoning, they point to rather limited use of air power on the coalition side, with deaths among innocent Iraqis in the low thousands, and concentrated among just a few locations (notably Fallujah).
Finally, I do think the invasion may turn out to have been a “mistake”, tough even with hindsight and in a few decades it may be difficult to tell conclusively. It may even turn out to be not just a “mistake”, but “worse”. What I haven’t seen yet, however, is any hard evidence of malicious intentions on the side of the coalition, in spite of the vociferous accusations flying around. It’s not nice to be accused of evil intent, when you are actually trying to help.
Hi Wilful,
The Soviet Union had the capability to pretty much destroy the US, which figures rather prominently among the reasons we didn’t go to war with them.
France has nuclear weapons, but they are a friendly democracy, no matter what Republican zealots may be saying about them.
And North Korea may or may not have nuclear weapons. Which figures rather prominently among the reasons why we wouldn’t want to attack it.
I find the debate about WMD’s rather strange. Iraq was attacked precisely because we knew with a high level of certainty that it didn’t have anything to kill millions with.
The WMD’s we thought it might have, only got such attention I think because the ceasefire after Gulf War I stated they had to verifiably get rid of them for the ceasefire to hold. As Tony Blair wanted to get security council approval (which he didn’t bother about with Kosovo) I think they wanted to concentrate on the argument that Saddam hadn’t come clear about his stocks and so the UN ceasefire conditions had been broken.
I certainly didn’t get frightened by his pile of WMD’s and if I had been, I’d think I would have been against risking Kuwait and Jerusalem getting nuked in a pre-emptive attack killing millions.
>
Actually most of the figures I’ve seen suggest that post-Gulf War fighting in both the south and Kurdistan killed around 100,000 people in total.
While I generally supported Bush Sr.s Iraq policy, I sometimes wonder if the US and its allies should have tried to establish a separate administration in the south as it did in Kurdistan.
On the other hand, the last three regime changes in Iraq – the military coup in 1958, the Ba’athist coup and Saddam’s subsequent seizure of power – each resulted in deaths in the thousands not the tens or hundreds of thousands.
Had the invasion not occurred, the most likely future course for Iraq would have been a coup by elements of the military or the Ba’athist regime. There were several coup attempts in the course of the 90’s and sooner or later one woul probably have succeeded.
The likely regime to follow such a coup would have been a non-democratic, reressive, corrupt Sunni-dominated militarydictatorship which would probably have been not quite as bad as Saddam.
The likely outcome of the current political process in Iraq is an Iranian-backed nondemocratic, repressive, corrupt Shia-dominated religious dictatorship.
Assuming the still imminent threat of civil war can be averted, the new iraqi government MIGHT be slightly less bad the regime which would probably have succeeded Saddam.
But we’re talking degrees and increments here not huge differences. How many people are you prepared to see die in an invasion this year to see one fewer person torutred next year?
jquiggin Says: May 16th, 2005 at 5:42 pm
A really interesting and crucial issue raised by Jack’s post is on what basis do we make an ex ante judgement about an issue like this. It is entirely possible for a principled person to come to an ex post conclusion which differs from one’s ex ante judgement, and yet still maintain that one’s ex ante judgement was the best one could have come to given what was known or reasonably knowable at the time.
On the other hand, an ex post conclusion that one’s ex ante judgement has not been borne out by events could also lead one to review the intellectual and ethical basis on which one made the original ex ante judgement, and be more likely to make a different ex ante judgement in a similar case in future.
I would be interested to read Jack’s response.
In the lead-up to the Iraq War I found myself considering the same issues that Jack mentioned and concluded that despite the obvious positives of getting rid of Saddam, the risk of major loss of human life and regional political instability meant that the war was unjustified.
Having previously supported the invasion of Afghanistan, the NATO intervention in kosovo and the Gulf War, this wasn’t an easy or comfortable decision.
One of my major concerns now is that the US public’s increasing disatisfaction with the conduct of the war (as demonstrated in opinion polls both on that specific topic and on general support for Bush) will lead to an unwillingness to engage in military action in future where it is justified.
Of course, soon the issue will probably be moot because the war-fighting capacity of the US will be so degraded that it probably won’t recover for a decade or more.
The French don’t do “friendly”. It’s not part of their way of thinking in affairs of state.
Teachers Unions are not exactly the most intelligent of organisations in Australia, I look forward to the day when they apply some effort to improving the education of children.
observa: �[the antiwar side] underestimated Iraqis desire for democracy and the willingness of the US in particular to facilitate it.�
This comment might appear less foolish had Iraqis’ raging thirst for elections held under occupation actually been anywhere near the centre of pre-war debate.
Implicit in the pre-war debate was the assumption that the invading COW would be responsible for governing Iraq(and Afghanistan) for some time. There was criticism that the COW wouldn’t stay the necessary course or provide the Marshall Plan wherewithal required. As well there was quite an argument about whether or not Iraqis were culturally and developmentally ready for democratic self-rule and indeed whether they’d get it (the usual puppet regime of the US accusation from the hard left) Some chose to ignore the beacon of light motivation of Bush and particularly Blair, which I personally pointed to on a number of occasions. Democracy may not have been central to you or the punditry pre-war but it was for the two Anglos.
Many presumptions were made and many ignored by both sides of the debate. Many have unravelled or are unravelling now. It remains to be seen long term whether COW leaders are great statesmen or naive fools. Iraqis are bearing the brunt of Islamic fundamentalists now and as well the fundies are preoccupied with our troops rather than our office workers. Also they’ve killed less of our troops than our office-workers prior to invasion. Bear that fact seriously in mind when you think about types of body counts. As for absolute body counts, how on earth could you possibly categorise and predict these types of casualties in a war zone described here http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=14916 Also the academics can keep busy netting out the casualties of their preferred sanctions. They had certainly underestimated the impacts of those on the legacy of infrastructure the COW inherited, but perhaps they should be addressing that deep concern with Kofi Annan and his bum buddies.
Heiko, it’s weird how conservative and cautious you are about counting deaths due to the actions of the US and how casually you claim that Saddam killed hundreds of thousands in the 1991 Shiite uprising.
“Also they’ve killed less of our troops than our office-workers prior to invasion. Bear that fact seriously in mind when you think about types of body counts.”
do you know how many iraqi office workers we’ve killed? do you care? perhaps you might want to bear those facts seriously in mind when you think about types of body counts. seriously dude, what are you even talking about? who is “they”? iraqis? i don’t recall iraqis killing any australian, english or american office workers, either before or after the invasion.
“…Kofi Annan and his bum buddies.”
Gratuitous homophobia – charming.