Trinity of dark news on Iraq
The Washington Post has published a trio of damning articles on the state of affairs in Iraq. Baghdad itself has become a large graveyard: 110 bodies were found last week while sectarian violence continues unabated.
Meanwhile, a new study funded by MIT and performed by Johns Hopkins puts the estimated number of excess deaths as a result of the war at a heart stopping 655,000. (The exact number is anywhere between 392,979 and 942,636). Even the low number exceeds the number killed by the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan.
Bush immediately said that the methodology used has been “pretty well discredited”. No one went on the record discrediting the methodology. The closest they came was a quote from Michael E. O’Hanlon from the Brookings Institute. O’Hanlon’s impressive analyst credentials and connection to the Project for the New American Century notwithstanding, he is not a biostatistician.
If you disagree with using samples to extrapolate general statistics you better start rejecting all health statistics about the U.S. If you disagree with the particular method (cluster surveys) then you should also reject statistics coming from “discredited” sources such as the U.S. government. Interview with Les Roberts, co-author of the study: (some emphasis added)
LES ROBERTS: You know, I don’t want to sort of stoop to that level and start saying general slurs, but I just want to say that what we did, this cluster survey approach, is the standard way of measuring mortality in very poor countries where the government isn’t very functional or in times of war. And when UNICEF goes out and measures mortality in any developing country, this is what they do.
When the U.S. government went at the end of the war in Kosovo or went at the end of the war in Afghanistan and the U.S. government measured the death rate, this is how they did it. And most ironically, the U.S. government has been spending millions of dollars per year, through something called the Smart Initiative, to train NGOs and UN workers to do cluster surveys to measure mortality in times of wars and disasters.
So, I think we used a very standard method. I think our results are couched appropriately in the relative imprecision of [inaudible]. It could conceivably be as few as 400,000 deaths. So we’re upfront about that. We don’t know the exact number. We just know the range, and we’re very, very confident about both the method and the results.
In context, these shocking statistics come almost simultaneously with the decision allowing Iraq to create autonomous regions of control. In U.S. history, the compromise between state and federal power was brokered to stabilize the fledgling country. Although the U.S. compromise eventually broke down and led to civil war, there was not an open conflict already between the two sides. Meanwhile, in Iraq: (emphasis added)
Parliament on Wednesday approved a controversial law that will allow Iraq to be carved into a federation of autonomous regions, after Sunni Arabs and some Shiite Muslims stormed out of the session in protest.
A Shiite politician from the Moqtada Al-Sadr block has it right:
Nasaar al-Rubaie, a lawmaker from the Sadr bloc, said: “The present conditions are not conducive to establishing regions, because we lack a strong central government that can overrule the regions.” In fact, he added, “the central authority is actually weakening instead of being solidified and strengthened.”
Even though the Shiites would be the biggest beneficiary of such regions (the Kurds having already created their de facto autonomous region) the Sadr aligned Shiites correctly realize that absent any meaningful central authority, a confederation of states is no different than a group of sovereign nation-states. Given the current political situation the passing of this legislation will do nothing but to increase the level of violence in Iraq.