Shocking Tally of Iraq Civilian Causalities

[Occhidiangela]

Has anyone heard of the report done by Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins University?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2...49,00.html
I was in my car yesterday listening to NPR news when this subject came up. Mind you that I'm aware of civilian causality rates in wartime and don't find the tally of 100,000+ civilians overly shocking so much as the total our government officials are claiming at a mere 25,000 civilian deaths:

http://www.iraqbodycount.net/press/pr12.php

It's ironic that the majority of the civilian causalities are being caused by air strikes meant to lower the civilian death toll. From what I heard in the broadcast, the mathmatical formula Leis used is very precise and highly regarded in the scientific community as the best means of conducting reports of this nature. Other than that, I don’t have much of an opinion on the subject, but thought I’d share this interesting article with the LL.
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Strange numbers. It doesn't pass muster with my "does it make sense" test due to what I know about Iraqi casualties induced by air operations, Apr-Oct 2004.

For example, a raid in the spring of 2004 killed 40+ foreign fighters who were at a way station between the Syrian border and Baghdad. A party/person/faction in Ar Ramadi, who may have had land or relatives or something lost in the raid, made a big public spectacle about "a wedding having been bombed" and the international media picked it up, Al Jazera running a bunch of footage of caskets draped in coloful cloth. Sorry, folks, but there was no wedding at that location/grid. (Day of the week was wrong in any case . . .) Our intrepid researcher, however, would probably add that 40+ to his civilian casualty list, even though it was new recruits to Al Douri's or Zarqawi's insurgency who were killed. If one such report of "civilian" casualties can dupe such a one has he, how reliable can the numbers be? I am unsure.

He runs into the profound challenge in his attempts at rational accounting in determining how, in a guerilla war, just what is and is not a non combatant. He appears to default to "it must be a non combatant unless proven otherwise." I am pretty sure he was not on the ground counting dead bodies. That assumption strikes me as requiring a large leap of faith, since as a logical tool it fails even a modest test. And Johns Hopkins endorses this fellow? Interesting. NPR editors have their own agenda.

The majority of Iraqi deaths in the past two years have come from the insurgency/bombs/shootings/kidnappings, etc. For example: it took a full war and a lot of IED's to kill about 2000 Americans and wound about 15,000. In the past six months, about 3600 Iraqis have been killed or wounded by IED's, suicide bombs, shootings, raids, gun battles, etc.

The profound rarity of bombs falling from on high I can attest to based on what I know from professional experience. Put a different way, unless people had been induced to stand in groups of 100 or more just before a bomb was dropped, enough ordnance has not been dropped to kill even a fraction of the number he claims.

Now, if the death toll included March 2003 to Sept 2003, which includes the large muscle movement fighting that went on for three months and that damnable "Shock and Awe" thing, the problem becomes that unless you have examined each casualty event for cause -- be it bomb, artillery, undisciplined fire, and a whole host of other ways to die, to include folks who were killed the the Fedayeen Saddam -- his total is hard to support. It is yet another estimate, like Mayor Nagin's estimate of 10,000 dead in New Orleans from Katrina. His analysis rests on a series of estimations.

"mostly as a result of airstrikes by coalition forces, according to the first reliable study of the death toll from Iraqi and US public health experts."

Now, if he is attributing second and third order deaths (casualties = deaths or dead and wounded, I wonder?) to the alleged infrastructure problems in Iraq, some of which bombs probably caused, the cause stated of "air strikes" is pure bullsh**.

Why do I say that?

First off, there are options to dying from bad water that have nothing to do with bombs from the air, and secondly, the last two years have seen a sustained effort by the partisans of various sorts to deliberately sabotage public utilities. With bombs, from the ground. So, whose bomb "caused" the death of Achmed junior thanks to poisoned water, dead doctor, or a myriad of other related "causes."

The charaterization of "airstrikes as a cause" smells. I say this also due to what I know about what targets were explicity removed/prohibited from target lists, such as

Water plants
Electrical plants
Sewage plants
and all the usual Geneva prohibitions like hospitals

He may be on to something, and he is trying to fill in a grisly gap of knowledge about the impact the war has had on Iraq since March 2003: a daunting task.

Where are the mounds of bodies to support his claim of this mass slaughter from the air?

Only the dead know for sure.

Occhi

EDIT:

PS: "

We think it is unlikely that deaths were falsely recorded. Interviewers also believed that in the Iraqi culture it was unlikely for respondents to fabricate deaths," they write.

That's an interesting assumption to make when making claims of the magnitude of the study's focus. Depends on who they talked to.