Study Claims Iraq's 'Excess' Death Toll Has Reached 655,000

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<p><a href=“http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15266.htm[/url]”>http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15266.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer</p>

<p>10/11/06 “Washington Post” – – A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.</p>

<p>The estimate, produced by interviewing residents during a random sampling of households throughout the country, is far higher than ones produced by other groups, including Iraq’s government.</p>

<p>It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group.</p>

<p>The surveyors said they found a steady increase in mortality since the invasion, with a steeper rise in the last year that appears to reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the news media and civilian groups. In the year ending in June, the team calculated Iraq’s mortality rate to be roughly four times what it was the year before the war.</p>

<p>Of the total 655,000 estimated “excess deaths,” 601,000 resulted from violence and the rest from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 unexpected violent deaths per day throughout the country.</p>

<p>The survey was done by Iraqi physicians and overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. The findings are being published online today by the British medical journal the Lancet.</p>

<p>The same group in 2004 published an estimate of roughly 100,000 deaths in the first 18 months after the invasion. That figure was much higher than expected, and was controversial. The new study estimates that about 500,000 more Iraqis, both civilian and military, have died since then – a finding likely to be equally controversial.</p>

<p>Both this and the earlier study are the only ones to estimate mortality in Iraq using scientific methods. The technique, called “cluster sampling,” is used to estimate mortality in famines and after natural disasters.</p>

<p>While acknowledging that the estimate is large, the researchers believe it is sound for numerous reasons…"</p>

<p><click above=“” link=“” for=“” complete=“” article=“”></click></p>

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<p>Let me know when it gets up around 25 Million.</p>

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<p>See the analysis of the methodology by Fred Kaplan, posted on Slate.com on October 20, 2006.</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.slate.com/id/2151926/[/url]”>http://www.slate.com/id/2151926/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>I agree that it would seem difficult to get any sort of accuracy under the present circumstances in Iraq.</p>

<p>However, I agree with the following:</p>

<p>From the Kaplan analysis:</p>

<p>“…Let’s say that the study is way off, off by a factor of 10 or five—in other words, that the right number isn’t 655,000 but something between 65,500 and 131,000. That is still a ghastly number—a number that, apart from all other considerations, renders this war a monumental mistake…”</p>

<p>ghastly.</p>

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<p>What they do know is the number of political refugees leaving the country.</p>

<p>I think the U.S. has a responsibility to take them in.</p>

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<p>Where are the folks who excitedly want to crow that it reall y"isn’t all that bad" in Iraq, because more people died in WWII?</p>

<p>Way to justify the death toll!</p>

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<p>Wars don’t run on schedules or death toll limits. Grow up.</p>

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<p>What war? The war ended in 2003. This is “the occupation”.</p>

<p>Stay the course.</p>

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mini~</p>

<p>Do you have any statistics concerning how many of these people desire to move to the U.S.? I’m going to guess that it’s about the same number as the number of Americans who would want to relocate from here to Iraq if Iraq were occupying our country.</p>

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<p>It’s not a matter of “desire”. It is a matter of accepting “political refugees”, which this country has a long tradition of doing. In this case, though, it ain’t out of the goodness of our hearts. We owe 'em; it is the U.S. that turned them into political refugees. </p>

<p>I honestly don’t know if it is 10,000 or one million (latest estimates from the U.N. Commission on Refugees is that there are a million refugees already, and more than a thousand a day (350,000 a year) are being added. The vast majority of them are secular, and feel their lives are threatened if they stay. </p>

<p>With Clinton having killed a million Iraqis, half of them children, and the current mess the U.S. created, it is the least we can do to live up to our proud traditions.</p>

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<p>

I’m not sure I’m understanding you, mini…are you saying that it doesn’t matter whether or not they WANT to come here?----that we should just MAKE them come here? Are you saying that Clinton has been responsible for more Iraqi deaths than Saddam?</p>

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<p>

Kind of like how the peace movement in the 60’s and early 70’s caused Congress to turn its back on the South Vietnamese and those who weren’t slaughtered by the North Vietnamese (whose Russian/Chinese allies did not abandon them) ended up as boat people. Those that didn’t drown were then accepted here as refugees. So, yeah, if the ISG recommendations are ignored and the Pelosi/Murtha crowd get their way and we prove what feckless allies we are once again and Iraq gets even worse … then we certainly owe them.</p>

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<p>Barrons is the epitome of the Republican Party. </p>

<p>He said let me know when “the number reaches 25 million” the est. pop of Iraq) and posted in another thread that “Islam has been moving backward since 622”. I don’t think it would be wrong to say that most, if not all conservatives share the same beliefs. They only supported this war because they thought it was a neat idea to go and kill Muslims. So don’t buy it when him and FF say they were going to fight for democracy. They’re just going for the blood.</p>

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<p>It’s news to me that peace activists had Congress in their pockets during that era. If they’d had that kind of control, we wouldn’t have been in the war. Surely you aren’t suggesting that those who opposed the Vietnam war were a majority of the voting public at the time?</p>

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<p>I’m not sure I’m understanding you, mini…are you saying that it doesn’t matter whether or not they WANT to come here?----that we should just MAKE them come here? Are you saying that Clinton has been responsible for more Iraqi deaths than Saddam?</p>

<p>Second question, first. I’m not saying it. UNICEF is saying it. Clinton (in a four year period) is responsible for about three times as many deaths (and probably six times as many child deaths) as Saddam Hussein for his entire reign. The European Union charged him (Clinton) with genocide, the U.N. high commissioner (Dennis Halliday) resigned, charging him with genocide, and that’s how “Oil for Food” came about.</p>

<p>First question. Only those who WANT to come here. There are tens of thousands of them, educated, but now semi-permanently unemployed living in slums in Jordan, Syria, or wherever else they manage to escape to.</p>

<p>“So, yeah, if the ISG recommendations are ignored and the Pelosi/Murtha crowd.”</p>

<p>ISG main recommendation is virtually the same as Murtha’s - “cut and run” (but put on a good show in doing so.)</p>

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<p>

So I guess by your logic that if the streets were filled with protestors encouraging the US to “stay the course” that Congress would have still pulled the plug on supporting our allies?</p>

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Only in a strange alternate universe is the ISG report consistent with Mutha’s cut and run.</p>

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<p>Maybe the 655,000 figure isnt so wacky afterall.</p>

<p><a href=“Web Page Under Construction”>Web Page Under Construction;

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<p>Well, the voters who made the decision to pull out are the kind of people who never march in the streets because they are too busy mowing the lawn. America pulled out because that was the choice made by the people who elect the federal government: middle class Chevy drivers, the moms and dads of the hippies. Mainstream America – as opposed to peace protestors – was sick of seeing kids get drafted and killed without seeing any positive results. By the early 70’s, Americans were also (rightly) getting skeptical about the idea that Communists would be storming the Jersey shore if they weren’t “contained” in Europe and Asia.</p>

<p>Nixon won in a huge landslide in 1968 and again in 1972. He wasn’t exactly pulling the peacenik vote away from McGovern. I guess by your logic, Congress cares more about leftists in the streets than about getting re-elected? I wish! If that were true, we’d have very different government than we have now.</p>

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<p>Actually, Hanna, you are partially correct. It wasn’t just the peace marchers that caused Congress to pull the plug, it was also the media that persisted in echoing the theme of the peace marchers. It was the Walter Cronkites of the media who pronounced the war unwinnable after Tet - failing to show that Tet was actually a huge defeat of the Viet Cong and the NVA but instead portraying it as a loss for America. With that kind of constant barage of protests and disinformation, it was not surprising that the Chevy drivers cooled to the war and the consequences to the South Vietnamese if we abandoned them. </p>

<p>Note that by the time we truly abandoned South Vietnam, American casualties were almost nill - we had successfully turned over the major combat operation to the South Vietnamese. However, when the NVA decided to break the Paris accords and wage a huge conventional battle against the South, the US stood by and did nothing - not even providing air support.</p>

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<p>If the Chevy drivers were just hostages in the stranglehold of Walter Cronkite, how do you explain Nixon’s obliteration of the anti-war McGovern in 1972, one of the most lopsided defeats in American history? Cronkite and his buddies weren’t exactly Nixon fans. Seems to me like the Chevy drivers were making up their own minds…they weren’t peaceniks, so they didn’t feel the need to get rid of their war president (no matter how much Cronkite told them to), but they were thoroughly sick of what was happening on the ground and stopped believing that the war was protecting them from Communism.</p>