In an exclusive for IraqMortality.org Milan Rai, Author of War Plan Iraq, Regime Unchanged, and Chomsky's Politics gives indepth analysis of the three major mortality studies conducted in Iraq; Iraq Body Count, The Lancet, and The UNDP Report. This document is presented to help activists more fully understand the differences and similarities between these studies.

For five days, begining on October 24th, almost 100 grassroots groups and individual activists in the US, UK, and Switzerland will toll a bell in their communities for Iraqis who have lost their lives in this war and for the families and loved ones they have left behind. This tolling of bells will also usher in the one year anniversary of the publishing of The Lancet Study on October 29th which estimates 100,000 Iraqi deaths due to the war and occupation.

INTRODUCTION

As the death toll in Iraq continues to grow, one question haunting the debate over the occupation is the scale of this loss. Supporters of the continuing war seek to confuse and obscure the issue by presenting existing estimates as in conflict with each other. However, when we examine the best-known Iraq mortality estimates, we find that they tend to support rather than contradict each other.

All known estimates agree that the death rate in Iraq, especially the rate of violent death, has increased dramatically since the US/UK invasion in March 2003. They all indicate that number of ‘excess deaths’ (deaths that would not have occurred if not for the war) is staggeringly high.

IRAQ BODY COUNT

The first authoritative, and still constantly-updated, estimate of war-related deaths in Iraq was compiled by Iraq Body Count (IBC). In July 2005, IBC issued a dense, readable analysis of recorded civilian deaths due to the invasion and occupation of Iraq from March 2003 to March 2005. Careful and conservative work by IBC principal researchers Hamit Dardagan, John Sloboda, Kay Williams and Peter Bagnall, showed that there had been 24,865 civilian war-related deaths, almost all of them as a direct result of violence, reported between 20 March 2003 and 19 March 2005.

In order to provide irrefutable, minimum figures for the death toll, IBC only records civilian deaths which have been reported by two reputable English-language sources.

IBC observed in its June 2005 report: ‘The population of Iraq is approximately 25,000,000, meaning that one in every thousand Iraqis has been violently killed since March 2003.’

Source: The Columbia Journalism Review
by Lila Guterman
March/April 2005

Last fall, a major public-health study appeared in The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, only to be missed or dismissed by the American press. To the extent it was covered at all, the reports were short and usually buried far from the front pages of major newspapers. The results of the study could have played an important role in future policy decisions, but the press’s near total silence allowed the issue to pass without debate.

Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education
by Lila Guterman
January 27, 2005

When more than 200,000 people died in a tsunami caused by an Asian earthquake in December, the immediate reaction in the United States was an outpouring of grief and philanthropy, prompted by extensive coverage in the news media.

Two months earlier, the reaction in the United States to news of another large-scale human tragedy was much quieter. In late October, a study was published in The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, concluding that about 100,000 civilians had been killed in Iraq since it was invaded by a United States-led coalition in March 2003. On the eve of a contentious presidential election -- fought in part over U.S. policy on Iraq -- many American newspapers and television news programs ignored the study or buried reports about it far from the top headlines.

Source: Left Hook
by M. Junaid Alam and Noam Chomsky
December 23, 2004

On December 17th, Left Hook co-editor M. Junaid Alam met with Professor Noam Chomsky at his MIT office to get his thoughts on the ideological justifications and historical realities behind America's "war on terror." Professor Chomsky spent a half-hour taking apart the framework of "civilization" versus "barbarism," pointing to Western and particularly US state-sponsored atrocities, laying out the grave nature of war crimes committed in Iraq, attacking the intellectual culture which sanctions massive suffering, and explaining the elite's knowledge of the roots of terrorism.

-Transcribed by M. Junaid Alam and slightly edited for clarification by Professor Chomsky

Source: Znet by Stephen Soldz November 03, 2004

[corrected 11/5/04*]

One justification for the Iraq war was to remove the barbarous regime of Saddam Hussein, thereby freeing Iraqis from the threat of death at the hands of his regime. Yet, from the first days of the war, accounts have surfaced of Iraqi civilian deaths at the hands of "coalition forces" and from the increased crime and chaos that have swept much of the country.

The United States and its British and other allies claim they do everything in their power to prevent civilian casualties. Yet, repeatedly accounts have appeared of civilians dying at checkpoints, in passing American convoys, in house searches, and in the relentless bombing campaigns that are allegedly precision strikes on known terrorist hideouts. Reports have also surfaced about increased murder rates.[1] If the rates of Iraqi civilian deaths increased significantly since the invasion, it would undercut the last remaining rationale for the war.

Source: The Economist
November 4, 2004

A statistically based study claims that many more Iraqis have died in the conflict than previous estimates indicated

THE American armed forces have long stated that they do not keep track of how many people have been killed in the current conflict in Iraq and, furthermore, that determining such a number is impossible. Not everybody agrees. Adding up the number of civilians reported killed in confirmed press accounts yields a figure of around 15,000. But even that is likely to be an underestimate, for not every death gets reported. The question is, how much of an underestimate?