Iraq War Numbers

Clayton Cramer looks at a report warning of the numbers that are being racked up in the course of the war in Iraq, and finds some problems with them.

Among problems, he finds:

Lott points out that a great many experts in the field--and significantly, many who opposed the Iraq War--find the methodology atypical and incorrect, with examples of double counting of costs, highly arguable assumptions about future interest rates...

One possible example of double-counting is to add in to the total the cost of maintaining the same military units if there were no war on. I don't know if the report does this, but it's certainly something to be on guard against.

Another number Clayton finds exaggerated (Quoting John Lott):

Possibly the most controversial claim in the book involves their estimate that well over one million Iraqis will have died from the US invasion by the year 2010. Without any caution or hesitation, they rely on an extremely controversial study published in the medical journal, Lancet. Stiglitz and Bilmes took Lancet’s estimated 654,965 deaths from the American involvement in Iraq from March 2003 to July 2006 and assumed that Iraqis would continue dying at that the same yearly rate through March 2010. The Lancet number is over 10 times the number of Iraqi deaths claimed by the Iraqi and US governments.

There are any number of people who are perfectly happy to take the numbers from the Lancet study at face value. However, one of the features of science is a ripple effect from facts. Facts don't exist in spendid isolation from each other -- they have consequences in the world. If the Lancet study is right, there are certain other facts that are implied, and these facts will be different from what they would be if the study is a gross exaggeration. These facts include:

A new study has been released by the Lancet medical journal estimating over 650,000 excess deaths in Iraq. The Iraqi mortality estimates published in the Lancet in October 2006 imply, among other things, that:

1. On average, a thousand Iraqis have been violently killed every single day in the first half of 2006, with less than a tenth of them being noticed by any public surveillance mechanisms;
2. Some 800,000 or more Iraqis suffered blast wounds and other serious conflict-related injuries in the past two years, but less than a tenth of them received any kind of hospital treatment;
3. Over 7% of the entire adult male population of Iraq has already been killed in violence, with no less than 10% in the worst affected areas covering most of central Iraq;
4. Half a million death certificates were received by families which were never officially recorded as having been issued;
5. The Coalition has killed far more Iraqis in the last year than in earlier years containing the initial massive "Shock and Awe" invasion and the major assaults on Falluja.

If these assertions are true, they further imply:

• incompetence and/or fraud on a truly massive scale by Iraqi officials in hospitals and ministries, on a local, regional and national level, perfectly coordinated from the moment the occupation began
• bizarre and self-destructive behaviour on the part of all but a small minority of 800,000 injured, mostly non-combatant, Iraqis;
• the utter failure of local or external agencies to notice and respond to a decimation of the adult male population in key urban areas;
• an abject failure of the media, Iraqi as well as international, to observe that Coalition-caused events of the scale they reported during the three-week invasion in 2003 have been occurring every month for over a year.

These are things that should be pretty easy to spot, if they exist. Those who believe the numbers in the Lancet study are welcome to look for them. If they persistently fail to turn up, that should be pretty evidence that the numbers published in The Lancet are bogus.