(This document is a summary of the full document available from http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/defended/.)
Introduction
Since March 2003 Iraq Body Count (IBC), a group of independent volunteers, have been keeping a daily record of media-reported civilian deaths. This is not a complete record, as we have always publicly maintained, but provides an irrefutable baseline of certain and undeniable deaths, and includes detail-specific information not available in any other study on war-related Iraqi deaths, in many cases down to the name and identity of the victims.
However, some have found our work wanting, even “shameful”.
In an ill-informed and antagonistic campaign spearheaded by the web-based pressure group Media Lens, it has been vehemently claimed that we are grossly undercounting deaths; that we severely underrepresent the deaths caused by the US military; and that we do nothing to advertise these gross errors or to correct them. This article shows the first two claims to be false, and therefore the third claim becomes irrelevant.
Our critics are united by a deep distrust of Western media, and an ardent advocacy of the views of epidemiologist Les Roberts, a co-author of the respected Iraqi mortality study by Johns Hopkins University published in the British medical journal The Lancet in 2004.
The media stand accused by our critics of failing to give the Lancet study the priority it deserves, and for citing IBC figures in preference to it. Our critics demand that we give Lancet preference over our own ongoing work and insist that we have a moral obligation to instruct the media to do the same.
The Lancet study makes an important contribution to knowledge. However, our critics rely on highly misleading and speculative conclusions drawn from that study and its lead author, which this article analyses and rebuts.
Is IBC grossly undercounting deaths?
Since late 2005 the claim has been made by Les Roberts, and widely repeated, that:
“…there are now at least 8 independent estimates of the number or rate of deaths induced by the invasion of Iraq. The source most favored by the war proponents (Iraqbodycount.org) is the lowest.”
This claim is false. A related claim, again asserted by Roberts and disseminated by Media Lens and their followers, that IBC’s count is low “most likely by a factor of five or ten,” is also false.
The origin of these claims is a ranking of seven of these estimates (see facsimile of original table below) compiled by Roberts and published in September, 2005 in Humanitarian Practice Network Paper no.52, (hereafter HPN 05), a publication of the British think tank, the Overseas Development Institute.
Table 1 (facsimile of Table 6 in HPN 05, page 30)
Source | Date of Information | Violent deaths per day implied |
Iraq Body Count | 3/1/03 – 2/1/05 | 17 |
Iraq Ministry of Health68 | 4/5/04 – 5/05 | 22 |
NGO Coordination Committee of Iraq (unpublished) | 2004 | 50 |
3/1/02 – 5/30/04 | 56 | |
Lancet research (violent deaths only)70 | 3/1/03 – 9/21/04 | 101 |
Mental health study, 200471 | 2003 – 2004 | 133 |
Iraqi Kaffi | 3/03 – 10/03 | 152 |
Unfortunately, this compilation, which Roberts refers to as a “sensitivity analysis”, is itself riddled with gross errors and inconsistencies.
First, the IBC per-day death rate in HPN 05 was given as 17, when it was in fact 32 for the time-frame in the table – an under-calculation of IBC’s per-day rate by almost 50%.
Second, the average per-day figures provided in HPN 05 take no account of the fact that death rates have varied greatly across different time-frames.
When just these two corrections are applied to produce a somewhat more rigorous analysis, the per-day rates for IBC exceed that of one study, provide a rate exceeding half of two other studies, and provide a rate of at least one-third of the remaining studies. Simply put, when IBC’s correct total is used, and when like period is compared to like period, there is no longer any other study for which IBC’s number provides only one-fifth the number, let alone one-tenth.
Third, three of the entries in the HPN table do not stand up to even the most basic academic or technical scrutiny, in two cases lacking any description of a methodology which could be scrutinized, and so must be removed from consideration.
Fourth, the four serious studies that remain measure different categories of victim and so their per-day death rates are bound to differ.
The remaining study that contains the largest number of categories of victims, the Lancet, produces the highest per-day rate of the four studies, as could be expected. The Iraqi Ministry of Health (with only two categories) shows the lowest per-day rate, with IBC and IMIRA (better known as the Iraq Living Conditions Survey – hereafter ILCS) falling between these two extremes.
In addition, the ILCS survey, which improves on the study by Roberts et al. in several crucial respects, is strangely under-emphasised by Roberts, Media Lens and their followers, yet it is superior to the Lancet study on sample size, geographical distribution of samples, and number of deaths recorded. As a result its 95% confidence intervals are far smaller, indicating far more precision in its estimate. On this basis, the ILCS estimate should be taken as the most reliable estimate of violent, conflict-related deaths available for the period it covers.
When appropriately compared to ILCS, the worst one could say of IBC is that its count could be low by a factor of two, a far cry from factors of “five or ten”.
Does IBC underrepresent deaths caused by US forces?
There are two main arguments our critics use to support the allegation that IBC minimises US crimes.
They firstly make erroneous claims (supposedly demonstrated by the Lancet study) that coalition forces directly caused 84 percent of Iraqi deaths, a proportion far greater than reported by IBC.
In fact, Coalition-caused deaths in the Lancet study are no higher than in IBC, and lie between 40 and 50 percent. Claims of “84 percent” can only be arrived at if Lancet’s Falluja outlier is reinserted and taken as representative.
Falluja data was excluded from the Lancet estimate on sound scientific grounds and is an extreme overestimate when compared to the ILCS findings. The Falluja data cannot be applied to an estimate for Iraq as a whole, and neither can the “84 percent” claim.
Our critics secondly claim a gross discrepancy between the number of air strikes known to have been carried out by the USA during 2005 and the small number of such strikes involving civilian deaths that they found in an examination of the IBC database.
In fact, current US air strike rates are far below the intensity of the invasion phase. During the first month of the invasion there were 20,733 air strikes, an average of 691 per day. The total number of air strikes for the whole of 2005 is 654. Thus there were more air strikes in a single day of the invasion phase than in the whole of 2005.
An analysis based on the Lancet data suggests that around 9,200 deaths occurred as a result of air strikes during the invasion phase, translating to roughly 4 deaths for every 9 air strikes. If this ratio were maintained into 2005, then 654 air strikes would be expected to cause around 290 deaths. IBC has recorded 185 (civilian) deaths from air strikes during 2005.
If these extrapolations are reasonable, then we may have missed 100 of these deaths. A discrepancy of this sort, or even one several times greater, is not on such a scale as to justify the sweeping claims made by our critics, that IBC provides “a very one-sided picture of who is doing the killing.” Neither, for that matter, is this discrepancy of a scale that would be visible to a sample survey such as Lancet’s.
In sum, the claims that IBC is assisting a cover-up of US-caused Iraqi deaths by underrepresenting deaths from air strikes are pure conjectures. During the period of the Lancet survey, IBC recorded a higher proportion (47 percent) of coalition-caused deaths than was found in Lancet’s central estimate (43 percent). More recently, IBC cannot be directly compared to any other study. There is no other study. And so claims of such a cover-up are not only offensive but speculative in the extreme.
There are no “gross errors” that IBC needs to correct.
We have demonstrated in the article that our critics have established no serious errors which require the kind of urgent action they demand, let alone the more extreme and irresponsible of these, such as that we “should cease” our work.
There will always be media errors (willful or otherwise) in presentation of data. It lies well beyond the power of IBC to prevent politicians from lying, pundits from spinning the facts, or journalists from missing a qualifier about our work.
In the gaps between our basic tasks, we do what we can to update, improve, and explain our work, through the editorial content on our web-site, and in some cases, in direct co-operation with news organizations, guiding them on how to appropriately present IBC and its numbers.
But this non-urgent work has always had to take second place to our primary data gathering work, and the continual updating of the database.
IBC’s work is not perfect, neither is its website. We will continue to improve our website and our work, as and when we are able, and taking into account all valid criticism. However, we will not do this based on the priorities and timescale demanded by uninformed and histrionic critics.
Getting back to the really important issues
Acceptance of bald assertions without proper critical scrutiny is always dangerous. It is doubly dangerous when such assertions are endorsed and repeated by individuals who have reputations for critical acumen (whether as intellectuals, or investigative journalists). This does not progress the cause of truth and justice.
We have consistently argued that the efforts of independent fact-finders are little more than stop-gaps for the properly-funded and coordinated studies which only governments have the level of funds to resource, and the level of authority to commission. The best that independent or survey studies can achieve is to serve as a thorn in the side to those who would prefer us to believe that such work is impossible and attention should be placed elsewhere. We remain such a thorn by constantly keeping the tragedy of the ever-mounting civilian death toll in the eye of the public.
We are not alone in this: there are many hard-working and brave people doing what they can to bring knowledge and understanding of this man-made disaster to the world, even in the employ of the Western media so despised by our critics. IBC ensures that their efforts are collected, preserved, and given additional value as contributions to a pluralistic and increasingly detailed picture of the consequences of the Bush/Blair war on Iraqis.
No one method or means will capture this picture completely. Even if the conflict ended today, that picture would continue to emerge for decades to come.
But to put our faith in speculation is to give up before we’ve properly begun.
(Full 48-page document as html and PDF from available from http://www.iraqbodycount.org/editorial/defended/.)
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