Denial Over Iraqi Deaths

Alexandra Walker

October 12, 2006

It's been one day in the U.S. news cycle since the findings of the new study on Iraq deaths were released, and still not one credible criticism of the study has surfaced. Yet American newspapers today are filled with headlines suggesting the study's methods and motives are being widely attacked. Dig beneath the headlines broadcasting controversy—"Critics say 600,000 Iraqi dead doesn't tally," "New study estimating number of dead in Iraq hotly contested,""Disputed study says 600,000 Iraqis killed during war "—and you'll find the articles are quoting the same handful of critics, almost all of them Bush administration partisans.

But let's focus on Anthony Cordesman, the one high-profile critic of the new study by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who merits attention. The study's other chief detractors all have obvious biases: President Bush, war cheerleader in chief; General Casey, head of U.S. troops in Iraq, and the Iraqi government, whose strings are pulled by the United States.

Cordesman hails from the centrist Washington national security think tank, CSIS , and strives to be nonpartisan, so I read his comments about the study carefully. His main criticism of the study rests not on the methodology or the results, but on the timing of its release . Politically influenced, he complains, to affect the outcome of U.S. elections. Perhaps, though he cites not a shred of evidence to support this allegation. And more importantly, that complaint says nothing about the validity of the study's findings.

Appearing on this morning's episode of"The Diane Rehm Show" to defend his attack on the study's integrity, Cordesman instead undermined his position. In an effort to condemn it, he attempted to point out a weakness of the study by bringing up all the wounded Iraqis that a study like this doesn't account for. Cordesman said:

In one sense, this kind of report actually underestimates the problem...What I find particularly troubling…it isn’t just a matter of killed, it’s a matter of wounded.

Okay, Tony, you've just reinforced the thrust of the study's conclusions: violence in Iraq is out of control. He did mutter something about the "credibility" of the study's methods, which the author of the study easily neutralized. Joining Cordesman on the show was one of the study's coauthors,Les Roberts, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Columbia University School of Public Health. Roberts countered Cordesman's weak attack on his methodology by pointing out that the sampling method his team used is an industry standard:

Sampling is part and parcel of every medical study we undertake…this is how the U.S. government is spending millions of dollars everywhere—through something called the Smart Initiative "—in order to estimate death rates in times of war.

We don't have to take Roberts' word for it. Let's see what research experts have to say on that front.

John Zogby, head of the polling agency Zogby Internationa', told the San Francisco Chronicle today that the study's methods have been used to estimate casualties in Darfur and the Democratic Republic of Congo, adding:

The sampling is solid. The methodology is as good as it gets.

It is what people in the statistics business do.

The same article referenced supporting quotes from other researchers who had been interviewed for other articles:

Ronald Waldman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University who worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for many years, told the Washington Post the survey method was "tried and true." He said that "this is the best estimate of mortality we have."

Frank Harrell Jr., chairman of the biostatistics department at Vanderbilt University, told the Associated Press the study incorporated "rigorous, well-justified analysis of the data."

In a comment in the Lancet  accompanying the article on the study, the editor explained the rigorous review process the study had to pass before being published:

…it is worth emphasizing the quality of this latest report as judged by four expert peers who provided detailed comments to editors. All reviewers recommended publication with relatively minor revisions. For example, one adviser noted that “this is an important piece of research which should be published because it is possibly the only non-government funded scientific study to provide an estimate of the number of Iraqi deaths since the U.S. invasion.” She underscored the “powerful strength” of the research methods, a view supported by other reviewers.

Let's review.

Knowledgeable people attacking the study who, when pressed, can credibly back up their criticisms: 0

Knowledgeable people defending the study in print based on a cursory survey: 6 and counting

Yet, the U.S. media bends over backward to characterize the study as "contested" when only a handful of critics, George W. Bush among them, questions the findings.

Eventually the quibbling over the study's methodology and motives will subside and we will hopefully focus on its meaning.John Tirman, whose Center for International Studies at MIT helped organize the study put it this way:

Even if there were a large sampling error in the survey—which there does not seem to be—the numbers would be colossal in scale. And it is the meaning of these colossal numbers that we must debate. We now have empirical evidence of the scale of this human disaster. In that light, what is best for Iraq? How can such violence be ended? How can the United States carve out a constructive role from the ruins of its intervention?