Iraq Civilain Death Toll Survey Is Ridiculous

There are some staggering numbers out there, proposed and perpetuated by academia, suggesting the United States military has murdered more than a million civilians in Iraq since 2002, or roughly 1 out of every 30 people in that country. The "studies" suggest even this claim to be "conservative", as in, this number is a conservative estimate.

Remember, you can never trust any number given by a liberal! (see previous posts)

The numbers come primarily from two studies by the same group of people, conducted in 2004 and again in 2006. The first study surveyed 988 "households" in 33 "clusters" and found 73 total "violent deaths". The report includes a statistical anomaly, stating that the Fallujah cluster alone accounted for 52 deaths. This aberration was left in the final analysis based on the rationalization that it was "not sufficiently abnormal to warrant total exclusion from the study." So 3 percent of the data accounts for 66% of the results and they don't think that's "sufficiently abnormal"?

This is the sad state of science today.

Oh, but they go on to state that in the Fallujah cluster they visited 52 households and 23 were abandoned. They don't state why they surveyed buildings with no people inside and included that in their results, but do make the absurd speculation that the reason no people lived in those houses was because they were killed by U.S. actions.

Any rational-thinking person would now be completely comfortable dismissing the body counts from these surveys as the worthless speculative work of imbeciles. But wait, there's more.

The same group went back in 2006 and this time expanded their survey to 1849 households in 47 clusters. Again Fallujah data was included, and the results of this study state, "With 95% certainty, that between 426,000 and 794,000 Iraqis had died violent deaths as a consequence of the war." With 95% certainty? Seriously? If anything these results are even more dubious because of the attack on Fallujah carried out by U.S. Forces during that time. Remember that Fallujah was Saddam Hussein's hometown - that's where all the loyalists were concentrated (or scared shitless to rise up against their dictator), so the concentration of resistance was significantly higher there than any place else. I would venture that to use the survey numbers in a different light, 66% of the remaining Saddam regime was in Fallujah. Also remember that the U.S. military went to extraordinary lengths to protect civilians there, taking the unprecedented step of delaying the invasion for several days to allow civilians to leave the city! One could easily suggest, and I do, that ALL deaths in Fallujah should be considered enemy combatants.

That invalidates more than two-thirds of the survey results.

Now ask yourself this: Is 1849 households a sufficient sample? To suggest that the sample is a fair representation of the total population is a grave misstep, and one taken with obvious malice against the United States. Also, the 1849 households comprised 12,801 individuals, which is inconsistent with the birthrate of Iraqi women. The individuals number is inflated by 20%. There are 5.4 million households in Iraq, with 22% rural population underrepresented by the survey.

Finally, the survey inquired how many "violent deaths" were experienced by the household. The decision was made not to use actual hospital statistics because, "Only the innocent go to the hospital." Huh? Ignoring that justification as completely contradictory, the survey team instead simply knocked on "random" doors and asked how many people in the household have died in the last 40 months. Whoever answered the door would tell them a number and they would write it down. So actual data was disregarded in favor of the word of a distressed sliver of a largely un-canvassed population. The final conclusion, extrapolated linearly through 2010, is that, "about 20% of households surveyed had lost at least one member, and estimated that 1.03 million people had died in the war. Without compensating for the conservative biases mentioned above, their data and sample size gave them 95% certainty for a number of deaths between 946,000 and 1.12 million."

And the methodology is beyond question because it is the same methodology used in previous war zones, and it is at least somewhat unlikely that all of the previous studies could also have been flawed. Unless of course the same methodology were used... Round and round we go.

Science!!! (*sarcasm*)

Conservative biases? Right, because what they really want to say is that using their original data and including the Fallujah sample, 285,000 people died in the first 18 months of the war, and a linear extrapolation through the total 117 months of operations would yield a result of 1,852,500 civilian deaths and three times as many wounded, for a staggering and unbelievable total of roughly 7.5 million casualties! Viola - George Bush is worse than Hitler! (That was surprisingly easy.)

But they realize only vegetables or people who read Democrat Underground would believe such an obvious falsehood, so they are forced to stick with their "conservative" estimate of about a million deaths. Meanwhile, other outlets suggest anywhere from 15,000 to 748,000 deaths, a spread so large as to be useless.

Look, I am not suggesting Iraqi civilians have not died during the conflict. Clearly thousands have. But even this survey indicates almost as many civilians were killed by insurgents as by coalition forces, and I suggest that is the only conservative number in the piece. U.S. soldiers are bound by rules of engagement that the enemy is not. How many of our boys have died protecting civilians while the insurgents use them as shields? The people who did the survey cannot risk the truth, so they chose to ignore it and instead report lies to be used in anti-American propaganda. How many more will die because of their actions? Could this survey be considered an act of treason?

The truth is we do not know how many people have died and in most incidents we do not know who is responsible. That is the nature of war. The question is simply at what point do we say we can shed no more American blood? That is the only thing we can control. But believe me, when the United States withdraws its last man, violence in Iraq will continue, and it will be on the hands of the fundamentalists on either side of Islam who will perpetuate it. A functioning government with a respected rule of law and police entity is essential, or whatever the number of unintentional casualties at the hands of the coalition will pale compared to what Islam can do to itself.