All of these publications devoted additional space to providing an overview of the war and its impact, with a particular emphasis on quantitative and empirical facts. Nonetheless quite striking differences exist between the mainstream U.S. sources and the others; most Americans are being presented with a very different view of the war on Iraq than any of the other audiences. Central objective ways of describing the impact of war are much less covered in the U.S. mainstream: the quantity of ­refugees and displaced people, civilians killed, and Iraqis held prisoner; the impact of U.S. air bombardment; and economic and social dislocation. Differences also exist in whose subjective descriptions of the last five years are put forward; what questions are asked; and how the history of the war is narrated.

A brief comparison

The World Health Organization and Iraqi Health ministry officials have just released a new estimate of the deadly toll of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. (Press Release | Article) The key result is this: “151,000 Iraqis died from violence between March 2003 and June 2006.” Iraq‘s Minister of Health Salih Mahdi Motlab
Al-Hasanawi reflects,  ”The survey results indicate a massive death toll since the beginning of the conflict.”

Like two earlier studies sponsored by Johns Hopkins University, the study is based on household surveys, and clustered sampling techniques. These are active methods of monitoring, and therefore more likely to be accurate than passive monitoring of the media represented by Iraq body count. What is likely to grab headlines, however, is that this latest estimate, while several times higher than the IBC estimate, is also only one quarter of the estimated toll from violent deaths given by the more recent Johns Hopkins study:  654,965 (392,979–942,636 is the 95% confidence interval) excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war; 601,027 (426,369–793,663) due to violence.

While both studies are subject to random sampling error, the new study uses a larger sample, and should be more reliable for those areas adequately sampled. However, researchers in the WHO – Health Ministry study failed to sample households in numerous sites due to concerns about security. These sites fell particularly in the provinces of Baghdad, Anbar, and Nineveh. The researchers’ response was to incorporate a correction. Unfortunately, the correction was scaled to the passive results observed by Iraq Body Count.

They have long been clear reasons to expect that Iraq Body Count underestimates deaths in outlying provinces, areas hostile to journalists, and during large-scale conflict. Johns Hopkins researcher
Gilbert Burnham has discussed this problem: “The IBC uses news reports mainly written in English, by people who can’t leave a very narrow area of Baghdad, while violence is worse in the Al Anbar and Diyala provinces. Mortuaries provide figures but a lot of bodies don’t make it there.”

Under the new study’s methodology, this undercount is the basis for extrapolation to the missing cluster sites. Anbar and Nineveh provinces are precisely where the Lancet studies have reported large numbers of excess deaths, as shown in the attached map from the Lancet. Of course, it is precisely where security concerns are highest that we would expect the highest level of violent deaths. The new study is likely to be an under estimate of violent death on the country.

If we look to regions where a complete sampling occurred in both studies, the additional data provided by a more dense household survey should provide us a clearer picture of the mortality impact of the war on the Iraqi people. Unfortunately, the new data has not been disaggregated in a way to allow such a comparison.