Let Slip the Dogs of War

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach him now:

Iraqi Death Toll Exceeds 600,000, Study Estimates - WSJ.com By NEIL KING JR.: A new study asserts that roughly 600,000 Iraqis have died from violence since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, a figure many times higher than any previous estimate. The study, to be published Saturday in the British medical journal the Lancet, was conducted by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health by sending teams of Iraqi doctors across Iraq from May through July....

The Johns Hopkins team conducted its study using a methodology known as "cluster sampling." That involved randomly picking 47 clusters of households for a total 1,849 households, scattered across Iraq. Team members interviewed each household about any deaths in the family during the 40 months since the invasion, as well as in the year before the invasion. The team says it reviewed death certificates for 92% of all deaths reported. Based on those figures, it tabulated national mortality rates for various periods before and after the start of the war. The mortality rate last year was nearly four times the preinvasion rate, the study found.

"Since March 2003, an additional 2.5% of Iraq's population has died above what would have occurred without conflict," the report said. The country's population is roughly 24 million people. Human Rights Watch has estimated Saddam Hussein's regime killed 250,000 to 290,000 people over 20 years.

The Lancet study, funded largely by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for International Studies, said while the percentage of deaths attributed to the U.S.-led coalition has decreased over the past year, coalition forces were involved in 31% of all violent deaths since March 2003. Most of the deaths in Iraq, particularly in the past two years, have been caused by insurgent, terrorist and sectarian violence....

Paul Bolton, a public-health researcher at Boston University who has reviewed the study, called the methodology "excellent" and said it was standard procedure in a wide range of studies he has worked on. "You can't be sure of the exact number, but you can be quite sure that you are in the right ballpark," he said.

A similar, smaller study by the same team in 2004 put the number of deaths at the time at 9,000 to 194,000...

Comments

[P O'Neill]

It's likely that Glenn Reynolds et al will simply dust off their previous contributions on the evils of random sampling used for the first version of this study and repost them.

[hack]

It is estimated that about 600,000 were killed in the US civil war, which at the time had a population of 31 million. Iraq has a population of about 26 million. Interesting coincidence.

[andres]

"One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic."

I've yet to see any evidence that Team Bush's attitude towards civilian deaths or deaths overall in Iraq is any different than in Uncle Joe's famous quotation above. Tragic.

As to the numbers, that's a huge increase. The most glaring part is of course:

"The mortality rate last year was nearly four times the preinvasion rate, the study found."

The writers of the reports will of course be accused of siding with Saddam Hussein against their own people. Some things don't change.

[jerry]

I am so ashamed for my country. And I feel terrible for my daughters.

[tomboy]

Hack,

I think that 600K died from the two armies in the US civil war. The numbers are higher when non-combatants are counted who died from disease, starvation, etc, as are included in this new Lancet article.

Wikipedia says that there were more than 970K casualties including both these groups.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War

[Dan]

P O'Neill: if they do bring out anything about the 'evils of random sampling' - there is a collection of defences of the 2004 lancet report to throw back at them at http://www.iraqanalysis.org/info/128

[A. Zarkov]

A lot of people think that war in primitive societies (bands, tribes and chiefdoms) was either rare or not particularly lethal. According to Lawrence Keeley (“War Before Civilization”) neither is true. Primitive people’s wars were extremely common (almost continuous) and gruesomely lethal. Keeley calculates that if modern states suffered the same rate of killing, wars would have claimed about two billion people since 1900. Ironically these societies actually hated war, and didn’t hold their warriors in high esteem. After a battle one was expected to go through a ritual cleansing. Perhaps this explains why veterans have been treated so poorly in so many societies.

[anne]

We should never have attacked Iraq, for Iraq was completely contained and no threat to America. Having attacked Iraq though, we should have left immediately after deposing the government; left as quickly as we had entered. However, we should have left each month these 3 1/3 years. Always though there are the lunatic tragic reasons given all around why we cannot leave. We must leave Iraq immediately.

[anne]

We have needed to leave Iraq month after month these years. Delay has been tragic and absurd beyond all understanding. We must leave Iraq immediately.

[rea]

We have to liberate them by killing them all . . .

[Roland Gustafson - Sweden]

President Bush and some of his top advisors and generals - must be arrested and given a death penalty, before another 100 000 thousand Iraqis will be killed by american soldiers.

[paul]

if my math is correct, the invasion has killed 14 times as many per year as Saddam did. is that what they mean by brutal efficiency?

[Euthydemos in Athens, GA]

Unfortunately, although possibly a correct estimate, it is so much higher than any previous estimate and out of line with Iraqi Body Count.org that no one will likely believe this number. The spin is already saying that this is a politically motivated fabrication.

This is not the kind of news that you can spring at the last minute. They should have been releasing parts of these findings for months and building consensus and refuting the inevitable "well you can make statistics say anything." I think they squandered a chance to make an impact by releasing it in this way.

And just to be clear, I am a die hard liberal, and opposed completely to the Iraq invasion, well informed, watch the News Hour, listen to NPR and even I have a hard time swallowing this.

[Corvid]

This is a shameful number but what's nearly as shameful is the media attention given to it--very little. Shouldn't this be a banner headline across every front page? I'll bet you that not 1 in 100 Americans knows the death toll of 3.4 million in the war in Indochina, while virtually everyone knows that 58,000 Americans died there. It's the media's criminal inattention to the broader figures that allows the United States to periodically get away with unleashing genocide-scale slaughter like this.

[jerry]

I find it intriguing that the touchstone for body counts is Iraq Body Count -- even Bush supposedly used their numbers.

When this crap started Iraq Body Count suffered most of the same slings and arrows as the Lancet Study did.

Now though, they are one of eight studies, and their numbers are the lowest. Guess who the wingnuts cite?

http://www.medialens.org/alerts/06/060125_paved_with_good.php

"Les Roberts, lead author of the Lancet report, told us last year:

"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. Our estimate is the third from highest. Four of the estimates place the death toll above 100,000. The studies measure different things. Some are surveys, some are based on surveillance which is always incomplete in times of war. The three lowest estimates are surveillance based." (Roberts, email to Media Lens, August 22, 2005)"

Euthydemos: you may be right in what the authors *should* have done, but it is my understanding that most peer-reviewed articles cannot be released early, the best known scientific journals themselves will refuse to print anything that is not first released through them. Sadly, scientific journals wield massive (and abusive) monopoly and copyright powers over the scientists themselves. This has spawned an Open Access movement by the scientists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/world/middleeast/11casualties.html

October 11, 2006

Iraqi Dead May Total 600,000, Study Says
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

BAGHDAD — A team of American and Iraqi public health researchers has estimated that 600,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003 American invasion, the highest estimate ever for the toll of the war here.

The figure breaks down to about 15,000 violent deaths a month, a number that is quadruple the one for July given by Iraqi government hospitals and the morgue in Baghdad and published last month in a United Nations report in Iraq. That month was the highest for Iraqi civilian deaths since the American invasion.

But it is an estimate and not a precise count, and researchers acknowledged a margin of error that ranged from 426,369 to 793,663 deaths.

It is the second study by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. It uses samples of casualties from Iraqi households to extrapolate an overall figure of 601,027 Iraqis dead from violence between March 2003 and July 2006.

The findings of the previous study, published in The Lancet, a British medical journal, in 2004, had been criticized as high, in part because of its relatively narrow sampling of about 1,000 families, and because it carried a large margin of error.

The new study is more representative, its researchers said, and the sampling is broader: it surveyed 1,849 Iraqi families in 47 different neighborhoods across Iraq. The selection of geographical areas in 18 regions across Iraq was based on population size, not on the level of violence, they said....

[anne]

Any death, any significant physical or psychological wound, Iraqi or American or other nationality in Iraq is tragic. Were the Iraqi deaths 1/6 of the extrapolation, the sadness would be terrible. We must leave Iraq immediately.

[Roger Albin]

Releasing data slowly is not an option for a project like this. Publication in a high quality peer-reviewed forum like The Lancet is probably the best way of demonstrating the quality of the work. A good journal like The Lancet will not publish previously aired work or dribs and drabs of data. You have to present the whole package and analysis in its final form to get through the review process at a journal like The Lancet. If your goal is to conduct a partisan campaign then the drips and drabs approach, accompanied by some PR, is probably the way to go. If your goal is scientific credibility, then this is the proper approach.
As for the study itself, the sampling method itself is probably the best possible. The real difficulty is that deaths are reported by interviewees and the best good faith efforts of the interviewers can't eliminate a lot of potential biases. Then there is the problem that this is still a relatively small sample with extrapolation to all of Iraq. Relatively small errors in ascertainment will ramify to potentially huge differences in estimated totals. The paper reports approximately 550 post-war deaths compared to a much smaller pre-war baseline. Suppose the pre-war deaths are underestimated by 100 deaths or the post-war deaths over-reported by the same number? The final extrapolation would be quite different. This is an unavoidable aspect of the method that can be avoided only with a much larger sample, hard if not impossible to do.
Its not reasonable to conclude that this is an accurate estimate. It is reasonable to conclude that prior estimates significantly underestimate the magnitude of the casulties but by how much is uncertain.

[anne]

http://www.juancole.com/2006/10/655000-dead-in-iraq-since-bush.html

October 11, 2006

Juan Cole:

A careful Johns Hopkins study has estimated that between 420,000 and 790,000 Iraqis have died as a result of war and political violence since the beginning of the US invasion in March, 2003.

Interesting conclusions are that we are wrong to focus so much on suicide car bombings. The real action is just shooting enemies down with bullets. Only 30 percent of the deaths have been caused by the US military, and that percentage has declined this year because of the sectarian war.

And, folks, this is a major civil war, with something close to 200,000 dying every year.

I once warned that a precipitate US withdrawal could result in a million dead a la Cambodia or Afghanistan. Little did I know that the conditions created by the US invasion and occupation have all along been driving toward that number anyway!

This study is going to have a hard ride. In part it is because many of us in the information business are not statistically literate enough to judge the sampling techniques. Many will tend to dismiss the findings as implausible without a full appreciation of how low the margin of error is this time. Second, it is a projection, and all projections are subject to possible error, and journalists, being hardnosed people, are wary of them.

The New York Times report has already made a serious error, saying that deaths in the Saddam period were covered up. The families interviewed knew whether their loved ones were disappearing in 2001 and 2002 and had no reason to cover it up if they were. The survey established the baseline with a contemporary questionnaire. It wasn't depending on Iraqi government statistics.

Another reason for the hard ride is that the Republican Party and a significant fraction of the business elite in this country is very invested in the Iraq War, and they will try to discredit the study. Can you imagine the profits being made by the military-industrial complex on all this? Do they really want the US public to know the truth about what the weapons they produce have done to Iraqis? When you see someone waxing cynical about the study, ask yourself: Does this person know what a chi square is? And, who does this person work for, really?

Then Anthony Cordesmann told AP that the timing and content of the study were political. But is he saying that 18,000 households from all over Iraq conspired to lie to Johns Hopkins University researchers for the purpose of defeating Republicans in US elections this November? Does that make any sense? And, if Cordesmann has evidence that the authors and editor set their timetable for completion and publication according to the US political calendar, he should provide it. If he cannot, he should retract.

Ironically enough, the same journalists who will question this study will accept without query the estimates for deaths in Darfur, e.g., which are generated by exactly the same techniques, and which are almost certainly not as solid....

[Michael Walzer epigone]

This site has often called for Bush's impeachment. Actually, he should be bound over to the Hague for trial as a war criminal.

[me]

But wait, it gets better, look what Bush is doing to US.

Veteran's Affairs: Report indicates that 1 in 4 Veterans of the "Global War on Terrorism" claim disabilities

http://www.nsarchive.org

Washington, DC, October 10, 2006 - One in four veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars are filing disability claims, according to records released by the U.S. Department of Veterans' Affairs (VA) under the Freedom of Information Act after nine months of denying their existence and posted today on the National Security Archive Web site.

The VA responded to the Archive's original January 2006 FOIA request for documents about the number of disability benefits claims filed by veterans from the current war in Iraq by claiming that no documents existed, apparently because the reports concern the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) rather than being limited to the Iraq War. Notably, one of the reports indicates that GWOT is the "military name for the current wars in and around Afghanistan and Iraq." A similar report was released in December 2005 detailing Gulf War veterans' benefit activity. An updated copy of this report was released in March 2006.

Only after the Archive administratively appealed the VA's "no documents" claims and advised the VA that it was prepared to file a lawsuit did the agency manage to locate the records. One is a January 30, 2006, document: "Compensation and Pension Benefit Activity Among 464,144 Veterans Deployed to the Global War on Terror." It reports that more than 150,000 deployed Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (Iraq) veterans, out of more than 560,000 veterans of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), filed disability compensation and pension benefits claims with the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA). The other is a July 20, 2006, document: "Compensation and Pension Benefit Activity Among Veterans of the Global War on Terrorism."

Veterans' groups have criticized the VA for using emergency appropriations to fund veterans' benefits rather than realistically planning and budgeting for the veterans' needs. According to Veterans for America, the newly released data suggests official estimates dramatically understate the future cost of the current Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. If the current trend continues, then VA could receive as many as 400,000 disability claims from the 1.6 million deployed active duty and reserve service members in the Global War on Terrorism. Jonathan Powers, Associate Director of Veterans for America and an Iraq War veteran, warned, "VA already has a backlog, and the claims process is only going to get worse unless VA takes action now. VA has no plan or funding to process and pay existing and future claims to ensure our veterans promptly receive the disability benefits and healthcare care they earned."

In its most recent FOIA Annual Report, the VA purported to process 1.9 million FOIA requests during FY 2005, with a median processing time of 11 days. Meredith Fuchs, the Archive's General Counsel, expressed dismay at how the FOIA request was handled: "For the agency to take nine months to 'find' information that is of clear current public interest in the context of the ongoing Global War on Terrorism is astounding. It is one thing for VA to be reluctant to deliver bad news, but another thing entirely to deny the existence of the information."

[anne]

Immediately, this morning, public radio news thought what shouls be emphasized was the political timing of the report. What should be emphasized is the tragedy of war and the lunatic tragedy of needless war, and occupation of another country generations after we should have learned many times over that colonizing must be no more. This is the lunatic Iraq tragedy from which those who would have us leave are accused of being cutters and runners.

[andres]

"This site has often called for Bush's impeachment. Actually, he should be bound over to the Hague for trial as a war criminal."

Considering that Bush is so easy to manipulate, it is even more important to have Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and co. undergo trial in an international tribunal. Saddam too, judging by what a farce his trial is starting to become. All a fantasy, of course. Kaiser Wilhelm and his generals all lived in comfortable retirement after WWI.

[anne]

http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/2006/10/birth_pangs/#comment

October 11, 2006

Birth Pangs
By Matthew Yglesias

A new epidemiological study by Iraqi and American public health experts sponsored by Johns Hopkins and published in the Lancet has concluded that there have been 655,000 "excess deaths" in Iraq since the American invasion. Kevin Drum reminds us that an earlier methodologically similar study that also came to striking conclusions about the death toll was widely dismissed by hawkish pundits and the establishment press, but none of their objections actually held any water. Kevin also runs the numbers so we can see that of these 655,000 deaths about 186,000 -- 4,700 per month -- were killed by coalition forces or airstrikes.

That, obviously, is a lot. And it ought to be sobering to anyone who still thinks of this as an operation that's justifiable on anything remotely resembling humanitarian grounds, or that people who oppose the war can somehow be accused of indifference to the fate of the Iraqi people. This is a ghastly level of death under any circumstances, but it's rendered all the more horrifying by the extreme self-righteousness with which it's all been undertaken.

[Barkley Rosser]

As has been pointed out by juan cole and some others, this number exceeds the best estimates of civilians killed by Saddam Hussein. So much for that justification of the war, one of the few that was left (and supposedly more are being tortured now than under him as well). Even if the number is only half or a third of what is estimated in this scientific publication, it is a lot more than we have been hearing and simply horrific.

[Ken Houghton]

Just a detail, though not a minor one: the 2004 study was to determine INCREMENTAL deaths caused by the war, which is the 9K-194K bandwidth; the "amazing" thing at the time was that the lower boundary does not include zero.

The new study appears to be a determination of total "violent deaths."

Realistically, the new study could be called "Reaping the Whirlwind," but it's not directly comparable to the headline data of the first.

[anne]

Ken Houghton, please extend the analysis in your useful comment to statistical ranging.

[Alan]

Regarding the methodology, I think everyone would admit it is not as reliable as, say, that of the U.S. census. On the other hand, it is clearly far more reliable than those used to estimate the number of pesons killed by Saddam, or by Pol Pot, or in the Cultural Revolution, and so on. I think anyone who has been scrupulous never to cite any of those numbers can legitimately reject these solely on methodological grounds. And if not, not.

[Anon]

Iraq Body Count counts only deaths reported in the local newspapers. If you used that same method of counting deaths for New York City, for instance, you'd have about 20 deaths per day - a few shootings, a few fires, and a few obituaries. (Actual number around 180-200 deaths per day in NYC.)

Iraq Body Count is a minimum. Most deaths are not reported by newspapers. This is not rocket science, people.

Meanwhile, in economics news... the Bush Administration's shenanigans in delaying end-of-year Medicare payments until FY2007 has paid off:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061011/ap_on_go_ot/budget_deficit

The media are reporting that the deficit is nice and small.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/washington/11veterans.html

October 11, 2006

Data Suggests Vast Costs Loom in Disability Claims
By SCOTT SHANE

Nearly one in five soldiers leaving the military after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan has been at least partly disabled as a result of service, according to documents of the Department of Veterans Affairs obtained by a Washington research group.

The number of veterans granted disability compensation, more than 100,000 to date, suggests that taxpayers have only begun to pay the long-term financial cost of the two conflicts. About 567,000 of the 1.5 million American troops who have served so far have been discharged.

"The trend is ominous," said Paul Sullivan, director of programs for Veterans for America, an advocacy group, and a former V.A. analyst.

Mr. Sullivan said that if the current proportions held up over time, 400,000 returning service members could eventually apply for disability benefits when they retired....

[maggie]

If you want to hear a fascinating first-person account of how a similar 2004 survey was carried out, search on the "What's In a Number" episode of This American Life http://www.thislife.org
Although available for purchase, you can listen for free on your computer (streaming audio).

[sglover]

Euthydemos in Athens, GA | --

"And just to be clear, I am a die hard liberal, and opposed completely to the Iraq invasion, well informed, watch the News Hour, listen to NPR and even I have a hard time swallowing this."

I don't doubt any of what you say, and I'm agnostic about the Johns Hopkins survey. But I think that, no matter how closely we might try to follow events in Iraq, we always need to keep in mind that we're forced to rely on a very imperfect lens. Even if we discount the generally shoddy state of American news media, reports from Iraq come from people who, for their own safety, have to live in a security cloister. And I suspect that many or most on-scene journalists live in a cultural bubble as well.

[anne]

Funny thing about public television News Hour. Just after the Iraqi government had been deposed there was a panel of experts on the Middle East to discuss the then and coming occupation. The chair of the Columbia department of Middle East studies startled me by saying we had to leave Iraq immediately. We had only a very short time to leave Iraq. At once, the anchor stopped the comment by asking whether we were supposed to "cut and run." So much for the PBS News Hour. Phooey.

Amid the cheering, we needed to leave Iraq immediately, but who could listen to the cries of sanity?

[Ken Houghton]

Correcting my note above: this study is also INCREMENTAL DEATHS.

Glenn Greenwald has more, including links, at
http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/10/counting-iraqi-deaths.html

[David Lloyd-Jones]

It is unfair (to Saddam) to compare the deaths caused by the American campaign in Iraq with those under Saddam's rule.

The common term is "hundreds of thousands" of deaths under Saddam. What this ignores is that most of those were deaths on the Iranian front (and the numbers are usually inflated to include both Iranian and Iraqi fatalities) -- but that war was fed by the US, whose military at the time was run by, guess who, little Donnie Rumsfeld and That Genius Richard Cheney. Saddam was America's front man in expressing America's very violent pique at the Iranian ayatollahs' revolution.

I.e., there's nothing new about America causing hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq. It's S.O.P. for Donnie and Dick.

[Grumpy]

Corvid: "This is a shameful number but what's nearly as shameful is the media attention given to it--very little."

As it happens, I couldn't find this story on the AP wire until it was reported as Bush's reaction to the study. Thus, the first take on the study was a dismissal of it.

[Marky]

There's only one appropriate punishment for the Bush cabal, but it will never happen.

Short of the proper level of punishment, it is my dream that one day, the top 50 or so people in the Bush White house will all be put together to live in a small glass house, like Eichmann, to live out the rest of their days in utter public humiliation.
Given the ultra-secretive nature of the Bushistas, nothing would be please me more than to see them stripped of all liberty, dignity and privacy for the rest of their natural lives.

And no, they can't make Powell and Rice into servants.

[anne]

http://www-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/julius_caesar/
http://www-tech.mit.edu/Shakespeare/julius_caesar/julius_caesar.3.1.html

June, 1599

Julius Caesar
By William Shakespeare

Act 3. Scene I

ANTONY

O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!
Thou art the ruins of the noblest man
That ever lived in the tide of times.
Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood!
Over thy wounds now do I prophesy,--
Which, like dumb mouths, do ope their ruby lips,
To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue--
A curse shall light upon the limbs of men;
Domestic fury and fierce civil strife
Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;
Blood and destruction shall be so in use
And dreadful objects so familiar
That mothers shall but smile when they behold
Their infants quarter'd with the hands of war;
All pity choked with custom of fell deeds:
And Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice
Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war;
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/opinion/11wed2.html?ex=1318219200&en=df19308829e0d994&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

October 11, 2006

The Cost of Doing Your Duty

During the recent debate over how to handle the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, the Bush administration made a lot of noise about its commitment to fair treatment for the detainees and its respect for the uniformed lawyers of the armed forces. Anyone who believed those claims should consider the fate of the Navy lawyer whose integrity helped spark that debate in the first place.

In 2003, Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift was assigned to represent Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni citizen accused of being a high-ranking member of Al Qaeda — for the sole purpose of getting him to plead guilty before one of the military commissions that President Bush created for Guantánamo Bay. Instead of carrying out this morally repugnant task, Commander Swift concluded that the commissions were unconstitutional. He did his duty and defended his client. The case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled in June that the tribunals violated American law as well as the Geneva Conventions.

The Navy responded by killing his military career. About two weeks after the historic high court victory in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, Commander Swift was told he was being denied a promotion. Under the Navy's up-or-out system, that spelled the end of his 20-year career...

[dubblblind]

"My dear Mademoiselle, perhaps you have already observed that in Casablanca, human life is cheap..."

Major Strasser

[andres]

anne: ah yes. Not my favorite play by the Spear Shaker (wrong one to teach in high school, imo), but it had its moments:

"There is a tide in the affairs of men,
that when taken at the flood,
leads on to fortune..."

The old baldy skull fetishist knew something about sailing in coastal areas it seems; he would have gotten a real kick out of Hawaiian surfing. But yes, I sense that it's time to grab our surfboards and give Bush and Cheney a non-lapdog Congress to work with come November (it's not as easy to fix 460-odd state elections compared to one presidential election in 1-2 swing states...). Happy surfing.

[sglover]

Commander Smith's case doesn't reflect well on the Navy. I would think that any military lawyer who managed to represent a client before the Supreme Court -- not to mention one who won -- would almost have to have glowing evals, by definition. It's a little hard to see why the service would want to shed an officer with his demonstrated effectiveness.

[Douglas Knight]

a figure many times higher than any previous estimate

A total figure, but not a death rate many times higher--more time has past! It sounds like only about triple the rate of the previous study by the same authors.

[Aniruddha G. Kulkarni]

If accurate, De Long of 22nd century when he writes (and hopefully completes!) his book on economic history will surely include George Bush in the same league as butchers of 20th century- Hitler, Mao, Stalin among few others. For me at the age of 46, western civilization is increasingly only a "good idea".

[d'Nile]

Hitler's body count hit ten million. Those of Mao and Stalin were even higher.

Shrub's bodycount is not going to come within even an order of magnitude unless turning Tehran into a glass parking lot moves from plan to implementation, past tense, within the next two years.

[kharris]

d'Nile,

Coming within an order of magnitude? Depends on what you mean by "within." If Hitler's tally was 10 million, doesn't 1.1 million get Bush "within" an order of magnitude - over 1 million? Unless Baker is floating a trial balloon for Rove (which would not be a surprise), I think we are clearly on the path to being responsible for over 1 million deaths. When it comes to culpability, the difference is that Bush created the situation in which a million may die, but only gave orders that resulted directly in the killing of, so far in high end numbers, under 200,000 people. Hitler gave the orders that led pretty directly at millions of deaths. Mao and Stalin, too.

[me]

"doesn't 1.1 million get Bush "within" an order of magnitude "

just a comma

[Roger Albin]

Even if the Lancet article projection is correct, which is arguable, it doesn't get this administration into the Hitler-Stalin-Mao-Pol Pot club.
But, if things continue as they are going presently, then the Bush administration is headed for membership in another odious group. There are reasonable estimates that the cost in human lives of Italian Fascism, including Italian participation in WWII and the colonial misadventures in Ethiopia and North Africa, is in the several hundred thousand to million range (Source - RJB Bosworth's Mussolini's Italy). Given the remarkable incompetence of the Bush war effort, comparisons with Fascist Italy are not totally strained.
Bush, meet Mussolini!

[Mark]

Oh boy Bush isn't as bad as Pol Pot!

[Lawrence]

Odd, maybe Stalin and Hitler, were at the top. Doesn't this put Bush in the same league as Slobidan and the Rwanda killers?

[Jon Fernquest]

Still, what is needed to convince those with a prior bias against high numbers like this, is some demographic model to explain it. What are the factors causing these deaths?

Most conservatives are not willing to count those deaths that inevitably result from reduced public health conditions during war, but aren't actually battle casualties with bullet wounds, for instance higher infant mortality, among the elderly, among displaced refugees?

[enigma_foundry]

"if my math is correct, the invasion has killed 14 times as many per year as Saddam did. is that what they mean by brutal efficiency?"

No, that's what the mean when they say "Compassionate Conservativism."

[Clawhammer]

Where is Sebastien "we are not exactly firebombing Iraq" Holsclaw when we need him?

In Sebastien's world, excess pharma returns are due to "survival bias" and excess deaths are due to the researchers' 'morbidity bias'.

[JonF]

Re: Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and co. undergo trial in an international tribunal.

I would much prefer to have these miscreants tried at home under the American justice system. It is our political system which really needs a thorough exorcism of these people, and the catharsis of such a trial might just do the trick. Not that I expect it to happen.

[Steve LaBonne]

"Where is Sebastien "we are not exactly firebombing Iraq" Holsclaw when we need him?"

Just head on over to Crooked Timber where you'll get plenty of him, and even more (and more bizarre) "contributions" from "Jane Galt".

[andres]

JonF: I agree with the sentiment, but the simple fact is that launching a war of aggression against a foreign country is not a breach of US law or the Constitution (unless it is done so without the consent of Congress, but that's another issue). Whereas it is a crime under international law, eg the Nuremberg Declarations (I'm not sure about the official title...). So I still think that most of the current White House leadership deserves the international spotlight, though in the most unpleasant manner possible.