By LILA GUTERMAN
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Thursday, January 27, 2005

When more than 200,000 people died in a tsunami caused by an Asian earthquake in December, the immediate reaction in the United States was an outpouring of grief and philanthropy, prompted by extensive coverage in the news media.

Two months earlier, the reaction in the United States to news of another large-scale human tragedy was much quieter. In late October, a study was published in The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, concluding that about 100,000 civilians had been killed in Iraq since it was invaded by a United States-led coalition in March 2003. On the eve of a contentious presidential election — fought in part over U.S. policy on Iraq — many American newspapers and television news programs ignored the study or buried reports about it far from the top headlines.

By Milan Rai
CRITICISING THE LANCET

As soon as the Lancet, the world’s leading medical journal, published an estimate that 98,000 Iraqis have died because of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the British Government attempted to undermine this work.

The Lancet estimate (usually approximated to 100,000 deaths) includes Iraqi civilians and insurgents, and includes all causes of death, whether violent or nonviolent, and whether they were caused by foreigners (such as US pilots) or by Iraqis themselves.

By Milan Rai
Justice Not Vengeance

OVER 100,000 DEAD?
The Lancet, the world’s leading medical journal, has published an estimate that 98,000 Iraqis have died because of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. This estimate (usually approximated to 100,000 deaths) includes Iraqi civilians and insurgents, and includes all causes of death, both violent and nonviolent.

The 100,000 figure is likely to be an under-estimate.

Les Roberts, Riyadh Lafta, Richard Garfield, Jamal Khudhairi, Gilbert Burnham
From The Lancet Journal

Summary

Background
In March, 2003, military forces, mainly from the USA and the UK, invaded Iraq. We did a survey to compare mortality during the period of 14·6 months before the invasion with the 17·8 months after it.

100,000 Iraqis Dead
380 tons of deadly explosives looted on the U.S. watch
Israel escalates new attacks against Gaza refugee camps
$70 billion in Congressional pipeline for next phase of war

by Phyllis Bennis
Institute for Policy Studies

As the election count-down goes into its final days, new evidence has come to the fore of just how high is the actual cost of the Iraq war and the administration’s disastrous Middle East policy.

According to a new report by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, Iraq has suffered a rise in the civilian death rate from 5% to 7.9% annually in the last 18 months. As a result, there have been 100,000 “excess deaths” of civilians in Iraq since the U.S. invasion began. Much of the rise in the death rate was due to violence, and the researchers cite U.S. air strikes on towns and cities as responsible for many of the deaths. Les Roberts, one of the report’s authors, told Reuters that, “the use of air power in areas with lots of civilians appears to be killing a lot of women and children. … What we have evidence of is the use of air power in populated urban areas and the bad consequences of it.”

The report is significant for several reasons. First, the credibility of Johns Hopkins and of The Lancet is virtually unchallengeable. The effort by Human Rights Watch to undermine the report’s veracity was limited to claims that the sample (988 households containing 7,868 people in 33 neighborhoods) was too small and that HRW investigation showed that the ground war, not bombing, caused more of the deaths. No one disputes that tens of thousands have died. Second, the report documents more than six times earlier estimates (from Iraq Body Count and others) of 16,000 civilian deaths. The report found that Iraqi civilians’ risk of death from violence in the period after the invasion was 58 times higher than before the war. Third, the report is the first to take into account the continuing consequences of the years of U.S.-imposed UN economic sanctions that are still devastating Iraqis.