More Numbers

A new report to be published in the British medical journal The Lancet has estimated the number of excess deaths in Iraq after the invasion as 100 000, mainly due to violence which is mainly due to the occupying forces.

As regards the methodology, the sample sizes seem quite small to me. Also, it's not clear how to reliably interpret data gathered from interviews (for example, Iraqis not uncommonly blame the US troops for bombings set off by Iraqi or other non-American terrorists, and a similar effect is imaginable in these numbers).

The Iraq Body Count, using a conservative methodology, has counted 14 000 to 17 000 civilian deaths. Given that deaths which are not confirmed by multiple reports don't make it into IBC, and that combatants are not included, the real number is probably a modest multiple of this figure - some tens of thousands.

This number of corpses is difficult to visualise. I think of of 10 Srebrenicas, 30 World Trade Centers, 50 Sabra and Shatilas. What does that mean? Too abstract. I think of the bus ride from here to London, watching out of the window for a hour and a half, corpses lined hand to foot by the road, enough for the whole hundred kilometers.