The Daily Background

A new AP-Ipsos poll shows that Americans really don’t have any idea how many Iraqi civilians have been killed in the ongoing war. Says the AP:

The number of Iraqis killed, however, is much harder to pin down, and that uncertainty is perhaps reflected in Americans’ tendency to lowball the Iraqi death toll by tens of thousands.

Iraqi civilian deaths are estimated at more than 54,000 and could be much higher; some unofficial estimates range into the hundreds of thousands. The U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq reports more than 34,000 deaths in 2006 alone.

Among those polled for the AP survey, however, the median estimate of Iraqi deaths was 9,890. The median is the point at which half the estimates were higher and half lower.

The AP also says that even if Americans knew the death toll, it wouldn’t likely make a difference: “Christopher Gelpi, a Duke University political scientist who tracks public opinion on war casualties, said a better understanding of the Iraqi death toll probably wouldn’t change already negative public attitudes toward the war much. People in democracies generally don’t shy away from inflicting civilian casualties, he said, and they may be even more tolerant of them in situations such as Iraq, where many of the civilian deaths are caused by other Iraqis.”

Still, according to the poll, when respondents were asked “Has there been an acceptable or unacceptable number of Iraqi civilian casualties in Iraq?” 77% answered “unacceptable.” (17% were satisfied, another 6% were unsure.) 77% also agreed that an “unacceptable” number of American soldiers have died in Iraq.

One study last year financed by MIT estimated that more than 650,000 Iraqi civilians have died since the initial US invasion in March of 2003. Many pundits and self-proclaimed “experts” have dismissed the study as being far too high to be reasonable, but the methodology is worth considering before it’s dismissed:

The survey was conducted between May 20 and July 10 by eight Iraqi physicians organized through Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. They visited 1,849 randomly selected households that had an average of seven members each. One person in each household was asked about deaths in the 14 months before the invasion and in the period after.

The interviewers asked for death certificates 87 percent of the time; when they did, more than 90 percent of households produced certificates.

In other words, for residents to fake the results to the survey, there would have to be a huge deliberate effort to game the statistics by saying that their relatives had died when they hadn’t actually died. And to do this, hundreds of Iraqi families would have to have fake death certificates lying around just waiting for the study’s conductors to come by and ask for proof of death. Not very likely.

This same methodology has been recognized as legitimate and the epidemiologist who lead the study has used the same method in other conflicts and had his results cited by the US State Department and the United Nations as accurate. For some reason, his numbers haven’t been endorsed this time around.

Filed under: Iraq Related, Z-TDB Blog