Iraqi Civilian Casualty Stats: It Takes Lotsa Chefs to Cook These Books
Shocking as it may seem, the civilian casualty figures that General David Petraeus used in his Iraq war progress report dog-and-pony show earlier this month differ from the generally higher numbers less partisan body counters use. But what’s really interesting in a grotesque sort of way is that the general’s numbers also differ significantly from the Pentagon’s official numbers, which are higher in some cases and lower in others.
Now before we impugn this whole crowd for having nefarious motives, of which there no doubt are some, let’s note that compiling wartime statistics always is tough and is all the more so in Iraq because of the prevalence of sectarian killings. Which begs the question: Just what is a sectarian killing?
The answer, it would seem, is elastic.
Writing in the WaPo, Karen DeYoung offers this sobering example:
“On Sept. 1, the bullet-riddled bodies of four Iraqi men were found on a Baghdad street. Two days later, a single dead man, with one bullet in his head, was found on a different street. According to the U.S. military in Iraq, the solitary man was a victim of sectarian violence. The first four were not.
“Such determinations are the building blocks for what the Bush administration has declared a downward trend in sectarian deaths and a sign that its war strategy is working. They are made by a specialized team of soldiers who spend their nights at computer terminals, sifting through data on the day’s civilian victims for clues to the motivations of killers.”
Then there is the range of available statistics.
To cite but one example, Petraeus cherry-picked civilian deaths only for his presentations, while Dan Macomber, a chief warrant officer who is in charge of the Multi-National Force’s sectarianism database, counts both civilians killed and wounded, which surely provides a more comprehensive picture.
But this, according to DeYoung, is where it gets interesting:
“In recent months, most of the military’s indicators have pointed in a favorable direction. As with all statistics, however, their meaning depends on how they are gathered and analyzed. ‘Everybody has their own way of doing it,’ Macomber said of his sectarian analyses. ‘If you and I . . . pulled from the same database, and I pulled one day and you pulled the next, we would have totally different numbers.’
“Apparent contradictions are relatively easy to find in the flood of bar charts and trend lines the military produces. Civilian casualty numbers in the Pentagon’s latest quarterly report on Iraq last week, for example, differ significantly from those presented by . . . Petraeus, [whose] numbers were higher than the Pentagon’s for the months preceding this year’s increase of U.S. troops to Iraq, and lower since U.S. operations escalated this summer.”
Ilan Goldenberg is less circumspect, asserting at Democracy Arsenal that a major difference between Petraeus’ numbers and the Pentagon numbers is that the general has taken what he asserts is the best available U.S. casualty data and blended it with Iraqi data that is notoriously unreliable.
DeYoung does not say that the numbers are being cooked, but does note that:
“The U.S. intelligence community considers more than numbers in making its war assessments. ‘What the Iraqis perceive’ about their country and their daily lives ‘may be more important than what the numbers are,’ said a senior intelligence official . . . Even so, he said, intelligence officials found contradictions in the available statistics as they wrote last month’s National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, whose conclusions were somewhat less optimistic than the military’s. . . .
“While both Petraeus and the recent Pentagon report emphasized improved statistics over the past three months, the intelligence community generally declines to declare trends based on data measured in periods shorter than six months to a year. Several senior intelligence officials said last week that most numerical indicators appear to be moving in a uniformly positive direction in the nearly two months since the intelligence estimate’s data cutoff — although they said it is too early to determine definitive trends.”
Alas, it will be something of a miracle if the men and women under Petraeus’s command can keep that “uniformly positive direction.”
An inept and corrupt Baghdad government that has failed to meet every benchmark of consequence set by the White House got a go-free card from President Bush in his prime-time speech following the appearances by Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker on Capitol Hill.
The president’s open-ended extension of the surge sends a clear message to the Al-Maliki regime that the pressure to work toward national reconciliation — which is necessary if modest military gains are to be sustained — is off because its American helpmates, who are busily arming both sides in the civil war, won’t not be leaving anytime soon.
Then there is the feckless Al-Maliki himself, who actually had the temerity to claim earlier this week that his government had prevented a civil war that in point of fact has been raging for a year and a half.
I guess Shiites and Sunnis will just have to reconcile on their own. If they aren’t killed trying as were representatives of both sects in a bombing in Baquba yesterday.
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8 Responses to “Iraqi Civilian Casualty Stats: It Takes Lotsa Chefs to Cook These Books”
NEVEr trust the governments of nations at war to release reliable stats. Even in the PBS Burns series on WW2, you can see how the #s were cooked for years.
WE claim tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died since the invasion, while others have it over a million. While neither is totally accurate, history suggests the higher figure is much closer to reality.
The ellipsis in the above quote “Civilian casualty numbers in the Pentagon’s latest quarterly report on Iraq last week, for example, differ significantly from those presented by . . . Petraeus” implies a sinister reading, while the full quote is more mundane.
The reason for the difference, from the ellided material: “Petraeus’s chart was limited to numbers of dead, while the Pentagon combined the numbers of dead and wounded.”
Arguable, Petraeus metric was more precise, for most people today seem to confuse “casualties” with numbers of dead…in fact, it means both dead and wounded.
It seems we have returned to the body count obsessed Vietnam era, and McNamara metrics allowing the best and the brightest to “perfectly” understand the war via spreadsheets.
Does anyone bother citing the fact that it is insurgents, militias, AQ who are directly responsible for the vast bulk of these casualties? Or the near impossibility of accurate data collection in Iraq, especially for “civilian” deaths? All that is needed is for the dead insurgent’s friends to take away his AK-47 and – “Alakazam” – he is a civilian killed by those gun-happy American cowboys.
I anticipate yet another report in the “Lancet” between September and November 08, prior to the election, declaring how 200 percent of the population of Iraq have been killed since the invasion.
I pointed to this post a few days ago and is the only source I know of that’s compiled all the various numbers into one chart. Here’s a direct link to the chart itself.
It looks to me like the trend since late last year is downward, but do fewer civilian deaths mean we are “winning?” No by itself, no. The sad fact is that partisans on both side will choose the statistic that “proves” their pre-determined point of view or intentionally obfuscate for the same reason. It’s extremely vexing to me to try to find reliable data and analysis in this politicized environment.
Marlowe:
You chide Shaun for an ellipsis, then you counter with Big Mac and claims of de-militarizing militias by taking away guns.
Both in Vietnam, and in Iraq (if you read some of the blogs by soldiers) it is just, if not far more, likely that the civilian count is alot higher because many innocents are counted as ‘insurgents’ because they are part of the collateral damage that might destroy a house or building w one true insurgent or terrorist, while 50 innocents perish. But, the military claims it got a viper’s den of 51 insurgents.
These are old tricks used by the accountants of death. Sorry, but Petraeus danced for his masters, and as with Uncle Tom Powell, it was a disgrace.
Entropy: Interesting comparison, but still GIGO.
The body count battle in Iraq is quite different than in Vietnam. In Vietnam the body count total was ratcheted up to show numbers of enemy dead. The problem, of course, was that many of the “enemy” were civilians. In Iraq, body count math is ratcheted down to show that civilians are NOT being killed as often as before. The actor is not US military forces but various militias and terrorist bands.
All of this is dubious because there are multiple ways to calculate casualties (Marlowe rightly points out that that includes dead and wounded; as a Civil War scholar I see mistakes of this nature all the time). And then to ascertain motive is even harder. My own research into Missouri during the Civil War shows that many people get killed for BOTH political and criminal reasons. Surely that’s true in Iraq too. Insurgents can kill and torture Shi’ites AND take their money to fund future terrorist acts. And vice versa.
The other problem is that downward trends in violence might not mean as much they seem: one has to ask why numbers may have gone down. Is it because of increased US military presence? If so, it’s a temporary success but with no provable sustainability. Is it because Sunnis and Shi’ites have started to reconcile? That would be genuinely good news over the long term. Or is it because so many Baghdad neighborhoods have been cleansed of sectarian minorities that there are no minorities left to intimidate or kill? That would be the worst news. But this is the appropriate follow-up question to claims that killings have dropped.
Elrod:
Your observations really flesh out the subject.
It is my view (as opposed to having the hard and cold numbers to back it up) that much of drop in sectarian violence in Baghdad can be attributed to neighborhoods being cleansed of Sunnis and, in fewer instances, Shiites through death squads and forced migration.
Elrod: When I wrote ‘it is just, if not far more, likely that the civilian count is alot higher because many innocents are counted as ‘insurgents’ because they are part of the collateral damage that might destroy a house or building w one true insurgent or terrorist, while 50 innocents perish. But, the military claims it got a viper’s den of 51 insurgents,’ I basically stated your position of upping the enemy bodycount for political purposes.