Two items in the trove of Iraq war documents just released by WikiLeaks have caught the attention of some on the right whose thinking is, to put it charitably, muddled:
… Well, so far the two biggest scoops from the latest document dump are that the infamous Lancet study was bogus, and that WMDs were found in Iraq in quantity. Neither of these stories is actually news to people who were paying attention, but now — conveniently enough just before an election, and even nicely timed for George W. Bush’s new book release — these stories are getting a fresh round of play. . . .
Barbara O’Brien debunks (admirably and beautifully) both of these cretinous conclusions:
The field notes released recently estimate 109,032 Iraqi deaths over a six-year period, including about 66,000 civilian deaths. The civilian deaths detailed in the reports were mostly from roadside bombs or sectarian violence. This caused some Aussie to note:
I’m not sure it’s what WikiLeaks intended, but its latest leaks reveal that the infamous Lancet paper which claimed the US-led liberation of Iraq cost the lives of 655,000 Iraqis in fact exaggerated the death toll by at least 600 per cent.
Of course, the Lancet study and the field notes are apples and oranges. The Lancetstudy was not trying to measure the number of people killed by wartime violence. It was a study of the changes in mortality rates FROM ALL CAUSES before and after the
U.S.coalition invasion. ALL CAUSES included deaths from sickness, from falling off ladders while changing light bulbs, from heart attacks, from getting drunk and drowning in a bathtub, whatever.The Lancet people took large samples and determined that the mortality rate in Iraq, expressed as deaths per 1,000 per year, had gone up from 5.5 before the invasion to 13.3 after the invasion. This was their principal finding. Again, this is ALL DEATHS, not just deaths that happened during some military action.
The point of this was not to determine how many people were being killed directly by guns and bombs, but as one way to measure quality of life before and after the invasion. And this is important, because the real impact of war is not just the direct impact of guns and bombs. It is the impact of scarcity of clean water, or baby formula, or antibiotics. It’s also the impact of the abundance of stress.
A person who died in his home of a treatable illness because the local hospital was bombed and the doctors ran away is just as much a casualty of war as the hospital personnel who died in the bombing. But the military field report would not have counted such a death; the Lancet study did.
Now, it’s possible the Lancet study was inaccurate. I’m not in a position to judge. I’m just trying to set the record straight on what the Lancet study actually, well, studied. It didn’t say what most people say it said.
Again, it was the change in the mortality rate that was significant, not an absolute number of deaths. However, some people got out their calculators and came up with a number of Iraqi deaths in the range of 650,000, a number which, for reasons explained in an old post, should not have been the focus of attention.
And that number got in the headlines, and the Right reacted with scorn and derision and declared the Lancet study bogus, because they couldn’t believe that 650,000 Iraqis had been killed by guns and bombs. And they hadn’t, and the Lancet study never said such a thing, but because righties don’t read, or think, they never bothered to understand what the Lancet study actually said. And they still don’t understand what it said.
[…]
Righties are also claiming the field notes say that vast quantities of WMDs were found that we weren’t told about. However, if you actually read the article they’re all linking too — again, the reading thing always trips them up — what was actually found appears to have been mostly old and degraded mustard gas and similar stuff left over from before the Gulf War, in “relatively small stockpiles.”
[…]
At one point, the article says, some troops found some old mustard gas that was still potent enough to raise a few blisters if applied to the skin. Wow. And for this we invaded Iraq.
Gary Farber has a very lengthy, comprehensive, and thorough round-up of links, commentary, and analysis (his own and others) about the WikiLeaks Iraq war logs at Obsidian Wings.
More quality commentary here and here.
PAST CONTRIBUTOR.