Source Justice Not Vengeance
By Milan Rai
December 18 2004

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.

IGNORING FALLUJA

The Lancet estimate is based on a survey of 988 households containing 7868 residents in 33 ‘clusters’ throughout Iraq. One of the 33 ‘clusters’ visited during the study was in the wartorn city of Falluja.

The number of violent deaths in Falluja was much higher than in the other areas visited: ‘More than a third of reported post-attack deaths (n=53), and two-thirds of violent deaths (n=52) happened in the Falluja cluster.’ Because of this, the Falluja data was excluded in calculating the 100,000 figure.

HOW THE ESTIMATE WAS COMPILED

The estimate was based on visiting 30 households in 32 randomly selected ‘clusters’ throughout Iraq. (Note that Falluja, the 33rd cluster, is not included in the following calculations.) In each house, questions were asked about births and deaths during the period from 1 January 2002 to mid-September 2004 (when the interviews were carried out).

The interviewers asked who had lived in each house and how many of these residents had died during this period - and the cause of their death.

Crucially, the survey only counted the deaths of people who had lived in the house for at least two months before their death. It did not count the deaths of family members who were living elsewhere, or visitors who stayed for less than two months.

DEATHS PER PERSON-MONTH

The next step was to calculate the number of ‘deaths per person-month’ for each household, the building blocks of the national estimate.

In other words, if five people had lived in a house throughout the whole post-invasion period (17.8 months), and a sixth resident died after living in that house for eleven months of the post-invasion period, that would be calculated as one death for 100 person-months, or 0.01 deaths per person-month. (5 x 17.8 = 89 person-months, then add 11 person-months to make 100).

The estimate was compiled by adding together the ‘deaths per person-month’ for all households in each cluster, and adding together all 32 clusters, for the period before the war, and for the period after the invasion.

Then the pre-war figure (0.00042 deaths per person-month) is subtracted from the post-invasion figure (0.00066), and multiplied by the number of people in Iraq (24.4 million) and the length of the post-invasion period (17.8 months).

This gives an estimate of the number of extra deaths after the invasion, or what the Lancet study calls ‘the death toll associated with the conflict’. The people who would not have died if the death rate