How Many Iraqi Civilians Have Died?

This morning's RMN contains a letter to Dave Kopel objecting to one of his articles. I'm going to reprint it below because these links tend to die in a few days.

"News media critic Dave Kopel, despite having written some well-researched books on various topics, still amazes me with the logical contortions in his column, such as his recent complaint that our country is losing the propaganda war in Iraq (Jan. 1).

Kopel cites as an American success the "unreported" fact that 140,000 refugees have returned to Iraq. This would be a success indeed, were it not for the equally "unreported" fact that an estimated 100,000 civilians have died in Iraq since the American invasion. (The Economist Web site has a good summary of this estimate here: http://tinyurl.com/5lejm.) Note that this estimate did not count Fallujah, a scene of heightened violence even before American forces effectively flattened the city. Note also that the U.S. has displaced an estimated 200,000 residents of Fallujah, creating a massive internal refugee problem.

This takes considerable shine off of any sense of accomplishment we should feel about returning Iraqi refugees. How can Kopel claim we're losing the propaganda war when these facts are routinely reported on TV around the world but not in America? Either Kopel has not done his homework, or he is more interested in pursuing his own agenda. Both seem likely. Kopel's column stands as its own bad example of what it purports to criticize: value-challenged punditry and the generally lazy and immoral nature of media in the U.S. "

The 100,000 civilian deaths number is where I want to focus first. I give the author props for including the link to the Economist story. However, subsequent articles have pointed at the problems with the study that prompted the 100,000 figure. Fred Kaplan at Slate wrote a very comprehensive piece on this study and its shortcomings:

"...Yet a close look at the actual study, published online today by the British medical journal the Lancet, reveals that this number is so loose as to be meaningless."

Read the whole thing. Also Iraq Body Count, which tracks reported casualties put the number closer to 17,000. They also have a response to the study above. The argument against this lower figure is that many of the deaths may be unreported. But the same would be true for the people who died during Saddam's reign. If Saddam had reported all the people he had killed, the number in the Lancet story would have been calculated differently.

Secondly, the author of the letter claims that these figures are not reported in U.S. but are reported around the world. Doing a simple Google search on "100,000" "civilians" "Iraq" I come up with 231,000 hits. The most popular are link to stories in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, and CNN. All of these are major American news sources.

The fact that any civilians have been killed in Iraq is a tragedy, but using an inflated number to criticize the administration or other journalists makes the author of the letter as guilty of propaganda as anyone else.