Body Counts and Just War

Christopher Shea follows up on the controversy surrounding the report from a British journal that claimed that casualties from the Iraq war have reached around 100,000:

Here’s how the study worked: The researchers randomly selected 33 towns or neighborhoods distributed throughout Iraq’s 18 “directorates,” or local regions. The Iraqi staffers drove to those towns or neighborhoods and, once there, made their way to a randomly generated longitude and latitude using a Global Positioning System device. Then they interviewed the 30 families who lived closest to that spot — 7,900 people in all. (Cluster studies like this, while far less accurate than national random surveys, are commonly resorted to in countries with weak governments or chaotic circumstances. Health organizations use them, for example, to determine childhood vaccination rates in developing countries.) […]

The mortality rate in these families worked out to 5 per 1,000 before the invasion and 12.3 per 1,000 after the invasion — 7.9 per thousand if you exclude Fallujah. Extrapolate the latter figure to the 22 million population of Iraq, and you end up with the headline-making figure of 98,000 total civilian deaths. The most common cause of death post-invasion was aerial bombing — which caused a quarter of the deaths outside Fallujah — followed by strokes and heart attacks.

Shea also raises the issue of consistency:

Reject the Lancet study and you have to toss out those studies — done with a very similar methodology — that found that war in the Congo in the late 1990s caused some 3 million deaths or that the current crisis in Sudan has killed 70,000. Those numbers, however, have been readily accepted by American commentators and government officials.

Then there is this sobering conclusion:

“We don’t do body counts,” General Tommy Franks has declared, explaining the Pentagon’s decision not to make public estimates of civilian or combatant deaths. The Pentagon doesn’t want a replay of Vietnam, when body counts became a bad joke. But the current occupation is supposed to help the Iraqi people. And there’s just no way to judge how Iraqi civilians are faring under the occupation without studying Iraqi mortality, the Lancet authors argue. And they concede, crucially, that this is just a rough first stab at the problem. Therefore, if the Bush administration doesn’t like the Lancet study, done on a shoestring, they offer a simple solution: Fund and support a better one.

This is, or should be, particularly troubling to anyone who supported the Iraq war on just war grounds. This is becuause one criterion of a just war is that the evil brought about by the war be less than the evil prevented or restrained by the war. This is part of the notion of proportionality. But, logically, if one doesn’t know how many Iraqis are dying, then it becomes impossible to make this judgment. And if the U.S. government, as a matter of policy, refuses to keep count, then one can only conclude it is not committed to fighting under the constraints of just war theory.

(link via Godspy)