> I think US peaceniks can take some comfort from the fact that Iraqi
> civilian casualties are probably a lot less than in 1991
and then went on to quote
> "Toting the Casualties of War", Business Week, FEBRUARY 6, 2003
which is based on an interview with Beth Daponte.
Below is a Financial Times article that appeared a month after the BW article on Daponte and her critics. Unlike BW, it concentrates not on her political critics in 1992 but rather her statistical rivals in the years that followed. At first sight, her main critics seems to make several substantial objections. Doubtless he goes too far in the other direction, but Daponte addresses none of his criticisms in BW interview.
Also I think we should be clear that in Daponte's high end estimate of combined civilian and soldier deaths, more than half are civilian deaths caused by illness in the year that followed the war. I think it is reasonable to argue that those deaths should not be credited to the war, but rather to the sanctions of mass destruction that both preceded and followed it. It is one of the blackest ironies of America's 12 year war on Iraq that the innocent sounding sanctions killed more than both wars combined -- a power of ten more, in fact, if we go by current central tendency estimates.
Michael
===============
Financial Times; Mar 19, 2003
Still missing: how many Iraqis died in 1991 Gulf war? By Stephen Fidler
As worries mount about casualties in the looming war, the question of how many Iraqis died in the 1991 campaign is still the subject of bitter debate. Estimates vary from as few as 2,500 to 200,000 or more.
The US has never published an official estimate of Iraqi casualties. One reason is that such figures feed the eternal debate at the Pentagon about the effectiveness of air power versus ground forces. The nearest thing to an official count came in May 1991 from the Pentagon's Defence Intelligence Agency. It estimated that 100,000 Iraqi troops had been killed in action and 300,000 wounded, while another 150,000 had deserted.
The estimate carried a disclaimer: a margin of error of 50 per cent or more. In fact, say some experts, the tally was little better than a guess based on news reports.
A 1993 report commissioned by the US Air Force from Thomas Keaney and Eliot Cohen, two academics, estimated 10,000-12,000 Iraqi troops died in the air campaign and up to 10,000 in the ground war. The official Iraqi estimate of civilian deaths in the air campaign was 2,300.
A higher number was arrived at by Beth Daponte, now a research professor at Carnegie Mellon University. In 1992 she found herself at the centre of a political storm when, as a demographer in the Commerce Department, her estimate that 158,000 Iraqis died in the war and its aftermath became public. In 1993, having left government service, she raised this figure to 205,500. The largest component was 110,000 deaths attributable to illness in the immediate postwar period: 74,000 more children dying than normally would have done.She estimated 35,000 people died in postwar unrest(other estimates put this figure at least twice as high) and 3,500 civilians were killed in the bombing.
The figures she used for the military deaths were obtained from William Arkin, a military analyst and activist with the Greenpeace environmental group. According to him, 20,000 to 25,000 people died from air attacks in Kuwait, 12,000-15,000 from air attacks in Iraq and 17,000-23,000 during the last ground war - a total of between 49,000 and 63,000.
Yet Mr Arkin's figures look very high to others. John Heidenrich, a former DIA analyst, began a controversy of his own by suggesting there were as few as 1,500 Iraqi combat deaths (with a further 1,000 civilian deaths).
Mr Heidenrich said the DIA estimate was far too high for several reasons. One was a significant overestimate by the Pentagon of the number of Iraqi troops in the Kuwaiti theatre of war.Kenneth Pollack, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst now at the Council on Foreign Relations, estimates 150,000-250,000 soldiers deserted the Kuwaiti theatre during the 42-day air campaign.
Another clue cited by Mr Heidenrich was the small number of wounded Iraqis captured by US forces. In modern warfare, the number of soldiers wounded in conventional combat is almost always about three times the number killed.
The point was reinforced by a 1999 paper in the British Medical Journal by two experts from the Red Cross who examined conflicts since the second world war. The number killed was never more than the number wounded;the ratio of wounded to killed averaged 2.8 and never fell below 1.9. The experts, Robin Coupland and David Meddings, concluded that if the ratio fell below 1, it suggested evidence of war crimes or the use of non-conventional weapons such as toxic chemicals.
In 1991, coalition forces captured 71,000 Iraqi soldiers, 37,000 of whom were taken into US custody. Of those captured by the US, just 800 required medical attention - and 20 per cent of those because they were suffering non-combat ailments such as dehydration. Based on the US experience, Mr Heidenrich supposed that among all the Iraqis captured, fewer than 2,000 were wounded.
Wounded soldiers are less mobile than healthy ones and so are more likely to be captured. Yet only 2.8 per cent of the US captives were wounded. "Many Iraqis did flee Kuwait during the 100-hour ground war but it is difficult to imagine how nearly 300,000 wounded Iraqis could escape capture while 69,000 able-bodied Iraqis could not," Mr Heidenrich argued.
He adduces much other evidence to show that Iraqi combat deaths in the Kuwait theatre were in the low thousands and argues that two well known US "massacres" of Iraqis may have been nothing of the sort. These two incidents - the so-called Highway of Death and the infamous "bulldozer assault" by the US Army's 1st infantry division - were supposed to have killed thousands but more likely killed many fewer.
One long-standing argument against low figures is based on the tonnage of bombs dropped in the campaign. Some 88,500 tons were used, just 7 per cent of them precision munitions. If between 2,500 and 12,000 soldiers and civilians died from allied action, that would translate to between 7 and 35 tons of bombs for each death. How could so many bombs cause so few casualties?
Mr Heidenrich says that is partly explained by the fact that the campaign was not meant to kill soldiers. One principal aim was to destroy Iraqi military hardware before ground troops were sent in. The likelihood was that Iraqi tank crews and others simply abandoned their vehicles.