14 Points

Summary

This essay offers an apology for the US-led invasion of Iraq in six sections that analyze data and critique debates with respect to the following topics: Iraqi views of the invasion and its consequences, comparative civilian death rates before and after Saddam, comparative economic indicators, the international security threat posed by the Baath Party, and the politics of invasion. The author, who initially opposed the war, concludes that while the outcome has been worse than many war proponents believed, the most likely consequence of the invasion is a series of substantive improvements in the quality of Iraqi lives relative to the Saddam period over the next few years and into the future. Some of these improvements have already begun to take shape, despite the atrocious violence.

Introduction

Was the US-led coalition right to invade Iraq? Far from being a purely academic exercise, establishing a true answer to this question is of vital importance. For those citizens of the countries involved who answer in the affirmative, they can proudly support, and perhaps better hold accountable, on-going efforts to stabilize and strengthen Iraqi democracy, while defending their countries against the false charge of implementing or abetting neo-imperialism or a violent clash of civilizations. These accusations serve as founding justifications for contemporary terrorism, on the one hand, and a rational for refusing to prevent crimes against humanity on the other, which makes their refutation no trivial matter.

Moreover, in many democratic countries around the world, citizens are weighing their government’s support, or lack thereof, for US foreign policy, and where those voters come down on the above question has been (in the cases of Spain and Germany) and will continue to be a significant campaign issue. It need hardly be mentioned that the ascendancy of the Democratic Party in this year’s US elections was in part a referendum on the Bush Administration’s Iraq policies, and while the critical issue of justification is different from the one of competent management, due diligence, or the wisdom of withdrawal, they are often mutually reinforcing.

Finally, the answer to the question posed above will significantly shape future policy on nation building, the promotion of democracy, and the use of military force. One could infer from opinion polls that enthusiasm for all three has already been greatly compressed, explicitly so for lapsed neo-conservatives thinkers like Francis Fukuyama. The Iraqi government and that of the USA, it must be admitted, have failed rather miserably to protect Iraqi citizens, at least since 2004, but with the accelerated purging and professionalization of the Iraqi security forces, we might yet believe US generals who claim the situation should stabilize over the next two years.

The question raised by this essay is slightly different then the one faced by US and British politicians before the war, since we have had over three years to examine the consequences. This essay won’t begin to address all the significant points of dispute, but it will aim to examine the most relevant data available with respect to basic questions of Iraqi and international welfare. Even after discovering that Saddam had postponed his weapon program to comply with UN mandates, the case for invasion is straightforward: Iraq was ruled by one of the worst regimes in modern history, lead by a dictator whose extraordinary brutality was sui generis. His propensity to invade neighboring countries, develop and employ weapons capable of vast destruction, and fund and train terrorism made him and a salient threat to the region, to US allies, and US citizens. With no peaceful option available to neutralize his corrosive effect on Iraqi society and international relations, forced liberalization was the last resort.

That war can be a justifiable conclusion to a political problem is an unsavory reminder of the limits of diplomacy and cooperation. Nevertheless there are certain behaviors which can not be tolerated by decent people and such activities were immanent to Saddam’s regime. The US, despite its status, can not be all things to all people, but it can mobilize its wealth and citizenry in the service of replacing the most dangerous and unjust oligarchies on earth with democratic governments. That the US has perpetuated injustice in some cases (e.g. Chile) and failed to lead intervention in others (e.g. Rwanda and Darfur) does not mean that the US is wrong to act in all cases. Each must be debated on its own terms.

Iraqi Answers

Interestingly enough, when confronted with the opening question of this essay (“was the US-coalition right to invade Iraq?”) in February 2004 the majority of Iraqi people surveyed answered yes. In this Oxford Research Group survey, 48.2% agreed that "from today’s perspective" the US-led invasion was somewhat or absolutely right while only 39.1% said it was somewhat or absolutely wrong. Moreover, Iraqis said the invasion "liberated" (41.8%) Iraq rather than "humiliated" (41.2%) the country, which was the other choice besides "difficult to say" (17%). 57% said their lives were better from a year ago, which was when Saddam was in power, and only 19% thought they were worse. 71% said that in a year from now, things, overall in their life, would be better. This optimism has faded since 2004, as a report from the International Republican Institute showed in March of 2006, but even then, the hopeful Iraqis outnumbered the pessimists.

War dissenters from the left and right will often claim that Iraqis simply aren’t ready for or don’t want democracy, which is why it can’t be “imposed,” but 72.2% said in that 2004 survey that they strongly agreed that what Iraq needed now most was “an Iraqi democracy,” with 85.9% either strongly or somewhat agreeing. 66.5% strongly agreed that Iraqi needed “a (single) strong Iraqi leader” and just 23.9% strongly agreed that they needed “a group of strong Iraqi leaders.” More explicitly, when asked to chose a political system defined as “how a government is set up” 48.5% chose democracy over a “strong leader (27.5%) or an Islamic state (20.5%). The overwhelming reasons given were freedom, followed by fair elections. In contrast to the notion that Iraqis want to break up into ethnic regions (which are in reality mixed, anyway), 79% wanted “one unified Iraq with a central government in Baghdad,” with only 3.8% wanting independent states. Over 82% said they would never use violence to solve political problems “even if it becomes necessary.” - although this figure has not perhaps been borne out by experience. Nonetheless, this survey implies that Iraq’s current troubles are not based on fundamentally virulent ethnic hatreds, but rather it appears that extreme minority elements have had undue influence via outrageous violence.

Other surveys have been conducted more recently with similar results. On the dates of January 2-5, 2006, a similarly scientific poll of Iraqis was organized by the Program on International Attitudes at the University of Maryland, with some of the main questions repeated again in a September survey. For our purposes the most important question, which was asked in both the January and September survey was, “Thinking about any hardships you might have suffered since the US- Britain invasion, do you personally think that ousting Saddam Hussein was worth it or not?” In January of 2006, 77% of all Iraqis said it was worth it; 98% of Shi’a Arabs thought it was worth it, even though, tellingly, 83% of Sunnis said it was not worth it. In September, after the worst months of Iraqi violence since the invasion and long after the election, the research team found a significant drop, but a substantial majority of Iraqis, at 61%, still said ousting Saddam was “worth it.” Moreover, 100% disproved strongly or somewhat of attacks on Iraqi civilians and 96% disapproved of attacks on Iraqi security forces. Additionally, a substantial majority of Iraqis expressed confidence in the government security forces, even in September.

Many consumers of western news would probably find these results rather incredible, since they run against the stream of misery pouring out of Iraq. One might wonder if Iraqis themselves have simply occluded reality in favor of a hypnotic state of adaptation, but one must consider the crucial differences between Saddam’s Iraq and the anticipated democracy of today that has yet to be adequately realized.

Civilian Deaths

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sources: 1) Iraqi Ministry of Human Rights, 2-3) Davis, Murphy, Topel, 4) Iraq Body Count 5) Iraq Health Minister Ali Al-Shammari 6) Roberts, et. al.

One of the more contentious issues of comparison between the new and old Iraq is the civilian death rates. The latest estimate from the Iraqi Health Ministry adjusted the number upwards quite dramatically, to 150,000. As Figure 1 shows the range of death rates for the Saddam period is from 21,000-42,000. Using estimates from the Iraq Ministry of Human Rights, Ba’athist brutality was responsible for the loss of 1 million civilians. The claim that death rates have dropped dramatically since Saddam would be easily accepted if it weren’t for a team of researchers based out of Johns Hopkins University and led by Les Roberts, with lead author Gary Burnham.They employed Iraqis to conduct household interviews in 47 different clusters, after meeting them to give directions from Jordan. Their second of two contentious and arguably admirable efforts put the number of deaths at 655,000 (with a 95% chance that the actual number is between 400,000-950,000). This figure was up from the 100,000 they found 17.8 months after the invasion. A thorough treatment of the first study and its criticisms can be found at Wikipedia, which quotes Les Roberts’s assertion that the probability distribution of Iraqi deaths was taken to be normal -thus justifying their decision to report 100,000 Iraqi deaths as the best estimate, since it fell in the middle of their confidence interval (8,000 and 194,000). This raises the issue of whether or not they have used an incorrect model to estimate their parameters, since data from an analysis of 2003-2005 by Oxford Research Group, in conjunction with Iraq Body Count data, can be used to show something like an exponential distribution of Iraqi death rates.

Before addressing methodological considerations in greater detail, it’s worth mentioning a significant reason to doubt the second Hopkins study. That is the fact that morgue and ministry data, which puts the figure at 150,000, may be fairly accurate. As Sabrina Tavernise and Donald Mc’Neil reported in the New York Times, “Iraqi authorities say morgue counts are more accurate than is generally thought. Iraqis prefer to bury their dead immediately, and hurry bodies of loved ones to plots near mosques or, in the case of Shiites, in sacred burial sites. Even so, they have strong incentives to register the death with a central morgue or hospital in order to obtain a death certificate, required at highway checkpoints, by cemetery workers, and for government pensions. Death certificates are counted in the statistics kept by morgues around the country.” So what percentage of the people interviewed by the Hopkins team had not reported the deaths of their loved one’s to the morgue? According to the researchers a mere 8% failed to produce a death certificate. Now this is a useful finding indeed. It means that the morgue data underestimated roughly 13,000 deaths (since 92% of the true number of deaths would equal 150,000 if only 8% went unrecorded), so the UN figure should go up to 163,000, but not 600,000. This number is probably the best estimate available.

From another perspective, the academic journal Science has published a critical review of second study’s findings. One of the more nettlesome has been this:

“Neil Johnson and Sean Gourley, physicists at Oxford University in the U.K. who have been analyzing Iraqi casualty data for a separate study, also question whether the sample is representative. The paper indicates that the survey team avoided small back alleys for safety reasons. But this could bias the data because deaths from car bombs, street-market explosions, and shootings from vehicles should be more likely on larger streets, says Johnson.”

One reason for the difference comes from the method itself, even if the Iraq research team was flawless and even if people living just off main streets are no more vulnerable to drive by shootings and car bombs than people living on smaller streets outside the city centers. Table 1 is taken entirely from the Hopkins team. Using their population data and the location of their clusters one can calculate how representative their clusters actually are. The difficulty with cluster sampling is imprecision on the margins. Every single cluster had roughly 40 households (or 280 people) and each of these was then multiplied by its share of the total population. So, the placement of each of the 47 clusters represented thousands of people, even if the regional population warranted only half the extra cluster. In other words, the population of any one region (say Baghdad) will never be exactly equal to an integer multiple of clusters.

It turns out that most of the regions here were sampled within a cluster of their true proportionality, based on 2004 population levels (though even this method overestimates deaths since many Iraqis have relocated because of violence). Yet, there is a noticeable bias against low-violence regions. To reach this conclusion, I performed a few simple operations on their data. First I calculated how many households they had per cluster, then I took their population figures (using 2004 Census data), and divided each regional population by the national population to get regional population shares. Then I divided the number of clusters the authors reportedly used for that population by 47, the total number of clusters to get a cluster share. The difference between the cluster share and the population share is the discrepancy between a perfect sample and the actual sample. To get the data for Table 1, I converted that difference into an actual number of households. I then used data from Oxford Research Group’s analysis of Iraq Body Count data to determine if a region was violent or not. For Table 2, I called regions with death rates higher than 10 in 10,000 violent and those with less than 6 in 10,000 tranquil.

As we can see Kerbala was the only violent province under-sampled, while 7 out of the 8 most violent provinces were over-sampled, and 5 out of the 7 least violent provinces were under-sampled. Table 2 summarizes the bias, which has an absolute value of 225 households. This means that about 12% of the household samples were biased in favor of violent households. Because they extrapolate from a small sample, each person surveyed represents 2,100 Iraqis, meaning that roughly 3.25 million Iraqis probably had their death rates mid-identified as disproportionately high.

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Source: Column 1 calculated from: Burnham, Lafta, Doocy, Roberts (2006) “Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey” Lancent v. 368, no 9545, pp. 1421-1428. Column 2: the estimates for these violent death rates come from Oxford Research Group’s “Dossier of Iraqi Casualties 2003-2005,” which uses data from Iraq Body Count. The numbers refer to the number of deaths per ten thousand people.

Note: The number on the left is the number of households I’ve identified as mis-sampled by the Lancet study. They are categorized as residing in high death rate (>10 deaths/10,000) or low death rate regions (<6 deaths/10,000) based on Oxford Research Group’s “Dossier of Iraqi Casualties 2003-2005”

The team also awkwardly attributes “miscommunication” to explain why two of the most tranquil provinces in the country were entirely skipped (Dahuk in Kurdistan and Muthanna in the south). If weighted properly by population both of those regions would have received more than one cluster.

If violent death rates were assumed to be 100/1000 in the most violent samples representing those 3.25 million Iraqis, which are, admittedly, spread out, and roughly 0 in the least, over 324,000 extra deaths would have been reported inaccurately. If that discrepancy sounds absurdly high, we must consider that the Hopkins team claims an “extra” 2.5% of the population (or 25/1000) have died since 2003. Since these deaths are not occurring in peaceful parts of Iraq, their conclusion must have been driven by extremely high rates in the most violent regions of their sample, which as we’ve seen, were over-represented.

As mentioned above, the fundamental problem is that by all accounts there seems to be something like an exponential, rather than bell-shaped, distribution of deaths, which makes their estimates extremely precarious as they sample and over-sample along the steeply climbing probability curve. To give an extreme example, if half of an entire block of people were killed in one neighborhood (and they interviewed entire neighborhoods and called it a cluster) in Baghdad, which had 12 clusters, (say 150/260 died) and one neighborhood in Falluja, Anbar, which has been especially violent (say 150/260 died), then the researchers could easily get their entire number of deaths (300 extrapolated to 600,000), from just two clusters, even if no one else died in their entire set of interviews. Violence like this is not statistically random, even if finding the cluster involved random selection. Unfortunately, they have not published the distributions of deaths by cluster.

Finally, another compelling reason to doubt these findings may be the fact that their first study, which used a similar methodology, was dramatically at odds with an even more rigorous study from the UNDP. That effort included a sample roughly 35 times as large as the Hopkins study (21,669 households vs. only 600 (from 30 clusters) for the first 2004 study and 1,849 households (from 47 clusters) for the recent 2006 Hopkins survey). The UNDP team found that just 18,000-29,000 violent deaths occurred from the time of the invasion in March of 2003 to around June of 2004. The only way both this study and the first Hopkins study could be correct would be for a sudden and unreported explosion in mayhem from July to September of 2004, which would have somehow accounted for 75,000 deaths. It’s difficult to believe that frequent aerial bombings and fervent US street fighting in the early months could cause 55 deaths per day (taking the middle estimate), while recent years of occupation without US bombing would see death rates over 9 times that figure, at roughly 475 per day. The strange thing is that if we accept the UNDP data for the first 15 months, which we must since it is more rigorous, and include the extra Hopkins deaths from the second study for only the last 25 months up to July (since that’s the only period when they could have occurred), we get a daily death rate of 768 per day from mid 2004-2006, which is roughly 15 times higher than the UNDP’s death rate, 21 times higher than the daily death toll from Iraq Body Count’s highest estimate, and 4 times higher than the morgue and Health Ministry data, when the latter two are taken over the entire post-invasion period. In light of the above analysis, a death toll of 163,000 Iraqis through the fall of 2006, which corrects for the 8% who didn’t obtain death certificates in the Hopkins sample, is surely the most plausible.

Death Under Saddam

There can be no doubt, whichever estimate is used, that civilian deaths in Iraq have been tragically ubiquitous, and yet, they must be compared to Saddam’s regime. This poses a number of problems since no systematic attempt was made in Iraq during the Saddam years to count its victims. Thus a full tally can only be made by adding up disparate estimates over two decades. Some of these come from mass graves. Though Blair and Bush cited more modest figures of Saddam’s record before the war, roughly 300 mass graves have surfaced since the invasion, with images of them collected online. Accordingly, the estimated number of Iraqi bodies found in the Baathist’s mass graves is 500,000. Yet, this figure presumably excludes a great deal. For example, there was the reckless invasion of Kuwait costing at least 1,082 Kuwaiti civilians their lives, including the execution of 57 mentally ill Kuwaitis using Nazi logic, while many others were tortured, according to a Pentagon report released by the Clinton administration. There was also the meaningless war with Iran, a uniquely horrific event resulting in an estimated 500,000 Iranian deaths and at least 375,000 Iraqi deaths, which were presumably non-civilian.

The Iraqi Human Rights Ministry estimates that 1,000,000 Iraqis went missing under Saddam, but I have been unable to determine how this figure was calculated. More impressively, a journalist for Newsweek reported on the Committee for Missing Persons. This civil society group has been scouring the tons of Ba’ath Party archives that apparently list political murders. So far, after going through just 1% of the multitude of documents, the committee has posted 5,663 names. They are convinced that Saddam killed 8 million Iraqis. This sounds incredibly high. Still, when one adds up missing persons (many of which are probably in mass graves), known and documented murders and genocidal campaigns, and known deaths from avoidable warfare, the figure can reach the millions.

Another ambitious total estimate comes from a new book published in French called Le Livre noir de Saddam Hussein, which is edited by Chris Kutschera. University of Virginia Political Science Professor Gerard Alexander, writing for The Weekly Standard on May 22, 2006, applauds its excruciating detail and comprehensive cataloging of the scope and horror of Saddam’s reign. Bernard Kuchner, who founded Doctors Without Borders and is a major human rights activist, contributes an essay calling Saddam “one of the worst tyrants in history.” Kutschera holds Saddam responsible for 2 million deaths over his rule, with half of them being civilians. This makes him easily one of the most brutal dictators in history, and puts his total number of victims well above even the highest estimate. When Iraqi and Iranian soldiers are included, I think this is probably the best estimate.

To those who might have the mistaken impression that life was normal for Iraqis except during occasional vicious paroxysms, Iraqi writer Kanaan Makiya’s Republic of Fear puts that notion to rest. The 1998 edition published by UC Berkeley Press has a useful introduction with the following: on August 18, 1994, Saddam promulgated Law 109, “the foreheads of those individuals who repeat the crime for which their hand was cut off will be branded with a mark in the shape of an X. Each intersecting line will be one centimeter in length and one millimeter in width.”(p. ix); $12 dollar theft was punishable by amputation then branding; desertion resulted in the word coward being stamped on forehead. In 1994, 2000 soldiers were found escaped in Kuwait with brandings. Law 117 forbid doctors from cosmetic surgery, upon threat of their ears being cut off. In the notorious Anfal campaign of 1988 following the Iran War, Amnesty International reported hundreds of children with eyes gouged out to force confessions from parents. In 1992, after 20,000% inflation (from pre to post war) 42 leading merchants were executed and 550 detained on profiteering charges. The dead bodies were tied around poles with the words “Greedy Merchant.” (p. xvi). More comprehensively, a British report from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, entitled Saddam Hussein: Crimes and Human Rights Abuses, mentions a number of cases with very specific references. To give some examples, a 1992 law protected all Ba’ath Party members from prosecution for property damage, injury, or death when pursuing and killing enemies of the regime. In 2000, Saddam’s Revolutionary Command Council promulgated a law allowing tongues to be cut out for criticism of the regime. Amnesty International documented a common case in which 12 women were beheaded in 2000 (on reportedly false charges of prostitution) after criticizing the Iraqi Health Ministry. In contrast to the violence of the current period, this was all perfectly legal and the perpetrators, rather than being punished, were promoted.

Makiya maintains that the sanctions weakened Saddam’s ability to conduct international terror but at the price of weakening the Iraqi people vis-à-vis Saddam, and by most accounts, initiating a humanitarian calamity. In a 94 page paper published for the National Bureau of Economic Research Messrs. Davis, Murphy, and Topel calculated the costs of “containment” for both the US taxpayers, military personal, and the Iraqi people and concluded the invasion was worth it. We will return to that work, but here I will simply cite what their review of the literature has found to be the best estimate of avoidable non-violent deaths stemming from the sanctions regime, and Saddam’s refusal to cooperate with them. Richard Garfield, a clinical professor of international nursing at Columbia University estimated a minimum of 100,000 excess deaths of children under five with a preferred estimate approaching 350,000, from 1991-1998. I used a conservative 350,000 number to produce Figure 1, because the combination of murders and deaths from health deprivation is surely well over 350,000 in the Post Gulf War period, when the campaign against the Shia and Kurdish revolts is included -with roughly 200,000 killed.

If the Hopkins numbers are compared to the estimates from Kutschera’s collection, the death rate would have to be sustained for 12.67 years before it equaled the number of Iraqis killed under Saddam’s regime. Juxtaposing this to the full two million is actually fair because the Hopkins data does not distinguish between civilian, Iraqi military (Baathist or post-Baathist), or insurgent deaths. If the Iraqi Ministry of Health morgue data is adjusted (which likewise just counts total bodies without distinction) based on the Hopkins finding that 8% are undercounted, then the current death rate would have to continue for 46 years before it surpassed Saddam’s record (see figure 3). Absent a sustained and full scale civil war, these deaths rates are likely to plummet over the next decade, making the Saddam period of 24 years vastly more lethal.

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