I have no doubt that mortality due to bad water and sanitation, lack of medical care due to fear of violence, etc., is higher in Iraq now than pre-conflict. (By pre-conflict, I leave it to the reader to choose pre-Iran/Iraq war or pre-2003 war.)
My skimming of the Lancet article and stories about it indicate that the numbers in the news are mostly "excess" deaths were due to violence. E.g. [link|http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/11/AR2006101101498.html|Washington Post]:
The new study _ which attributes roughly 600,000 of the deaths directly to violence and 55,000 more to other war-related causes _ was released Wednesday on the Web site of The Lancet, a respected medical journal. But just how good is its conclusions?
I believe that the Baghdad morgue figures in the news are similarly deaths due to violence.
Something I haven't seen reported is the gender breakdown of the deaths. I assume the
vast majority of deaths are among males. Except in the deaths due to bombings of various kinds, I would suspect that the vast majority of the violence is male upon male and that it's less random than the raw statistics might lead one to believe. Don't misunderstand me, though. It's no less horrible for a young man to be murdered standing in line to get petrol or a job than it is for a young woman collecting food or water to be.
It's such a mess over there. :-(
Cheers,
Scott.
Report: 300K - 900K dead since 2003 Iraq invasion
- (lincoln)
- (19)
- Oct. 12, 2006, 12:38:24 PM EDT