Higher education

A telephone survey conducted 30 May to 3 June by Pew Research Center for the People & the Press of a sample of 1503 American adults reveals that 51% now think ‘the U.S. made the wrong decision in using military force against Iraq’. Fifty-six percent ‘think the U.S. should bring its troops home as soon as possible’, which is comparable to the 55% who want the number reduced reported in the Washington Post-ABC News Poll about the same time. But while only 15% in the WP-ABC poll wanted troops removed immediately, 20% gave that response in the Pew poll.

Interestingly, every population separately tabulated has shown a significant increase in the proportion saying bring the troops home since June 2006. Even 29% of identified Republicans held this view, an increase of six percentage points in the last year. Apart from Republicans, every population but three had a majority favouring withdrawal. Pluralities of 49% of both men and White Evengelical Protestants wanted the troops out, with 46% and 45% saying they should stay in Iraq. The only population with a plurality that favoured keeping troops in Iraq was College graduates – 46% said bring them home, 48% said let them stay. Fifty-two percent of those with ‘some college’ and 64% of those with ‘High School or less’ wanted the troops out.

In a rather more disturbing development, 49% of the half sample asked whether ‘the United States has a responsibility to do something about the ethnic genocide in Darfur’ said it did, while 45% of the other half favoured ‘the use of U.S. troops in Darfur as part of a multinational force to help end the ethnic genocide there’.

What’s truly appalling is the wording of the question. It certainly does not go without saying that what’s going on in Darfur is ‘ethnic genocide’ and there is an interesting argument about this on lenin’s tomb. The argument revolves around the issue of whether it is in fact genocide and more significantly whether the characterisation of the situation in Dafur as genocide is a diversion from Iraq. Given the leading question, though, it’s disturbing that less than half think ‘something must be done’ – 34% said it’s not the US’s responsibility and 37% opposed sending troops. It’s also disturbing that even after all the blatant lying and scandals and corruption and cronyism and stolen elections and the completely unjustified decimation of Iraq, that a majority say was wrong, so many American adults still think that the US, and even US troops, can act as a force for good and rescue the suffering Fur. It’s as if they’ve forgotten Somalia and so many other US ‘humanitarian interventions’. Perhaps the large number of refusals – 17% and 18% - are an encouraging sign.

Toll dwarfed?

A few days ago, lenin had a piece quoting extensively from Anthony Arnove’s article on Tomdispatch drawing a comparison between the treatment of statistics of the tragedy in Darfur and in Iraq. According to Arnove,

Since 2003, according to UN estimates, some 200,000 have been killed in the Darfur region of Sudan in a brutal ethnic-cleansing campaign and another 2 million have been turned into refugees.

How would you know this? Well, if you lived in New York City, at least, you could hardly take a subway ride without seeing an ad that reads: "400,000 dead. Millions uniting to save Darfur." The New York Times has also regularly featured full-page ads describing the "genocide" in Darfur and calling for intervention there under "a chain of command allowing necessary and timely military action without approval from distant political or civilian personnel."… celebrities on Good Morning America talking about their commitment to stopping "genocide" in Iraq.

The point of this post is not, however to discuss the reasons for the discrepancy between all the noise about Darfur and the silence about Iraq. Apart from those two articles, Arnove cites ‘The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency’ by Mahmood Mamdani in the latest London review of books. In a later piece, lenin returns to the theme, citing Ed Herman’s recent article on the ‘“Worthy-Genocide” Establishment’.

One of the ironies is that the emphasis on the Darfur crisis is not related to its scale. While the latest UN assessment, cited by Arnove, claims ‘More than 200,000 people have been killed and at least 2 million others forced from their homes since 2003’, estimates of Iraqi deaths and displacement are much higher. According to the latest information on their website,

UNHCR estimates there are some 1.9 million Iraqis displaced internally, and up to 2 million in neighbouring states, particularly Syria and Jordan...in 2006 Iraqis had become the leading nationality seeking asylum in Europe…By early 2007, internal displacement was estimated to be continuing at a rate of up to 50,000 a month.

In other words, the US occupation of Iraq has displaced nearly twice as many people as the situation in Darfur, universally condemned as genocide. In another cruel irony that I’ve covered before, the US has only accepted as refugees 466 of the two million Iraqis it drove from their country.

What really prompted this post is that while Arnove and others continue to cite the Johns Hopkins study estimate of 655,000 excess deaths published in the Lancet last October, Information Clearinghouse posted an article entitled ‘Deaths In Iraq Have Reached 1 Million’, dated 22 March. Attributed to an ‘Alan Jones’ but not linked to any source, it starts out by claiming,

THE number of deaths in Iraq since the start of the conflict could be as high as one million, it was claimed yesterday.

On the fourth anniversary of the invasion by Allied troops, an Australian scientist insisted the true death toll dwarfed previous estimates.

Dr Gideon Polya said: "Using the most comprehensive and authoritative literature and UN demographic data yields an estimate of one million post-invasion excess deaths in Iraq."

The article does in fact link to Dr Polya’s Global Avoidable Mortality blog, where the most recent post, dated 16 May 2006, relates to Israeli and Palestinian deaths.

In reality, the ICH article appears to relate not to anything published on 21 March, but to Dr Polya's 1 March editorial on his Media With Conscience site. He actually presents the same analysis in a 7 February Countercurrents article.

In the 7 February article, Polya writes, ‘the post-invasion excess deaths (avoidable deaths, deaths that did not have to happen) total 1.0 million (ONE MILLION)’. This is his reasoning,

Consider the following estimate from the Johns Hopkins medical scientists of "annual death rate per 1,000 of population" of 13.3 (post-invasion Iraq) as compared to (a) 5.5 (for pre-invasion Iraq after 12 years of crippling Sanctions) and (b) 4.0 (for Iraq's resource-poor but peaceful neighbours Syria and Jordan; UN Population Division data: http://esa.un.org/unpp/).

The "post-invasion excess death rate/1000 of population" was 13.3 - 5.5 = 7.8 (Comparison A) or 13.3 - 4.0 = 9.3 (Comparison B). Assuming an average population of 27 million, the "post-invasion excess deaths" total (over 4 years i.e. as of February 2007) (A) 7.8 x 2,700 x 4 = 842,000 and (B) 9.3 x 2,700 x 4 = 1,004,400 i.e. ONE MILLION.

In other words, the estimate of one million is arrived at by multiplying the difference between the Johns Hopkins study’s estimate of deaths per 1000 in Iraq over the 40 months to July 2006 and the UN estimate of deaths per 1000 population in Syria and Jordan at an unspecified date. Note that the link he provides is to a database that provides population projections. There probably are UN crude mortality rate (CMR) data for Syria and Jordan available, but not at any of the URLs he cites in either the MWC or the Countercurrents articles.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s not really outrageous to compare the post invasion Iraqi crude mortality rate with the rate for a neighbouring country. The rationale is that preinvasion mortality in Iraq was already inflated by the twelve years of sanctions. But by using the Syrian data as the benchmark, Polya is effectively factoring in the sanctions’ effects rather than isolating the effects of the invasion and occupation. Apart from that, there may be any number of other factors that might render the mortality rate in Syria or Jordan not comparable with that in Iraq. Perhaps more importantly, there is no possibility of the mainstream media treating a comparison like this seriously. So the relevant estimate is really his ‘Comparison A’, which, based on the Lancet study’s estimate of crude death rates in Iraq before and after the invasion, arrives at a figure of 842,000 (not 1 million!) for the four years to March 2007.

I’ve made attempts to update the Lancet estimate before, but the Lancet data are now eight months old and we know the slaughter has proceeded, by all accounts at an accelerating pace, we need some new estimates. The report of Polya’s estimate has prompted me to take it a little further. This is not to cast aspersions on Polya’s method, but I have adopted a different approach.

The Lancet estimates published last October cover the period March 2003 through June 2006. The estimated average monthly crude death rate for the fourteen months through April 2004 was 7,017. For the thirteen months from May 2004 to May 2005, the average was 15,115 per month, and for the last thirteen months June 2005 to June 2006, 27,710.

The method I am using is to assume that the Lancet estimates are correct as a starting point and increment them for the eight months since July 2006 based on monthly averages. I have calculated projections using three assumptions. As I am not actually weighting new data, but just projecting from the July 2006 data on the basis of some assumptions about the probable average monthly rate of increase, I will round the figures to the nearest thousand.

First, if we assume that the monthly rate of deaths over the last eight months was equivalent to the average of the forty months from March 2003 to July 2006, 16,373 per month, the current toll would stand at about 786,000. I regard this as highly improbable, as it would mean that the average monthly crude death rate had decreased by 41% from the 2005-2006 average.

Second, if we assume that the monthly rate has remained at the average for the 2005-2006 period, the total would now come to 877,000.

Third, if we assume that the current average monthly crude death rate has increased proportionally by as much over the 2005-2006 average as that average increased over the previous thirteen month period, by about 83%, the monthly average would now be 50,801 and the total to date, 1,061,000.

Bear in mind that these are based on statistical estimates each of which represents the approximate midpoint of a range of values. Principally because the size of the sample in the Johns Hopkins study, the confidence interval is wide. The claim the authors, Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, and Les Roberts, made was that they were 95% confident that the true number of excess deaths in July was between 393,000 and 943,000. Using the same confidence interval proportionally, in the first and least likely scenario, where the monthly rate had decreased, we would be talking about a range of 472,000 to 1,131,000. In the second scenario, where the rate had remained constant from last year, it would be between 526,000 and 1,262,000. Finally, if the average monthly crude death rate has increased as much as it did between 2004-05 and 2005-06, the range is 637,000 to 1,528,000.

The following table may clarify the results.

		Estimate	95% Confidence interval
			Minimum	Maximum
Lancet estimate to 2006 07		654,965	392,979	942,636
Polya’s estimate	Iraq baseline	842,000	n/a	n/a
	Syria baseline	1,004,400	n/a	n/a
My projection assuming increase at:	Per month
A. 2003-2006 average rate	16,373	786,000	472,000	1,131,000
B. 2005-2006 average rate	27,710	877,000	526,000*	1,262,000
C. 83% above B.	50,801	1,061,000**	637,000	1,528,000

* The true death toll is almost certainly more than 526,000.

** The probable death toll is 1,061,000.

From all reports, the rate of increase has been increasing itself, so even these highest projections are likely to be on the low side. Conservatively speaking, I think you could claim with nearly 100% confidence that the crude mortality rate over the last eight months has certainly not decreased from the average of the previous thirteen month period and that the US invasion and occupation has cost at least 525,000 Iraqi lives over the last four years. If, as seems probable, the CMR has in fact increased since last July, the figure is very likely to be over a million and could exceed a million and a half.

The central point is that, horrific though the situation is in Darfur, estimates based on similar methods demonstrate that it is in fact much much worse in Iraq, where the US, UK, and Australian governments bear direct responsibility for the catastrophe.

An ancillary point is how we use these statistics. At the top of the daily ICH email and the ICH site it asserts, ‘Number Of Iraqi Civilians Slaughtered In America's War On Iraq - At Least 655,000 + +’. I thought that the Johns Hopkins University team did good work under dangerous conditions and have done the peace movement a big favour by publishing their results in the prestigious and impeccable Lancet journal. Sorry to split hairs, if that’s what it is, but I think it would be fair to treat their findings as if we believed what they said.

What they actually found was that there were 654,965 excess deaths in Iraq over the 40 months to July 2006. Specifically, they were 95% certain that the number of people who had died since the 20 March 2003 invasion who would not have died otherwise, was in the range 392,979 to 942,636. As I have pointed out before, Burnham et al. do not say that at least 655,000 civilians were slaughtered.

For one thing, if there is an ‘at least figure, it is not 654,965, but 392,979. For another, the Johns Hopkins study is absolutely explicit that, ‘Separation of combatant from non-combatant deaths during interviews was not attempted…’ So their research provides no basis for any claim specifically about ‘civilians’. Finally, these estimates are for deaths from all causes. The relevant estimate of specifically violent deaths to July 2006 is 601,027 (i.e. in the range 426,369–793,663). Presumably, that would be the number slaughtered.

It’s not as if the Lancet study’s findings were not sensational enough. There’s no need to distort them as ICH continues to do, much less to headline Polya’s 1 million figure, which explicitly includes sanctions effects with the invasion and occupation.

In my view, the safest, most responsible approach remains to be to cite ‘the July 2006 estimate of about 655,000’. Alternatively, as Eli Stephens of Left I on the news points out, the confidence that the true figure is above 393,979 is nearly 98%, so it would be even more accurate to assert that the invasion and occupation of Iraq killed ‘at least 394,000’ by July 2006. However, I am fairly comfortable that my projections provide a sound basis for asserting that the current death toll definitely exceeds half a million, is probably much higher, and possibly three times that number.

I have a confession

I have a confession to make: I don’t know enough about Darfur.

From what I’ve read, however, it seems clear that all those killing and being killed are both black and Muslim. It also seems patently obvious that the heart of the issue is access to resources.

A year or so ago, when the Times brought in Times select, it was such a relief not to have to read Friedman and Dowd and Kristof anymore. But someone forwarded me the sage Nicholas D Kristof’s article in yesterday’s NY Times where he writes that ‘gunmen on the Sudanese payroll heave babies into bonfires as they shout epithets against blacks’ and ‘Arab leaders need to show that they care about Muslim children being shot’. Clearly, Kristof thinks the gunmen and baby slaughterers are white Christians, Jews, and Hindus, and who would know better than him?

In his op-ed, he suggests an eight point plan for what ‘we’ can do to alleviate the crisis. Not one of those eight points involves providing food, water, medicines, doctors, nurses, or any of the other things that might help to alleviate both the suffering and the underlying causes of the conflict.

He goes on to lament:

After fewer than 10,000 white people had died in Kosovo, the U.S. intervened to prevent a genocide.

Wait a second…that wasn’t the US that bombed Serbia, was it? They said it was NATO – a completely different kettle of fish. And the widespread killings and displacement of the ethnic Albanian Kosovars occurred after the NATO bombing campaign started. Just as everyone expected it would. And the motivation for the bombing? Was that to prevent genocide? Well, my understanding was that Serbia had agreed to withdraw from Kosovo and provide for Kosovar autonomy in accordance with the Rambouillet Accords, until the notorious Appendix B was inserted at the last minute. The provisions of this Appendix effectively provided for a NATO occupation of Serbia. The terms, as I recall, were much more stringent than the terms on which Serbia eventually surrendered after ten weeks of bombing, including, for example

NATO personnel, under all circumstances and at all times, shall be immune from the Parties' jurisdiction in respect of any civil, administrative, criminal, or disciplinary offenses which may be committed by them in the FRY.

I thought that Tory Blain and many others had made it plain that the objective of the bombing was precisely to restore the credibility of NATO in the post Cold War world on its fiftieth anniversary (see this article by Steven Shalom, and this one by Brendan Stone, and this one by Chomsky).

following the "promise" that "we would not tolerate the brutal suppression of the civilian population," to walk away now would not merely destroy NATO’s credibility, more importantly it would be a breach of faith with thousands of innocent civilians, whose only desire is to live in peace and who took us at our word. (HC Deb 23 March 1999, c161)

On 19 March 1999, President Clinton said,

This is a conflict with no natural boundaries. It threatens our national interests. If it continues, it will push refugees across borders, and draw in neighboring countries. It will undermine the credibility of NATO, on which stability in Europe and our own credibility depend.

US National Security Advisor Samuel Berger told Jim Lehrer on 23 February 1999,

…there really is a question of NATO's credibility here. NATO has been the alliance, the transatlantic alliance which has kept us at peace for the last 50 years, hopefully for the next 50 years. NATO has an investment here in trying to use its strength to implement a peace if we can reach it.

As David Fromkin wrote in the Prologue of his 1999 book Kosovo Crossing: American Ideals Meet Reality on the Balkan Battlefields as reprinted in the NY Times:

In the former Yugoslavia, NATO found that it had lost its credibility. No longer could it deter the other side. Put another way, the Serbs refused to fold in March 1999, so NATO was obliged to play out the hand. Now that it has done so, perhaps its credibility will be restored.

It frequently has been said, and perhaps with reason, that the future of NATO, and of American global leadership, were at stake on the battlefield of Kosovo.

As Fromkin has come up again, one of the people [formerly] on this list was quite angry at how I had treated him and wrote to ask to be removed. I was very grateful to receive her email rather than just get reported as spam! And of course it left an opening to engage with her criticisms.

Anyway, she reckons:

It's always unwise to trash the work of someone you haven't read. In that volume, Fromkin produces the most detailed diplomatic history of the Sykes-Picot agreement that I've seen in one place, as well as its interplay with Zionism and its betrayal of promises to the Arabs. (Chapter 41 is titled "Betrayal".) His history is utterly damning of British and French colonialism as well as illuminating of the role of the oil companies. He also offers a detailed history of what happened to Turkey, and Syria. It's a great piece of scholarship and pulls no punches. In short, he covers everything you think he should cover.

Finally, saying that Fromkin is "completely subservient to power" is simple nonsense. It's glib and silly to denounce, especially in such sneering tones, a historian you haven't read and who, demonstrably, knows vastly more than you do.

To which I responded, in part,

Fromkin would not be much of a scholar if he didn't know vastly more about his specialty than some grunt like me. But that does not raise him above criticism and I reject your apparent suggestion that I can't criticize what he has written for publication to a mass audience in the NY Times without familiarising myself with his complete opus. I don't think it would be too much of an exaggeration to say that very few of those reading his op-ed would have already read 'A Peace to End All Peace' - it has to stand on its own.

My blog is not intended as scholarship and I am not a scholar. I am just someone with a low tolerance for bullshit and an inclination to write about what I read. Whatever merits Fromkin's academic work may possess, and indeed whatever actual information he conveys in the op-ed - and there is some - it is contained in a matrix of assumptions that coincide with the received wisdom that underlies a significant element of the propaganda system. Whether deliberate or not, this is precisely an example of an intellectual at the service of power.

I was relieved when she replied, as I hadn’t really set out to alienate her. She reiterated her view,

But it is incumbant on critics at least to have a look at the major work of that author before assuming basic things about his/her politics and, implicitly, character. It's very unhelpful to slash and burn and deride wonderful scholars who have contributed in major ways to our understanding of what happened, based solely on a sour reading of some quick public essay in which they didn't say precisely the right thing in your view, or cover precisely the right ground.

…We have to support and promote the great scholars who have helped expose the frauds and lies, not discredit and deride them. Everybody should read Fromkin. For those who are concerned about the Middle East, it's a page-turner.

I have now replied, in part,

I think the issue is that the author has to take responsibility for what they write. In my view, if anything, what you write for a general audience is more important than what you write for a specialized or academic audience. My critique of Fromkin's NYT op-ed does not require that I know anything about his other work, although if he had not been presented as an expert, I probably would have been slightly less unsympathetic to the lapses in the NYT piece.

… I hope you will agree, for example, that 'The Arabic-speaking Muslim world had been taken in hand by Britain and France after the First World War' is a curious way of talking about the Sykes-Picot Treaty. I can only read 'taken in hand' as beneficent, with a strong component of paternalism, at best. Or that writing 'the third world remained unconvinced' suggests that harbouring such suspicions was groundless, when it plainly was anything but.

If I had read Fromkin's book and felt as you do about it, I would definitely want to promote it. But that doesn't give him carte blanche and my support would only go that far. As I said last time, his NYT piece has to stand on its own and he has to take responsibility for it, although, if truth be told, I don’t know how much the editors tampered with it, but I doubt they actually changed the substance. On reviewing what I wrote, I might have gone a little lighter on the sarcasm, but don't perceive anything unfair. You see, what I think is unhelpful is for those who have established themselves as authorities to purvey stuff to a mass audience that, for example, glosses over British, French, and US imperialist designs, as this piece appears to.

On the strength of her recommendation, by the way, I have added Fromkin’s book on the Middle East (but not the one on Kosovo!) to my Amazon basket.

Fromkin concludes the prologue to his Kosovo book by enjoining reconsideration of

the questions that have arisen so often in the years following the end of the Cold War, and that are likely to recur in the twenty-first century: when, why, and how should the United States send its troops overseas in an attempt to resolve conflicts if they do not threaten the nation's physical security?

I find it hard to stomach some of the implicit assumptions evident in this question:

· There are situations where the US should send troops overseas.

· The US attempts to resolve conflicts.

· It is possible for US troops to resolve conflicts.

But he goes on to conclude, somewhat ambiguously, in my view,

… The Kosovo war raises the question of the extent to which America, in the world outside its borders, has the power to do good — or even whether it knows with any certainty what "good" is.

The central issue, however, is the way he writes of America, fully buying into the myth of the nation – that there is some entity called ‘America’ that has interests other than those of its rulers. That there are just ‘Americans’ who can come under collective threat, rather than one group who determines what to call a threat, ‘al Qa’ida’ for example, and what not to call a threat, NAFTA, for example, and another group that cops the consequences, whether it means losing their jobs, or killing and dying in Afghanistan and Iraq. What ‘good’, I can hardly help asking, has the US government, because that’s clearly what he means by ‘America’, done for ordinary people within its own borders? A clean environment? Health care? A decent standard of living? Even protection from terrorists? Even on their own stated terms?...

And outside its borders? Well, the US blocked a ceasefire in Lebanon for over a month. And slaughtered some 655,000 in Iraq. Fromkin wrote that in 1999, before W was elected, so he couldn’t have anticipated the absolute certainty of this administration in prosecuting good and suppressing the axis of evil.

I’m not that sure that certainty is the issue. The US has a very long and consistent history of wreaking havoc wherever it goes, from Nicaragua to Haiti, to Brazil to the Dominican Republic, to Vietnam and all over Southeast Asia, back to Nicaragua, to El Salvador, to Guatemala, to Grenada to Panama, to Iraq, back to Haiti, to Somalia, to Serbia and back to Iraq and, as George Shrub would say, Cubaragua to East Nicador and many more, always doing good.

I remain hopeful that Fromkin’s more scholarly contribution will not betray the kind of silliness I’ve observed in what he writes for us plebs.