Today thousands of Americans will gather in hundreds of vigils across the country sponsored by MoveOn and United for Peace and Justice, among others, to mark the fifth anniversary of the illegal and unjust war in Iraq. These vigils will note the 3,990 U.S. deaths and 29,314 wounded, and will note the terrible toll the war has taken on Iraq.
But what is a cautious, conservative, responsible thing to say about the Iraqi death toll? No accurate count can be given, and the question has been further clouded by poor reporting in the U.S. media, and misleading commentary by the Bush administration and its supporters.
There are two scientific studies that have used standard techniques for estimating the death toll.
The first, generally referred to as the "Lancet study," estimated that just over 600,000 Iraqis had been killed as a result of the invasion as of July 2006.
The second, generally referred to as the WHO study or the Iraq Health Ministry study, estimated that 151,000 Iraqis had been killed over essentially the same period. There is some reasonable basis for questioning whether this study underestimates the death rate -- indeed, some Iraqi officials indicated that they thought that it did -- but it was a scientific study, using generally accepted methods.
If we assume that the tally of deaths reported by Iraq Body Count, while not giving us an accurate picture of the overall scale of death (no tally could, in such a situation), does give us an rough picture, when compared to itself over time, of changes in the death rate, then we can extrapolate these two numbers forward to the present.
The Lancet study would suggest an Iraqi death toll today of about 1,190,000. This is how we arrive at the Just Foreign Policy estimate of Iraqi deaths. This is also broadly consistent with the death toll of 1.2 million estimated by Opinion Research Business in Britain in September 2007 (as of August 2007).
The WHO/Iraqi Health Ministry Study, based on the same extrapolation, would suggest a death toll today of about 300,000.
Note that the WHO study also uses Iraq Body Count trends to extrapolate, suggesting that this is a reasonable approach, in the absence of better information.
Thus, a cautious, balanced appraisal based on available scientific information would suggest an Iraqi death toll today of between 300,000 and 1.2 million since March 2003.
Note that, if you look for estimates of war dead in past wars -- for example, Vietnamese dead in the Vietnam War -- you will also see what appears at first to be a wide range. The exact death toll will never be known. More studies -- and certainly such an important question deserves to be further studied -- will give us more information. But as of today, a responsible, cautious, conservative thing to say is that between 300,000 and 1.2 million Iraqis have died, and the statement "hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died" has very strong support.