The Disappeared

via Instapundit (I know, I know), we have a several-day-old-article about a new poll counting the number of Baghdad residents Saddam Hussein murdered. The estimate they come up with is 61,000, in Baghdad alone.

This was higher than previous estimates, but it does not really surprise me. I never doubted him to be a thug and a murderer and whatever invective I could come up with–though every time you’re confronted with the numbers again you wonder how the Iraqi people could possibly be worse off when all this is over, no matter how much we screw it up.

But what I’m really interested in, for the purposes of this post, is the methodology:

“The survey obtained Monday, which the polling firm planned to release on Tuesday, asked 1,178 Baghdad residents in August and September whether a member of their household had been executed by Saddam’s regime. According to Gallup, 6.6 percent said yes.

The polling firm took metropolitan Baghdad’s population — 6.39 million — and average household size — 6.9 people — to calculate that 61,000 people were executed during Saddam’s rule. Past estimates were in the low tens of thousands. Most are believed to have been buried in mass graves.”

I’ve never heard of this casualty-count-by-poll before. Do we have any statisticians or social scientists reading this? Is this a decent method of counting casualties? How does it differ from the use of press reports or anecdotal evidence, or mass graves, or the various other methods that are used?

I have no idea if it’s even remotely accurate. But if it is, we should consider using it to figure out how many civilians (or for that matter soldiers) were killed in the U.S. invasion, and its aftermath.

(continued, and please read the whole thing before commenting.)

Please note that I am not asking these questions because I want statistics about dead Iraqi children to throw back at pro-war people in response to their statistics about dead Iraqi children. I am really and truly not. I think it is very important that we get civilian casualty numbers, for four reasons:

1. If we are going to justify wars for humanitarian reasons, we should get as good an idea as possible about their humanitarian costs.

2. If we are going to war in order to win hearts and minds, or where victory requires winning hearts and minds, it is useful to know how many people’s relatives were killed in the process. That number is obviously going to be very relevant to what the population we’re liberating/occupying thinks of us. One of the reasons I have more hope about Iraq than Vietnam is that we’ve apparently grown a lot better at killing fewer civilians, even since the 1991 war. But I would like to know that with more certainty.

3. If the government or better still an independent group doesn’t do this, it will only be done by people with an axe to grind. I have no idea about the methods of this Iraq Body Count group, but anyone who looks at their website is going to question their objectivity, and for good reason.

4. This last reason is less practical and more emotional on my part. A lot of people commented, after September 11, about the difficulty of mourning when there is no body, of the added horror of realizing someone has simply disappeared. We all remember the “missing” posters, and many of us have heard of “Los Desaparecidos” in Argentina or Chile, or families of POW/MIAs in the U.S.

I guess I have a similar feeling about the idea that people are killed, by us or our enemies, in Iraq or Rwanda or Cambodia or Kosovo–and not only is there no body, but there is not even a name. Not only is there no name, but there is not even a number. Only these ranges that vary by orders of magnitude, that are exaggerated or minimized by people in support of their political causes. I don’t know if Gallup’s methodology is any good. But if we can find out, using this method or any other, we should find out.

Obviously, this does not only apply to the U.S. in Iraq, but this survey method seems as if it would have to take place shortly after the violence for it to work.

Footnote the first: this is a sensitive topic, so let me add another disclaimer: When I say “by us or our enemies” I am not comparing the U.S. army to Saddam Hussein or Pinochet or anyone else, or asserting any moral equivalence between us and our enemies. Even if you ignore intentions, it seems pretty clear that we killed a hell of a lot fewer Iraqis than Saddam did–and I think intentions matter quite a lot. I am only saying that violent death is violent death, and one should at least try to count the victims.

Footnote the second: the title of the post reminded me of, and may subconsciously be taken from, this poem.