[This week's] fixation in Washington is former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates' so called new revelation, breathlessly reported by the the Washington Post (Robert Woodward), The New York Times (Thom Shanker) and others, that Barack Obama was not fully committed to George Bush's (and Robert Gates') war in Afghanistan, especially the troop surge there which Obama allowed himself to be maneuvered into by the Pentagon's generals (and Robert Gates).
We are then blown away—well, not entirely—by the other dramatic news from Gates that Hillary Clinton said politics influenced her own position during her 2007-8 presidential campaign on the other troop surge-the one in Iraq. Quite a stunner, eh?
Without giving this fluff any further attention, it's time to consider something a little more important and a little less comforting to those seeking to distract us from the effects of their handiwork.
Consider the question of life and death. Specifically, almost a half a million deaths, mostly of civilians. That is the tally in Iraq directly attributable to the US invasion and occupation of Iraq: "461,000, just under half a million people," a recent study says. […]
"Mortality in Iraq Associated with the 2003-2011 War and Occupation: Findings from a National Cluster Sample Survey by the University Collaborative Iraq Mortality Study" appears in an international, peer reviewed publication,PLOS Medicine.
The study is the work of researchers at the University of Washington, Johns Hopkins, Fraser University in Canada and the Iraqi Ministry of Health. The typical Washington apparatchik will ignore the study as from an obscure publication; individuals with any interest in data and analysis will look at the article's description of its methodology and realize that this is a piece of research that cannot be ignored—even if Washington already has.
In sum, the study surveyed 2,000 randomly selected households throughout Iraq, using methods to ensure the sample was nationally representative-including of those who were either internally or externally displaced. Direct interviews were the primary data collection technique--with procedures to verify what the interviewers were being told.
[…]
It is also highly likely that the 460,000 deaths are an undercount. The baseline death rate was the 26 month period just before the US invasion in March 2001; that was a death rate already elevated by the effects on the Iraqi infrastructure from the bombing of civilian targets (such as water treatment facilities and electricity generation) during Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and also elevated by years of US-led economic sanctions. Moreover, it is not clear if the new study included infant mortality in its accounting, and its assertion that only 15 percent of the families that left Iraq during the US occupation had a death in the family seems more than a little conservative for that group.
Perhaps the upper bounds of the statistical analysis (751,000 deaths, or more if you include the emigrant households) approach the reality of the impact of the American invasion and occupation. […]
For it all, we have many people to thank, not just Robert Gates. Anyone reading this commentary knows their names. However, as you contemplate Gates' efforts to write his own legacy, think about what he was a part of-but which his eagerly fawning reviewers write no whisper of.
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