How Many Dead Iraqis?
Guessing about collateral damage.
By Fred Kaplan
Tuesday, February 25, 2003, at 3:23 PM PT


How many Iraqi civilians will die in Gulf War II? It's one of the most
disturbing questions going into this battle—the question that fills doves
with passion and hawks with doubt—so a few activists and analysts have tried
to develop an answer. The most widely circulated one comes from a
confidential report by a U.N. humanitarian-aid specialist, which was leaked
to a group in Cambridge, which in turn published it on the Internet. This
report estimates that civilian casualties could total 500,000. Another
much-cited public study, by the International Physicians for the Prevention
of Nuclear War, cites a figure of up to 100,000. If these calculations were
even close to plausible, they would certainly strain many of the rationales
for going to war, especially those that involve the liberation and welfare
of the Iraqi people.

So, it's worth asking: How were these numbers computed? On what
assumptions—especially about U.S. strategy, tactics, weapons, and
targets—are they based? There's an old phrase among those who work with
computer models: "GIGO," for Garbage In/Garbage Out. Feed a computer silly
assumptions; it spits out ridiculous numbers. Not to paint a rosy picture on
the devastation wrought by any war, especially this one, which is likely to
be fought partly in densely populated cities, but these numbers are textbook
cases of GIGO. They're not so much wrong as they are completely useless.

The U.N. study, which was written last December (the author has not been
revealed, though the document's authenticity has been confirmed), makes the
following assumptions about the course of the war:

That U.S. and allied bombing will severely damage Iraq's electrical power
plants, generators, and distribution networks, which will have a grave
effect on the country's electrified water and sanitation systems;
That the port of Umm Qasr will be disabled, thus blocking imports of vital
supplies;
That the country's railroad tracks, bridges, and key roads will be
destroyed, disrupting internal travel, trade, and post-war aid.
The International Physicians' report makes the same assumption: "The
destruction of roads, railways, houses, hospitals, factories, and sewage
plants will create conditions in which the environment is degraded and
disease flourishes." These structures and networks were key targets in the
1991 Gulf War; they were bombarded heavily and repeatedly. As a result,
according to several independent estimates, about 3,500 Iraqi civilians were
killed during the war, and another 110,000 died from the after-effects on
the country's health and sanitation system. In a similar vein, the leaked
U.N. study calculates that 100,000 civilians will die during the coming war,
plus 400,000 after the war.

Here's the fallacy, though: In this war, the United States has no intention
of attacking power plants, railways, or bridges—or not many, anyway. Several
news stories (for example, click here) have said as much, but logic makes
the same point.

First, this time around, the U.S. leadership seems genuinely interested in
rebuilding Iraq after the war. It makes no sense, therefore, to bomb these
kinds of targets, the repair of which would only make an already-difficult
job even more costly and time consuming.

Second, and more pertinent, the basic aims of this war are very different
from Operation Desert Storm. In 1991, the goal was to push Iraqi troops out
of Kuwait and make sure they couldn't reinvade afterward. Bridges, railways,
and roads were bombarded in order to cut off those troops—in Kuwait and in
southern Iraq—from command channels and supply lines. Electrical power
plants were destroyed in order to "blind" Iraq's politico-military machine.
This was necessary to keep Saddam's intelligence officers from detecting the
vast movement of U.S. troops and armor just across the border. This
movement, which had to remain covert to be effective, allowed the United
States to sweep up and around the dug-in Iraqi soldiers, surrounding them
from the rear and the flank and thus attacking them from all sides, once the
ground war started.

The destruction wreaked by this bombing was horrendous, especially since
Bush I bugged out right after a cease-fire was reached, helping neither to
rebuild the country nor to overthrow Saddam. The point here, though, is that
power plants, bridges, and so forth were considered military targets in
1991; they are not—or at least not remotely to the same extent—in 2003. If
these sorts of facilities are not bombed much in the coming war, then the
assumptions in the U.N. and International Physicians' report are completely
off-base, as are the casualty estimates that go with them.

A closer look at those reports' numbers reveals a great deal of looseness,
even if their assumptions were pertinent. The U.N. report does not lay out
the range of estimates—a failing that, given the range of uncertainties in
any war, makes the calculations inherently suspect. (How 100,000 civilians
are supposed to die in the course of the war, from the bombing alone, is not
explained.) However, the International Physicians' report does lay out a
range. In Baghdad, it states, civilian deaths caused directly by the war
will total between 2,000 and 50,000; wounded will reach 6,000 to 200,000. In
Basra, Diyala, Kirkuk, and Mosul, civilian deaths will be between 1,200 and
35,000; wounded, between 3,600 and 120,000.

But these aren't estimates; they're dartboards. A footnote in the report
cites a source for these numbers, and it turns out to be an article by
Brookings analyst Michael O'Hanlon that appeared in Slate last September.
O'Hanlon wrote, "Iraqi troop losses might be expected to be anywhere from
2,000 to 50,000, with civilian casualties in the same relative range,"
adding, "Even as broad a range as this is based on certain assumptions."
O'Hanlon was making the point that it's nearly impossible to predict how
many civilians will die; it's based on too many factors that are themselves
impossible to predict. The International Physicians, it appears, took
O'Hanlon's hand-waving gesture of the task's futility as a precise piece of
science.

The physicians go on to state that this war will "be much more intense and
destructive than in 1991" because of the "new, more deadly weapons" that the
United States has "developed in the interim." This makes little sense. To
the extent the new U.S. weapons are deadlier, it is because they are far
more accurate than those used in '91 and are, therefore, at least
theoretically, likely to cause less "collateral damage." There has also been
much talk of "directed-energy weapons," which can destroy electronic
circuits by zapping them with microwaves. (Think of them as the opposite of
"neutron bombs," in that they can destroy property without killing people.)

It is true that heightened precision can have a lulling effect on
commanders. In the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, U.S. "smart bombs" had grown
so accurate that the commanders dared to drop them on urban
targets—particular buildings, specific street corners—that would have been
impossible to hit so precisely, and therefore would have been avoided, in
earlier "limited wars." However, some bombs did go astray, as some
inevitably do; some targets were imperfectly identified (for example, as a
military facility as opposed to what it really was—the Chinese Embassy);
and, as a result, a few mistakes led to over 1,000 civilian deaths.

There is no way to estimate ahead of time—even within several orders of
magnitude—how many civilians, or for that matter how many combatants, will
die in this war or in any war. Beth Osborne Daponte is a public policy
professor at Carnegie Mellon and a former government demographer who got
hounded out of her job by the Bush I administration for attempting to do a
post-'91 estimate of Iraq's civilian casualties. She is ignoring all
inquiries about how many might die in this next war. As she put it to me,
"Multiply an unknown by an unknown, and you get an unknown."

However, there are lessons to be learned from the '91 war. The vast majority
of the deaths came after the war, as a result of the destruction of the
country's infrastructure and electrical network. The best way to minimize
casualties is to minimize targeting that network. Bush officials insist they
are planning to do just that. If the war comes, they should be held to that
standard.






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