Maj.Gen. Dunlap, an Air Force officer, yesterday proclaimed We Still Need the Big Guns. His NYT op-ed is basicly a lobbying piece for Dunlap’s next employer, Lockheed or Boeing. But the pretended cause is counterinsurgency and some incoherent thought. Robert Farley at Tapped summarizes it:

1. The military success of the Surge is due to an increase in "boots on the ground"; …
2. The
   counter-insurgency manual still sucks, but its proponents misunderstand
   its key tenets, which are much more forceful than commonly believed,
   even though it still sucks.
3. The Air Force really won the Surge, through a substantial expansion in airstrikes.
4. Actually,
   the Surge didn’t work, because the only success we’ve seen is due to
   segregation of neighborhoods and cozying up to Sunni tribal leaders, so
   consequently the counter-insurgency manual still sucks.
5. And then there’s Russia, which proves we need more F-22s.  Why won’t anyone think of the Russians?

To airmen like Dunlap and the assorted industry the Army counterinsurgency manual sucks simply because the Air Force only appears in the appendix. Just like Dan Haluz, the Israeli commander who lost the 33-day war against Hizbullah in Lebanon, Dunlap believes when you hit people long and hard enough, they will start to love you (one wonders how their wives do in their marriages).

Dunlap wants to Inflict Hopelessness with clean air-power:

[T]he nature of the air weapon is such that an Abu Ghraib or Hadithah simply cannot occur. The relative sterility of air power — which the boots-on-the-ground types oddly find distressing as somehow unmartial — nevertheless provides greater opportunity for the discreet application of force largely under the control of well-educated, commissioned officer combatants. Not a total insurance policy against atrocity, but a far more risk-controlled situation.

Today the U.S. Air Force again demonstrated such "discreet application of force":

The US launched a major air strike this morning against what it claimed were al-Qaida hideouts on the southern outskirts of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.

Planes dropped 40,000lb (18,100kg) of explosives during a 10-minute blitz on 40 targets, according to a military statement.
…
"Thirty-eight bombs were dropped within the first 10 minutes, with a total tonnage of 40,000 pounds," the statement said.

The difference between the crimes of Abu Ghraib and Hadithah and today’s bombing are obvious: There will be no humans left to photograph or even count where those 500 pound bombs hit the ground.

Which brings me to the new study the World Health Organisation and the Iraq Family Health Survey did on death in Iraqi related to the U.S. war on Iraq and its occupation.

In the media the study is universally headlined as WHO estimates Iraqi war deaths at 151000 or 151,000 Iraqis died in three years. Those headlines are utterly false and willfully misleading.

The new study and the 151,000 number are emphasized against the Lancet study (pdf) which calculated some 655,000 "excess death" due to the war up to mid 2006. While having lower numbers than the Lancet study, the new study says something very different than the headlines:

On the basis of the simulation that took into account the sampling errors and the uncertainty in factors for missing clusters, the level of underreporting, and the projected population numbers, we estimated that there were 151,000 violent deaths in Iraq (95% uncertainty range, 104,000 to 223,000) during the post-invasion period from March 2003 through June 2006.

First let’s notice that the study ended in June 2006. It estimates 3.870 "violent death" per month. Since the end of the study 18 more month have past, so we have to add roughly another 70,000 to reach the likely current study number of 220,000 "violent death" because of the war.

"Violent death" is of course only a small part of the total death and destruction that results from any war. How many people died because hospitals were bombed and they couldn’t get care? How many died because the water purification facilities broke down? How many died for lack of medicine?

While the Lancet study (pdf) looked at "excess death", i.e. all death that would not have occured without the war and occupation, the new study avoids (why?) to answer the "non-violent death" questions directly. But it includes some base numbers:

Mortality from nonviolent causes was significantly higher per 1000 person-years in the post-invasion period (4.92; 95% CI, 4.49 to 5.41) than in the pre-invasion period (3.07; 95% CI, 2.61 to 3.63)

The difference between pre-war and war in the study is 1.85 dead per 1000 person-years – an increase of 60%. 

1.85 per 1000 per year x 28,000,000 x 5 years equals 212,750 "excess death" from nonviolent cause that have to be added to the 220,000 that died from violent cause.

So looking at the numbers the study uses, more than 430,000 total "excess death" occurred in Iraq due to the war the U.S. waged on Iraqis. The headlines certainly do not reflect that fact.

Besides the false representation of this study in the media – the distinction between violent and non-violent death is irrelevant – there are other systematic mistakes that make me believe that the study itself is significantly lowballing the numbers.

To pick just one of several issues: The study is based on cluster surveys, yet over 60% of the surveys planed in Anbar province were simply not done due to security problems. These clusters are estimates based on the very dubious Iraq Body Count numbers. Iraq Body Count uses verified press reports for their count. How many people were reported to have been killed in the assaults on Fallujah during which no reporters were allowed there?

Due to this and many other questions the Lancet study and its numbers seem to me to be the more reliable ones.

But to deranged persons like General Dunlap none of these studies will matter. He doesn’t care whether 50,000, 500,000 or 1,000,000 die through the bombs his fine new air planes drop. If only he can bamboozle the U.S. public into spending more billions and to contribute to his personal future fortune.