Yonatan Zunger’s Blog

Lots of interesting tidbits about the Lebanon war.

First of all, a very well-researched article by Marvin Kalb about how Hezbollah manipulated the media during the Lebanon war. It gets the key point: Israel is running an open society, and so the media could hear all about disputes, problems, etc. Hezbollah is a secret society; the journalists only got to see what Hezbollah wanted them to see. And that was a bunch of peaceful Lebanese getting bombed by the Israelis. They painted an almost entirely false picture of what was going on, but because journalists had no real opportunity to investigate further, they got to completely control media presentation of the war worldwide. Link from , who has some more good discussion. (This article is an excellent read for anyone interested in media manipulation in general – highly recommended!)

However, media manipulation or not, Olmert (Israel’s PM) is in trouble. He commissioned a blue-ribbon panel to analyze Israel’s handling of the war. Their results basically say that the civilian and senior military staff fucked up severely, endangering national security, by doing things like entering a war without a clear strategy, letting Hezbollah get away with all sorts of things, exhibiting insufficient creativity in military operations, etc. It’s very damning, and the Israeli public generally agrees with it: there was a rally tonight in Tel Aviv with 100,000 protesters calling on Olmert to resign.

My prediction: Olmert will make a lot of noise saying how he shouldn’t resign. In a few days, his defense minister will resign (and about time, too — I still have no idea why that half-wit got the minstry of defense). Unless that magically satisfies everyone (it probably won’t) Olmert will have to resign, since if he doesn’t there’s going to be a vote of no confidence, new elections, and his party is going to get creamed. If he does resign, the foreign minister Tzipi Livni will become PM, and she’ll have a few months to desperately try to restore confidence in this government. I’d put her odds of success around 1 in 3. If it fails, there will be elections a few months afterwards, which Likud and Israel Beiteinu are going to do very well in. That probably means that Netanyahu will come back as PM — unless, gods forbid, Israel Beiteinu does really well, and Avigdor Lieberman becomes PM instead.

In all my years, I never thought I would miss Ariel Sharon this much. Where are the old lions when we need them?

You may have heard rumors that the US and Israel are planning a joint strike against Iran. I don’t have time to read through all the sources now and check on the rumors, but we’re definitely building up military strength in the Persian Gulf. Short summary of possibilities:

• This is just some saber-rattling to point out to Iran that it should, in fact, be thinking more seriously about negotiation. If so we’re in luck, because that would be a not entirely stupid move. Of course, it’s no good if you’re not willing to follow through, but that’s a legitimate negotiation tactic.
• These forces are actually going to be used in Iraq. That could go well with option 1.
• We’re planning some limited sort of operation, or to act in support of an Israeli operation. Possibilities include bombing selected targets or even doing highly targeted ground operations against them. I would have to spend a lot more time analyzing data, and for that matter analyze highly classified data, to get a sense of whether this is workable or not. It’s very risky.
• Our President has decided to make the First Classic Blunder for a third time in a row, and has no understanding of the relative military strengths of the force he just put in the Gulf and the Iranian military, nor of the consequences of turning Iran into another Iraq. Normally I would rule this out under “even he isn’t that stupid,” but the past few years have taught me the folly of betting on that.

Anyway, keep your eyes open. If I have time I’ll sniff more.

(And thanks to for pointing me at the recent changes — I’ve not been paying proper attention to political news lately)

An article recently published in the Lancet estimates the number of “excess deaths” in Iraq since the invasion at 655,000, of which 601,000 were due to violence and the balance due to disease, etc. Here’s a Washington Post story; here’s one from the BBC. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to the original journal article; if someone does and could forward me a copy, I’d be very interested to read it.

[In fact: The BBC and WP stories seem to disagree on numbers a good deal, so I’d really like to see the original paper and figure out what’s going on. The WP numbers more closely match what I’ve heard from other media channels, so I’ll use those below]

There’s “controversy,” of course, because the US administration immediately decried the results as false and the methodology as incorrect — which I would personally find a bit surprising, given that poor methodology doesn’t generally get published in top-tier medical journals. The official death toll is less than 1/10th of that.

But there may be a good reason why those two numbers disagree: the official death toll is probably counting very selective types of deaths, e.g. deaths in which US personnel were directly involved, either as combatants or in cleaning up the mess. It’s an attempt to count deaths which came to the attention of US forces. The Lancet study is measuring something else: they did a random survey of 1,849 households across Iraq and asked people about deaths in their family, asking for (and routinely receiving) death certificates to verify the numbers. Based on this, they computed the overall mortality rate in Iraq in deaths per 1,000 people per year, compared this to the known mortality rate prior to the war, and thus computed the number of people who died above the number you would expect to have died had nothing happened. As a sanity check, they noted that their measurement for excess deaths in the time period immediately following the invasion does match the official number for that period fairly closely. Since US forces were more directly involved in everything that was going on then, those numbers ought to match up.

A number measured by these means is both helpful and not: on the one hand, it tells you that there is some total effect going on (which is why this sort of method is very common in epidemiology) but it doesn’t tell you what caused it. However, the second number is pretty surprising: Of the 655k excess deaths, 601k were from violence, primarily from gunshot wounds. Normally in a post-war region, I would expect excess deaths to come mostly from disease, starvation, and the like; the fact that most of these deaths were violent is pretty unusual. Perhaps it means that medicine is improving.

I noticed that a DoD spokesman said “it would be difficult for the U.S. to precisely determine the number of civilian deaths in Iraq as a result of insurgent activity.” This is an attempt to emphasize that people aren’t dying because US forces are killing them, but as a result of the insurgents, which we consider our enemies. This is true but misses the point; on the one hand, nobody was accusing the US forces of killing 655kpeople, and on the other hand, the simple presence of these insurgent forces is a direct consequence of the US invasion. In fact, the relatively low number of non-combat deaths may speak well of US activity on the ground; the absence of the other two of the Four Horsemen bespeaks some good work on keeping food and medicine flowing in a war-torn country. But the high number of overall deaths is directly
attributable to the fact that the US invaded Iraq, and the upper political command has no cover from that.

Edit: I got a copy. It looks like the WP numbers are correct; the 100k number that the BBC cites is the number from previous studies, which this paper means to update. Similarly the number of households surveyed is in fact 1849, not “under 1000.” I’ll read the paper in more detail tonight and update if there’s something interesting in it.