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What We Know and How We Know It

October 17, 2006 7:47 AM

How do we know what we know about Iraq?

As reporters in Baghdad, our movements are severely circumscribed by security concerns, so it is difficult for us to get out and report.  Even our local Iraqi colleagues are finding that the areas they can go and report from safely are shrinking.  This past weekend something horrific happened in the town of Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad on the Mosul road.  We know that Sunnis decapitated a group of Shiites and left them in an orchard, and Shiites then retaliated by shooting Sunnis.  But the number of dead is anyone’s guess – figures range from 36 to over 90.  We heard that Shiite militiamen broke into Balad hospital and pulled out Sunni patients to execute them – a horrific eyewitness tale of a war crime, or a story made up by someone with an agenda?  In the current climate of fear and polarization in Iraq, the distance between rumor and fact is a function of prejudice and politics. 

Reporters simply could not get to Balad to sort out fact from fiction.  It is a Shiite town in the middle of a predominantly Sunni district.  Any Shiite journalist would likely have been stopped and killed on the road towards the town, and any Sunni journalist would likely have been killed inside the town.  And a foreign journalist could have been picked off by either side as an unwelcome intruder.

Multiply the Balad dilemma a thousand times, and you start to get an idea of the frustrations of reporting in Iraq. 

President Bush said he thought about 30,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed since the war began.  NGO’s have put the total between 44,000 at the low end and 128,000 at the high end.  Then last week researchers published a study in the British medical journal The Lancet suggesting that over 600,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed since 2003.  This was so much higher than any other figures we had seen, that our initial instinct as reporters was to see if the study contained any obvious flaws.  The UN, no friend of the US, had estimated 100 Iraqis were dying every day – now we were to believe that in fact the daily death toll from violence was over 500?

My instincts tell me the Lancet study overestimates the real death rate, but I have to ask myself how can I be so sure?  Could it not be that we are missing a huge amount of this story, that much of the violence is going unreported because reporters simply cannot get there?  Like the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, who were able to kill hundreds of thousands of people in their killing fields without the outside world realizing what was going on?

Of course Iraq is not Cambodia of the late 70’s – its borders are open, people can travel from city to city, there is a healthily free, if somewhat undisciplined press, and cell phones are ubiquitous.  But at the same time disinformation is rampant, exaggeration a standard rhetorical technique, and statistics are simple bargaining chips.

I think I have an idea of what is going on in Iraq.  But how do I know that?

October 17, 2006 | Permalink | User Comments (0)

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