There's an article in the NYT about the president authorizing US troops in Iraq to use force against Iranian agents they encounter there. And for the first time in a long while, I think the president said something that wasn't simply asinine. But what I hope this means is something significantly more aggressive. Iran is currently engaging in a very sophisticated proxy war across the Middle East, with their agents infiltrating and taking over groups and using them for violent confrontations and takeovers. (Hamas against both Israel and Fatah, Hezbollah against all of Lebanese civil society, various agents including al-Sadr in Iraq, Iranian "military representatives" in Syria, and sleeper cells in every country with a Shi'ite population) These guys are using Iraq as a perfect opportunity to set up people who can do all of the things that they don't want to do openly; a really significant fraction of the violence in Iraq is being driven by these agents, for Iranian purposes. (Mostly, to screw with the US, and to even have a chance to attack US forces, train against them, and evaluate their capabilities in the field)

If Iran is going to fight a "secret war" with the US, the US should feel no compunction about fighting a secret war back. Let me armchair-general for a moment: I would have already issued orders to capture or kill any Iranian agents found in Iraq, and if they have any local cell organizations that aren't valuable for some other purpose, to simply wipe them out. Iran can't complain about nasty things happening to its people when it denies that they're in there; OK, let's take them up on that. The fewer remaining members of their "intelligence services," the better.

So for once, I actually think that our president's call for increased military action in some regard is a good idea. Mark it well, it won't happen that often.

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.

Politics: Riots in Hungary, a military coup in Thailand. (Random note about the latter: when we were in Thailand a few months ago, I told autumnflames that it was good that we went then, since there had been unrest a few months before and there was going to be a coup by October. I don't actually know much of anything about Thai politics; it was clear enough that picking up the paper a few times and staring out the window was information enough to tell. It's too bad there isn't an obvious way to do something useful with "there will be a coup here on such a date" information, apart from the usual "get you and everyone you care about out of the way.")

Israel says it will pull the last of its troops from Lebanon by this weekend. At some point I'll write a big post about all of the politics around this, really.

Potentially (much) more important news: Major openings forming in the Arctic ice sheet. They quote Mark Drinkwater of the European Space Administration as saying that the North Polar Sea should be seasonally navigable in 10-20 years. Key conclusion: If you can get your hands on land way up North, especially useful sea ports, now would be a good time. There will be shipping traffic there, there will be oil exploration, and if James Lovelock's really gloomy predictions come to pass, it may be some of the most pleasant real estate left on the planet 100 years from now...

And your oddball news: A recent study of almost 25k women with breast implants showed that they did not have a significantly higher mortality rate than women without them. They did, however, have a 73% higher suicide rate than the population as a whole.

Still no time to write the big politics post summarizing the Lebanon War; I'll get to that soon, really. In the meantime, here's a post by bradhicks with a good update on some stuff from Pakistan.

The latest quarterly Pentagon report on Iraq was released today. (NYTimes story) It probably won't surprise anyone to hear that things are bad; Iraqi casualties went up 50% relative to last quarter. One number that particularly struck me is that total Iraqi casualties have reached 120 per day.

Think about this for a moment. If a terrorist action, or set of terrorist actions, were to kill 120 people in the United States, consider what the news would be like, what the inquests would be like, how long it would be remembered for. This has now reached the level of daily occurrence.

Technical aside: When trying to interpret the impact of this, we really need to scale things to the size of the population. The real number that affects the public as a whole in a mass casualty event is the average number of degrees of separation between a random person and a person affected. Simply scaling the number of people affected linearly -- the US has ten times the population of Iraq, it's as if 1200 people were killed here -- is incorrect, since as groups get smaller you're more likely to know someone else in it. Does someone know a good result on mean distance in very large social networks?

Speaking about Iraq, our president said: "We're not leaving so long as I'm president."

While I suppose we've all known this for a while -- given the unholy mess we're stuck in, there's really no way we're going to get out of there for many years to come -- it's interesting to see him completely give up on pretending that we're going to win the war Real Soon Now.

(Coming soon: A real write-up about the recent war with Hezbollah and what was going on behind the scenes. The short answer is "a hell of a lot.")

Edit: Will wonders never cease. Take a look at the transcript of another press conference, and search for the word "weapons of mass destruction." You will see our president openly and publicly admitting that the entire WMD rationale was wrong, and that Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11. Thanks to xthread for the link.

Quick note: If you hear something in the news in the near future about the "Abu al-Fadal al-Abas Brigades" in Iraq, these are a new arm of Hezbollah which Iran has set up in Iraq, specifically to act as Iran's proxy fighters against the US. Apparently they moved from silent setup mode to active attacking mode on 4 Jul, and we can expect them to be trouble in the future.

Related: Notice that ever since Ahmadinejad took power in Iran, and made Mughniyeh his defense minister, Iran has been very actively founding Iranian-controlled terror groups in as many places as possible: AaFaA Brigades in Iraq, its old Hezbollah setup in Lebanon and Syria, its infiltration & takeover of Hamas in Gaza, etc. If I were running a government anywhere vaguely in that region that had a Shi'ite minority, I'd be keeping my eyes open for whatever satellite group Iran were setting up there. And note that this is an international network of professional terrorist groups with the systematic sponsorship, supply and control by a government that's trying to become a nuclear power: the worst hypothesis is confirmed.

Iran is gearing up for a major proxy war. If they set up these units in every Middle Eastern country with a Shi'ite population, they could effectively destabilize the local governments and install friendly regimes, or at least create friendly circumstances "on the ground:" the true creation of an Iranian sphere of influence. The other thing these teams are for is for fighting against the US/Israel alliance, which it views - quite rightly - as a competitor for geostrategic power in the region. Such a force would certainly back even non-Shi'ite groups to further its aims; (remember that Iran supplied weapons to the [Sunni] PLO for years) direct alliance with groups like al-Qaeda is less likely, since those groups have very strong ideological leanings which aren't that compatible, but these guys have the potential to be much more strongly unified.

The question of just how broad Iran's ambitions are is open: they want this network, they want ICBM's (they already have intermediate-range ballistic missiles, like the Shahab-3; once North Korea finalizes the Taepodong-2 ICBM, Iran will probably be the first customers), they want the Bomb. Do they want to take on China or India for regional power? Would they want to press engagement with US/Israel even beyond the scale needed to push them out of the area?

Another interesting question: How will Russia come down in this? They haven't decisively allied with either the US or Iranian side in this conflict, and have been willing to work with both. At some point it will probably become very difficult to do this. Which way it goes depends e.g. on how Iran decides to involve itself (or not) with Chechnya, but it could have a big impact on how much free rein Iran ends up getting in the Central Asian sphere.

There's something curious about this particular war: the politicians all seem to get what's really going on -- even the ones who are usually a bit dense -- but the media seems to have completely, utterly, missed the ball. So this is probably a good time to give a bit of backstory.

(The backstory to the backstory, if you haven't heard the news at all -- a few months ago, Hamas started firing missiles at Israel fairly regularly from Gaza. A few weeks ago, they raided and kidnapped a soldier, plus killing a few more. Israel demanded his return and parked armored divisions at the border; Hamas refused, and Israel rolled in the tanks, going for both the hostage's release and an end to the attacks. Then a bit after that, Hezbollah raided from Lebanon and kidnapped people as well; in response, Israel has essentially gone to war, and Lebanon has been getting bombed ever since. Various countries have said "bad Israel, you're overreacting" but the response has been very noticeably muted; in fact, the US, Europe, and even the Arab League aren't actually opposing Israel's actions very strongly at all, and Bush signalled today pretty clearly that he's going to wait at least another week before really trying to encourage a cease-fire at all. Why?...)
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Just an update, for those of you who haven't been watching this. A few days ago, Hamas attacked an Israeli position, killing two soldiers and capturing another one. They took him to somewhere in Gaza. Israel massed armored units at the border and warned them to return him at once.
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This isn't a big, world-shaking event; it's a regional crisis, with the potential for having real regional effects, but it's not something that you absolutely need to be following unless you care about Middle Eastern politics. In fact, I'm just posting this because I know a lot of people don't follow that, and may just want a quick summary of the week's news.

Edit: Here's a link to New York Times coverage of the various things going on. Not all the details, but a fair roundup of events with minimal editorializing.

Me: Here's a headline you don't see in civilized countries. "Fatah Gunmen Attack Parliament."
Officemate: Sure you do. Whenever Fatah comes and attacks people's parliaments.

Only in the Middle East...