From Juan Cole's Iraq by the numbers post:
Number of Iraqis who died of violence 2003-2011: 150,000 to 400,000.
Orphans in Iraq: 4.5 million.
At the high end of 400,000, and assuming that no childless Iraqis died at all (and that an "orphan" is someone who has had both their parents die), this would project an average family size of 22.5 children per Iraqi couple.
(Of course, there will be orphans created by causes of death other than violence, but this is really quite rare; people usually die once their children have grown up. If even half the number of orphans represent an increase in the Iraqi orphan population attributable to the war, it must have killed much more than 400,000 adults).
The report behind the 4.5m orphans number states that "almost 70%" were orphaned since the beginning of the conflict. Let's round that to 2/3, giving us a nice even 1.5m pre-war orphans.
ReplyDeleteNow let's take the average duration of orphanhood to be half the length of childhood, which we'll put at 15 years for the sake of round numbers. This gives us a pre-conflict background orphan radiation of 1.5m /(15/2), or 200k orphans per year.
We should also take into account the fact that parents with more children will be more likely to be involved in violence, as can be demonstrated easily using the principles of evolutionary psychology.
The rest is left as an exercise for the reader; I believe you'll find the average number of children per Iraqi family is at most an entirely reasonable dozen or so, not your outlandish 22.
We really don't need any more innumerate nonsense in the Iraq Humanitarian Crisis debate; you of all people ought to know better.
People could be orphaned by causes other than violence.
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