The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,192

be tabulated. Since then the UCDP has maintained a Non-State Conflict Dataset, and it contains three revelations. First, nonstate conflicts are in some years as numerous as state-based conflicts—which says more about the scarcity of war than about the prevalence of intercommunal combat. Most of them, not surprisingly, are in sub-Saharan Africa, though a growing number are in the Middle East (most prominently, Iraq). Second, nonstate conflicts kill far fewer people than conflicts that involve a government, perhaps a quarter as many. Again, this is not surprising, since governments almost by definition are in the violence business. Third, the trend in the death toll from 2002 to 2008 (the most recent year covered in the dataset) has been mostly downward, despite 2007’s being the deadliest year for intercommunal violence in Iraq.63 So as best as anyone can tell, it seems unlikely that nonstate conflicts kill enough people to stand as a counterexample to the decline in the worldwide toll of armed conflict that constitutes the New Peace.

A more serious challenge is the number of indirect deaths of civilians from the hunger, disease, and lawlessness exacerbated by war. One often reads that a century ago only 10 percent of the deaths in war were suffered by civilians, but that today the figure is 90 percent. Consistent with this claim are new surveys by epidemiologists that reveal horrendous numbers of “excess deaths” (direct and indirect) among civilians. Rather than counting bodies from media reports and nongovernmental organizations, surveyors ask a sample of people whether they know someone who was killed, then extrapolate the proportion to the population as a whole. One of these surveys, published in the medical journal Lancet in 2006, estimated that 600,000 people died in the war in Iraq between 2003 and 2006—overwhelmingly more than the 80,000 to 90,000 battle deaths counted for that period by PRIO and by the Iraq Body Count, a respected nongovernmental organization.64 Another survey in the Democratic Republic of the Congo put the death toll from its civil war at 5.4 million—about thirty-five times the PRIO battle-death estimate, and more than half of the total of all the battle deaths it has recorded in all wars since 1946.65 Even granting that the PRIO figures are intended as lower bounds (because of the stringent requirements that deaths be attributed to a cause), this is quite a discrepancy, and raises doubts about whether, in the big picture, the decline in battle deaths can really be interpreted as an advance in peace.

Casualty figures are always moralized, and it’s not surprising that these three numbers, which have been used to indict, respectively, the 20th century, Bush’s invasion of Iraq, and the world’s indifference to Africa, have been widely disseminated. But an objective look at the sources suggests that the revisionist estimates are not credible (which, needless to say, does not imply that anyone should be indifferent to civilian deaths in wartime).

First off, the commonly cited 10-percent-to-90-percent reversal in civilian casualties turns out to be completely bogus. The political scientists Andrew Mack (of HSRP), Joshua Goldstein, and Adam Roberts have each tried to track down the source of this meme, since they all knew that the data needed to underpin it do not exist.66 They also knew that the claim fails basic sanity checks. For much of human history, peasants have subsisted on what they could grow, producing little in the way of a surplus. A horde of soldiers living off the land could easily tip a rural population into starvation. The Thirty Years’ War in particular saw not only numerous massacres of civilians but the deliberate destruction of homes, crops, livestock, and water supplies, adding up to truly horrendous civilian death tolls. The American Civil War, with its blockades, crop-burnings, and scorched-earth campaigns, caused an enormous number of civilian casualties (the historical reality behind Scarlett O’Hara’s vow in Gone With the Wind: “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again”).67 During World War I the battlefront moved through populated areas, raining artillery shells on towns and villages, and each side tried to starve the other’s civilians with blockades. And as I have mentioned, if one includes the victims of the 1918 flu epidemic as indirect deaths from the war, one could multiply the number of civilian casualties many times over. World War II, also in the first half of the 20th century, decimated civilians with a holocaust, a blitz, Slaughterhouse-Five–like firebombings of cities in Germany and Japan, and not one but two atomic explosions. It seems