A MOST GHOULISH DEBATE
By Rick Moran Posted in Spotlight Blogs | War — Comments (12) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
It is an unseemly thing to be debating how many Iraqis have died as a result of the invasion and occupation by US troops. I'm absolutely sure that most opponents of the war feel that way. They would, I'm sure, wish that we would all just sit back and accept the politically motivated study released today that purports to show 600,000 more Iraqis have died since 2003 than would have if we hadn't invaded:
A team of American and Iraqi public health researchers has estimated that 600,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003 American invasion, the highest estimate ever for the toll of the war here.
The figure breaks down to about 15,000 violent deaths a month, a number that is quadruple the one for July given by Iraqi government hospitals and the morgue in Baghdad and published last month in a United Nations report in Iraq. That month was the highest for Iraqi civilian deaths since the American invasion.
But it is an estimate and not a precise count, and researchers acknowledged a margin of error that ranged from 426,369 to 793,663 deaths.
First of all, the Times makes a common mistake by lumping civilians, insurgents, and Iraqi Police and Army units all together and simply referring to them as "civilians." In fact, the study makes absolutely no effort to differentiate between civilians and insurgents, Police and army. All the researchers asked were the number of dead over the last 3 years.
But why is the study politically motivated?
This is the same crew whose 2004 study showing 100,000 Iraqi dead was thoroughly debunked by a wide variety of experts from both sides of the debate.
Fred Kaplan of Slate on the 2004 study:
"Readers who are accustomed to perusing statistical documents know what the set of numbers in the parentheses means. For the other 99.9 percent of you, I'll spell it out in plain English—which, disturbingly, the study never does. It means that the authors are 95 percent confident that the war-caused deaths totaled some number between 8,000 and 194,000. (The number cited in plain language—98,000—is roughly at the halfway point in this absurdly vast range.)
This isn't an estimate. It's a dart board.
Imagine reading a poll reporting that George W. Bush will win somewhere between 4 percent and 96 percent of the votes in this Tuesday's election. You would say that this is a useless poll and that something must have gone terribly wrong with the sampling. The same is true of the Lancet article: It's a useless study; something went terribly wrong with the sampling."
As you can see from the above New York Times excerpt, these purveyors of wildly exaggerated mortality have tried the same technique this time around as well: they have "a margin of error that ranged from 426,369 to 793,663 deaths."
What's more, this excerpt from the original NY Times article of October 29, 2004 could have been pasted into their article today:
“Editors of The Lancet, the London-based medical publication, where an article describing the study is scheduled to appear, decided not to wait for the normal publication date next week, but to place the research online Friday, apparently so it could circulate before the election.”
Funny how these studies seem to show up around election day, eh? Color me suspicious, but if the study had come out 3 weeks after the election, I would be more sanguine about the author's motives.
The Washington Post tries to put the best face on the study by quoting non-experts who seem satisfied with the results but curiously, all seem to be unanimously against the US occupation. But putting a ball gown on a sow still gives you a pig all dressed up with nowhere to go:
Ronald Waldman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University who worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for many years, called the survey method "tried and true," and added that "this is the best estimate of mortality we have."
This viewed was echoed by Sarah Leah Whitson, an official of Human Rights Watch in New York, who said, "We have no reason to question the findings or the accuracy" of the survey.
"I expect that people will be surprised by these figures," she said. "I think it is very important that, rather than questioning them, people realize there is very, very little reliable data coming out of Iraq."
Ms. Whitson's take is interesting. There is "no reason to question the findings" of a study using, despite what Mr. Waldman says, questionable methodology 3 weeks before an election. She actually wishes critics would just sit back and shut up because - and here she inadvertently debunks the study herself - "there is very, very little reliable data coming out of Iraq."
At least give the Times credit for including some cautionary voices in its article:
Robert Blendon, director of the Harvard Program on Public Opinion and Health and Social Policy, said interviewing urban dwellers chosen at random was “the best of what you can expect in a war zone.”
But he said the number of deaths in the families interviewed — 547 in the post-invasion period versus 82 in a similar period before the invasion — was too few to extrapolate up to more than 600,000 deaths across the country.
Donald Berry, chairman of biostatistics at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, was even more troubled by the study, which he said had “a tone of accuracy that’s just inappropriate.”
In other words, the researchers were able to discover and confirm 547 dead in the post invasion period by interviewing a little more than 1800 families. And from that sample, they extrapolate 600,000 dead.
What's wrong with that picture?
There are other sources for counting Iraqi dead. The well respected Iraq Body Count, run by academics opposed to the war, lists nearly 49,000 civilian dead since the invasion. Their methodology is sound and their numbers are based on actual reports from morgues, the media, and the military. Their number of confirmed dead is still less than half the number estimated in the 2004 Lancet study.
Someone is wildly off base here. Could it be the group that says that the US military has killed 180,000 Iraqis as a direct result of military actions?
Gunshot wounds caused 56 percent of violent deaths, with car bombs and other explosions causing 14 percent, according to the survey results. Of the violent deaths that occurred after the invasion, 31 percent were caused by coalition forces or airstrikes, the respondents said.
The fact that those three percentages totalled up equal 101% isn't as ridiculous as 31% of deaths were caused by coalition forces or airstrikes. And here we get to the number one critique of this study and why it so totally useless:
Again, the study makes absolutely no effort to differentiate between innocent civilians and Iraqis trying to kill our troops. Nor does it differentiate between civilian deaths and the deaths in the Iraqi police and armed forces.
In addition, the study includes deaths that the researchers have arbitrarily determined were caused by the invasion but not caused by violence. If they are using the same criteria as the 2004 study, some of these causes of death include:
* Malnourishment due to bad economic conditions as a result of the invasion.
* Illness due to degraded health care infrastructure.
* Deaths due to domestic violence.
* Deaths due to criminal activity unrelated to the insurgency.
* And “... civilian deaths resulting from the breakdown in law and order, and deaths due to inadequate health care or sanitation.”
Of course, the political problem engendered by this pseudo-scientific hit piece is that the left will use this figure without any caveats and state flatly in their critiques of the war that 600,000 civilians have died as a result of our invasion. And by the time the study is once again debunked by those who know a helluva lot more about statistics and such than I, the lie will have taken hold and the myth will have been set in stone.
And the American people are treated to one more October surprise before casting their vote on November 7.
Saw that one, too.
Same flawed research method, by the same guys as last time.
"So let's take the number of murders in Washington DC and extrapolate the number of murders in the entire country ..." - engineer.
for the media to jump on it, though; one of the first questions in today's press conference was about the President's "reaction" to 600,000 Iraqi casualties. The reporter clearly just took the report at face value. Bush dismissed it with alacrity, but you know the message that will get out.
In Vino Veritas
Agenda-Driven Disease Definition Syndrome: If they don't have enough victims of a particular disease to scare up some research funding or support a political agenda, they create a "spectrum" or "syndrome" umbrella, under which they cram similar--but historically unrelated--maladies, until there are enough sufferers of the "syndrome" or "spectrum disorder" to call it a "global epidemic" requiring massive funding, usually from taxpayers. It happened with AIDS and ADD, and I believe it is happening with Autism. Now it appears to be happening to warfare.
CDC once stood for "Communicable Disease Center". Now it stands for "Center for Disease Control", and they focus like a laser beam on the Gunshot Wound Epidemic and other non-diseases. Now we have the Lancet and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health tallying victims of another non-disease (war) and padding the count with victims of common maladies which have only a tangential relationship with war. If the Iraq Body Count is more accurate, perhaps doctors are not the best people to be making these counts.
the Soviet Union in the 30's and 40's, they would likely miss the two or three people who starved to death or those dozen or so who died in the gulags.
Idiots.
_______________________________
If "pro" is the opposite of "con", what is the opposite of "progress"?
The main concern here is of course that you've said that "The well respected Iraq Body Count, run by academics opposed to the war, lists nearly 49,000 civilian dead since the invasion." which is a 19,000 dead innocent iraqi person delta from what the president is claiming.
This 600,000 dead innocent iraqi person study is clearly wrong. It seems that we should be concentrating on how the white house arrived at a number that is clearly incorrect as well.
...is another man's freedom fighter. I think Academics may have some of the casualties in a different column than the White House.
In my head it finished "... is another man's major league pitcher". Is that terrible?
...Charlie Rangel would say. Allegedly, he is complaining that fighters were scrambled AFTER Lidle's plane hit the building. I guess the Dems are stronger, smarter AND more clairvoyant on national security. Not to veer too far off topic, but this reeks of desperation for a party which is so busy counting their poll-hatched pollos.
DC stats: http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/dccrime.htm
US stats: http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
DC had 195 murders in population of 550,521
US population was 296,410,404
Calculating projected US murders...
104,992
Actual was 16,692
would be.....
600,000 dead
793,663 margin of error
193,663 actually came back to life !!!
gotta love statistics...
Death is the currency of war. He who has the most, with only a few historical exceptions, usually loses.
Al Qaeda and the Islamic fighters most closely resemble the Japanese in their tactics. The Japanese fought from caves to their death, the Japanese pilots crashed their planes into our ships in the name of their Emperor, their God. The Japanese also adopted tactics that sunk to unusual levels of savagery and brutality in the hope that our forces couldn't counter them, giving them victory by default.
If you look at the Japanese death tolls that occurred across the vast expanse of the Pacific battles, ie 4,000 out of 4,000 defenders at Tarawa atoll, 10,200 out of 10,900 on Pelielieu island, 20,800 out of 21,000 on Iwo Jima, 100,000 out of 120,000 defenders on Okinawa, 100,000 dead in the March,1945 firebombing of Tokyo, 53,000 on August 6,1945, 38,000 on August 9,1945 (Hiroshima and Nagasaki)you have to draw the conclusion that the cumulative Japanese death toll was so large it was frightful. Add to these specific numbers, the nearly one hundred per cent casualties of the Japanese defenders of Guam, Saipan, Tinian, the Phillipines and the other innumerable Pacific Island battles not noted here, and the death tolls from the sinking of the numerous Marus plying the seas in and around Japan trying to keep the Island Empire supplied, and the death tolls from the Naval defeats Japan suffered, you realize why the Emperor admitted 1n August, 1945 that the 'war had not gone as well as they had hoped for'. He did not know the U.S. had exhausted its supply of atomic weapons, he thought he was staring at the imminent extinction of the Japanese people. I estimate a rough death toll of between thirty and fourty per cent of all the Japanese that were alive at the start of the war, December 7,1941. I suspect the German people suffered the same fate.
Thirty per cent of all Iraqis living at the start of the second Iraq War, March 2003, would be 8,400,000 Iraqi dead.
By those standard we are a long way from the death toll necessary to pacify that country, and we have a very long road ahead of us.
War is, and always has been, the application of overwhelming force.