Lancet report redux

If you were being extremely catty, you would say this is a follow up article to the ‘Faking Da Fizzics’ post below. The question in this one is: to what extent can someone who is statistically illiterate like Kaplan offer a coherent meaningful critique of a statistical report in a scientific journal like the Lancet? (For once I’m not being pretentious here: I actually do have statistics qualifications and I do understand the article).

Incidentally, another Lancet report that mysteriously dropped down the memory hole.

http://tinyurl.com/kjqs2.

Perhaps we should pass it to Fred Kaplan or Glenn Reynolds for further statistical analysis.

But hey – you can’t put a price* on democracy**! I’m sure it will all work out*** in the end****

*in other peoples’ lives

** the correct form of democracy, as guaranteed by a large military presence, obviously

*** for certain values of ‘working out’

**** I’ll be sure to get back to you with a date

A few things come to mind, as always:

– We must find a way to blame the 426,369+ deaths on Clinton.

– Whatever happened to national civility?

– Because Michael Moore is fat.

So certainly Bush is moving up the rankings, tho he will have to attack Iran and NK to approach Mao, Stalin, or Hitler.

Bob, he’s waaay short of Mao, Stalin or Hitler. He’s not even in shouting distance of Mussolini. For a start, it remains more likely than not that he’ll leave office in 2008 (if there’s still an office to leave).

He’s inched ahead of the Marquis of Salisbury, that’s all. And he should still be impeached.

Not even then – to approach Mao or Stalin he’ll have kill some tens of millions of Americans…

Why would this be the case? Is there a special value of extra-badness for extinguishing domestic human life as opposed to merely extinguishing foreign human life?

13:Word

He’s got a ways to go before he reaches LBJ, even.

In fairness to the Corner, Iain Murray is actually trying to enlighten Podhoretz that cluster sampling is a legitimate stastistical methodology.

“For what it’s worth, I’ve just sent emails to the two statisticians quoted in the New York Times article to ask them if they were quoted correctly. I’m pretty sure that Blendon has been badly misquoted and suspect that Berry has been at best taken out of context.”

Yes, gosh, isn’t it funny, the way that this report is being reported….as opposed to the way, for example, the various reports about deaths in the Sudan (where the perpetrators were evil Muslim types with beards and scimitars (probably)) were?

On Radio 4, for example, I heard the commentator arguing that because it was ‘difficult’ to get accurate statistics from warzones (no shit, sherlock) then perhaps all (!) statistical estimates of deaths and suchlike from such places were dubious, and perhaps we will never know. Unless it’s the warzones of our enemies of course, in which case we must believe the statistics immediately, especially if they make ‘them’ look bad, and, therefore, ‘us’ look good.

We then cut to that great statistical mind of our time George Bush giving his views that the statistics were obviously wrong, cos, you know, yeah but no but yeah but, it’s too big and that, innit?

Presumably later questions were directed towards the President’s views on gravity waves, and recent critiques of string theory. We already know his profound views on natural selection. Still, teach the controversy, eh?

Of course you realise that at some point in the future there would only be a single person left in Iraq, at that point a democracy is bound to work and there would be no more sectarian problems. Is this maybe the plan behind the scenes?

He’s inched ahead of the Marquis of Salisbury, that’s all.

And Saddam.

brendan writes:

I would like to know the details of the other (presumably, many) papers that you have been so intrigued by that you have felt duty bound to write to the authors to request the raw data.

Actually, I do this all the time in my professional work. Alas, because finance data like CRSP and Compustat generally requires a license, researchers just pass around specific codes requested and the like. Owen Lamont does a fine job of making his data public (although some links seem broken now).

For more on the importance of replication to progress in the social sciences, start here.

Also, David, I don’t think anyone here has called for the mass killing or deportation of anyone. That alone makes this very much unlike every LGF thread I’ve ever seen.

Something doesn’t add up with the Saddam 300,000 dead figure. Is that excluding the casualties of the Iran-Iraq war? According to wikipedia, those added up to 1 million plus killed and wounded alone – 500,000 Iranian soldiers killed/wounded, 375,000 Iraqi soldiers killed/wounded and hundreds of thousands of civilians killed/wounded. After all, Saddam started that war, though the Iranians did prolong it after 1982.

One interesting aspect of the data (according to the NYT) is that for June 05 to June 06, about 70% of the deaths are not the responsibility of the coalition forces. That correlates with what we have been hearing from many other sources, that the civil war is in full swing, and that American forces are becoming bystanders in many cases.

And David, as Brendan says, presumably the deaths caused by Saddam were a factor in your supporting the Iraq war (there being no “weapons of mass destruction”). Did you check these numbers by finding news reports for all of them? Have you got hold of the underlying data used for those estimates? Surely any honest and competent person opining on this issue would have done so… unless, of course, they are part of some evil conspiracy.

Brendan, the report I heard on radio 4 (6.00 news I think), disaparagingly referred to it as an “academic survey”. You know, typical bloody ivory tower academics going into war zones and knocking on people’s doors.

I going to make a formal complaint about it to the BBC, and I recommend other people do as well.

I suspected that David Kane was a hack, and now I know, I don’t have to worry any more. Or engage with his hackery, since he’s gone straight to the defamation or ‘lying Iraqi’ angle.

Daniel will doubtless have to file for a few days off, since he made himself something of an ever-present corrective to hackery on this topic. But the new study — and let’s call it the ‘Bloomberg School of Public Health study’, shall we, just to embrace the cognitive dissonance from the denialists? — backs up the earlier one’s numbers. Alas, that will allow 2004’s hacks more easily to dismiss it. But they are hacks, after all.

But I’ll toss in this little nugget for David: where are the underlying data for the Armenian mass killings? And why is Yad Vashem three million short in its list of names? I say this, holding my nose, only because the pig-headed denialists are heading rather rapidly into David Irving territory.

“maybe we won’t hear from Fred ‘This isn’t an estimate. It’s a dart board’ Kaplan this time.”

Being a propagandist means never having to say, “I was wrong.”

BTW, the question is, is David Kane a *paid* hack.

I should have known that any good streak in the Corner couldn’t last. Now Murray is up to “it’s not as bad as the impact of AIDS on Botswana” which is both true and completely beside the point.

David Kane makes a big deal of data release, as if he expects the Lancet authors to weasel out of if. They released their data the last time (I analysed it and got a narrower confidence interval, using a simpler technique). There is no reason to suspect they won’t do the same this time.

(I don’t think holocaust estimates were made in quite this way, were they?)

Many Holocaust revisionists start with ‘that number’s too durned big’ and head towards arguments that hide their basis in gut sensibility. I don’t head lightly in that Godwinian direction, but I think that critiques that are basically ‘too durned big’ are dumb enough to deserve the comparison.

I’ve not rushed in that direction. I wouldn’t have done it in 2004, and I’m loathe to do it now. But cheap, selective uses of the ‘That seems awfully high’ response deserve to be slapped down. Come up with a substantive critique, or take an antacid for your gut.

The other issue, in addition to whether the sampling is accurate and representative, is the matter of moral reasoning: Nobody is seriously claiming that the US itself, and through it’s agents, is killing a half million innocent Iraqis a year. Rather, the vast majority of those deaths, assuming the number is accurate, fall into two catagories:

Guilty Iraqis,

and,

Innocent people killed by the other side in this war.

Perfectly reasonable people can believe that the death of quilty Iraqis is plus, not a minus, and that the deaths caused by the other side belong on THEIR moral tab, not ours.

We went in and deposed a murderous dictator. The people who wanted to take his place didn’t HAVE to start a war to obstruct Iraqi democracy, and assert their own control. That was a choice THEY made, and the guilt of that choice lies with them, not us.

And they could kill a million of their fellow Iraqis, and that would only make THEM more guilty, not us. So this Lancet study, like the previous, does not prove our actions wrong, absent additional moral premises which are, to say the least, contraversial.

David Kane makes a big deal of data release, as if he expects the Lancet authors to weasel out of if. They released their data the last time….

In fairness to David Kane, he was the one who got Les Roberts to release the cluster-level data.

If the new study correctly shows that deaths were 5 times higher than other counting methods, does that mean that the standard death totals for every other war before ~1990 were off by about the same factor?

In other words, did the Iran-Iraq war have a net excess mortality of 5 million, not 1 million?

Brett: “And they could kill a million of their fellow Iraqis, and that would only make THEM more guilty, not us. So this Lancet study, like the previous, does not prove our actions wrong, absent additional moral premises which are, to say the least, contraversial.”

Brett, by both the Geneva Conventions and common decency, the occupying power is responsible for public safety. Many opponents of the war (left, right, centrist) pointed out that the Bush ‘plan’ was to wish for the best, while lying like crazy.

Bush, his administration, and all of you war supporters were *warned* repeatedly, that this was likely, unless strong measures were taken.

Bush, his administration, and all of you war supporters have repeatedly told us to go f*ck ourselves, both metaphorically and literally.

It’s your guilt.

So Brett,

Do you think gross incompetence is more excusable than malice?

Perfectly reasonable people can believe that the death of quilty Iraqis is plus, not a minus, and that the deaths caused by the other side belong on THEIR moral tab, not ours.

Well, you can, Brett. But that’s distinct from your own premise. If you want to say ‘the only good Iraqi’s a dead Iraqi’, then at least be up front about it.

So this Lancet study, like the previous, does not prove our actions wrong, absent additional moral premises which are, to say the least, contraversial.

That’s barely palatable in cases of ‘sins of omission’, such as Rwanda or Darfur; for Iraq, where the US bears legal and actual responsibility for the post-invasion conditions, that’s just lofty nose-in-the-air bullshit. I’m sure it makes you sleep more soundly at night, but it doesn’t make over half a million Iraqis less dead.

Perfectly reasonable people can believe that the death of quilty Iraqis is plus, not a minus, and that the deaths caused by the other side belong on THEIR moral tab, not ours.

I really don’t see what’s perfectly reasonable about thinking such a bizarre thing. By this logic, if I noticed that my neighbor’s door was unlocked and decided to help him out by sticking a large sign up on his door saying “THIS DOOR IS UNLOCKED AND NO ONE IS HOME!,” then it wouldn’t be my fault at all when his house got burglarized & all his valuables stolen. What?! I was just trying to help! The larcenies caused by the burglars belong on THEIR moral tab, not mine!

Moral responsibilities do not sum to 100%. The burglars are 100% responsible for stealing (barring mitigating circumstances), and I am 100% responsible for being a blithering idiot who created the opportunity for them to do it.

“They also refused to supply enough information to replicate their results”.

This quote is very very very very very stupid. I simply cannot be bothered pointing out why. Just think about what sort of place Iraq is at present, who is likely to have died, and why they might have been killed. And then think about the word ‘replicate’ (which Kane obviously means to mean ‘replicate precisely’ i.e. the same study with the same people). And then why the authors of the study might have a problem releasing this data.

(Note: if he doesn’t mean ‘replicate precisely’ then of course the study could be replicated. Hey Dave man, why don’t you do it! That’s right, just go from door to door round Baghdad and Fallujah asking the Iraqis how many people have been killed. I’ll pay for your taxi to the airport).

Incidentally, Soru, DK, you others: how do you all feel about the implication of Bush’s remark (quoted above by Chris Bertram) that the Iraqi people are actually voluntarily undergoing this violence, and that (again, implied) they believe it is a price worth paying to be ‘free’?

David Kane wanted more detail, drilling down to the level of towns. That’s not a reasonable demand. If some of the towns are small, revealing that they are in the sample might breach undertakings given to the respondents.

I wanted more detail because that is the best way to check for fraud in a survey. For example, what if one team of questioners always reported higher death counts then the other, in every singe town that they both visited? That would suggest that one team is reporting too high or the other too low. Something is certainly wrong. But without access to the data at that level (which, as far as I can determine, the peer reviewers did not have), you can’t know if everything is OK.

Roberts, in personal communication, claimed that the IRB filed on the study precluded him from providing better data to outsiders. He then refused to provide a copy of the IRB to me or to tell me how I could get one myself. Perhaps he was busy with his Congressional campaign. (It has been on my list to contact Johns Hopkins directly but I have not done so yet.)

Again, I am not accusing Roberts et al of fraud. I am accusing them of preventing other researchers from replicating and confirming their results. Without checking the data, it is hard for you (or the Lancet reviewers) to be sure of any conclusions the article draws.

Could Brett take his mail-order bride there, though?

that the Iraqi people are actually voluntarily undergoing this violence, and that (again, implied) they believe it is a price worth paying to be ‘free’?

You might think it incredible, but statistical surveys at least as good as the Lancet one do seem to show that that is the case.

If that doesn’t match your intuition, I guess either the statistics or your gut feeling is wrong.

I never knew that under the Geneva conventions, we had an obligation, not to fight the insurgency, but instead instantly prevail over them

That would be the insurgency that didn’t exist until we invaded the country, right? I see your point: how in God’s name could we be considered responsible for that?

and that we were legally to blame for anybody they killed due to that failure to instantly win

Legally, maybe. Morally, definitely. Not a distinction I’m going to waste time going into with you, Brett.

So, Brett, to repeat, if things in Iraq are so darn peachy, except for those demonic Iraqis who are “guilty” of the capital offence of taking up arms against an invading foreign army, why don’t you move there? I’m not joking about the government: by all accounts it’s a libertarian utopia.

David Kane,
Do you read the newspapers everyday? I mean ones like the NYT and Washington Post? They have articles tucked away in their websites like this:

“110 Bodies Found in Baghdad in 24 Hours”, link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR2006101000156.html

Or this:
“http://www.antiwar.com/updates/?articleid=9830″
:”196 Killed, 45 Injured in Tuesday Iraq Violence”
Or This:
http://www.antiwar.com/updates/?articleid=9821
” Monday: 73 Iraqis, 3 US Marines, US Soldier Killed; 18 Iraqis Kidnapped”

Note that most of the reports are from *Baghdad* alone. Do you think that if 500 deaths a day in *all* of Iraq are too much, 110 deaths are too much in Baghdad too? Or maybe the reporters from Reuters and the Washington Post are liars too.

At least have the decency to admit that, just possibly, there is a tiny chance that the Lancet studies may actually be reasonable estimates; instead of implying fraud at the drop of a hat. It is chaps like you who were the cheerleaders for this completely pointless and bungled war.

uncle kvetch,

How do your citations disprove soru’s point that “statistical surveys at least as good as the Lancet one do seem to show that that [Iraqis believe the price they are paying is worth it]”?

If I’m not mistaken, soru would have been thinking of the numerous polls where the “was it worth it?” question was put and Iraqis answered in the affirmative. See here for a synopsis. There has been at least one BBC World poll since then in which Iraqis answer the same way. As per JW, I’m not aware of a single poll where a majority of Iraqis conclude “it wasn’t worth it”.

For statistics fetishists with an unhealthy interest in the Iraq war, this really ought to be food for thought, no?

vkri,

The report of “100 bodies found in Baghdad” made it to the press preceisely becasue of its exceptional nature and not because such finds are a daily occurrence.

The original study published in October 2004 went with 100,000 excess deaths as the confidence interval mid-point. This was for the period Mar 2003 – Sep 2004. The new study has revised upwards the figure for this period to 112,000. This means that for the 22 month period Oct 2004 to Jul 2006, the study finds 543,000 excess deaths (655,000 – 112,000). This breaks down to an average of 822 excess deaths every day for the 670 or so days between Oct 2004 and July 2006. Given we’re talking an average of 822, this means that >1,000 daily excess deaths must be commonplace.

Even allowing for the fact that most bodies don’t make it to the morgue/hospital, if death at these levels were occurring on anything like a daily basis, it’s inconceivable that the Iraqi and western media would be missing 90% of it. Yes, foreign journalists don’t spend much time outside of the green-zone, but that didn’t mean we were denied hourly updates about the battle for Falluja. If, for instance, 100 people died in Mosul on any given day, I’d expect the local news media organisations at least – including those cited by Iraqbodycount – to maybe mention it.

Note, I’m in no way commenting directly on the methodology and statistical rigour employed compiling this new report, just passing comment on the direct implications of the figures assuming they are accurate.

Brett: “How interesting; I never knew that under the Geneva conventions, we had an obligation, not to fight the insurgency, but instead instantly prevail over them, and that we were legally to blame for anybody they killed due to that failure to instantly win. You learn something new every day…”

Brett, stop lying, stop putting words in my mouth. An obligation to handle something like you gave a flying f*ck whether you succeeded or not is not an obligation to succeed instantly.

This must be that personal responsibility thing I’m always hearing conservatives going on about.

Speaking of which, but otherwise off-topic, I just came across this wonderful quote from a White House press conference about the North Korea nuclear test.

Q …when you have a President who draws a red line three years ago and says, we will not tolerate nuclear weapons, and now you have a country that just tested a nuclear weapon — you don’t think it’s fair to ask for some accountability as to what happened, or that there were mistakes made?

MR. SNOW: David, the accountability lies in North Korea, not in Washington.

Truman used to have a sign on his desk which said “The buck stops here.” Bush, presumably, has one which says “Don’t look at me!”

I don’t think David Kane is a hack at all. He got at least some of the data released from the first Lancet piece and, using the definition he posted above (i.e., “sufficient information exists with which to understand, evaluate, and build upon a prior work if a third party can replicate the results without any additional information from the author”) I believe there is clearly sufficient information to understand and evaluate the first article, and there is arguably sufficient information to build upon it. We disagree on this latter point.

David, did you ever put together an R package on Iraq?

Brett Bellmore, no Sebastian Holsclaw. David Kane is new to me. It’s a quiet day in Lake Wobegon.

What is the maximum level of deaths that would make the war OK? 30,000 is OK with Bush, and 600,000 seems too high for everyone.

As a compromise, let’s commission a survey to raise the death estimate to the highest OK level, in order to produce a report which is somewhat plausible but which doesn’t make everyone feel awful.

My suggestion is 150,000 would be about right.

I never knew that under the Geneva conventions, we had an obligation, not to fight the insurgency, but instead instantly prevail over them

The Geneva Conventions are not going to help you much here Brett, since what they actually say is that aggression is the original war crime, from which all other war crimes flow.

TomT: Those figures of 500,000 deaths were established to be untrue (by Richard Garfield, one of the co-authors of the current study). And as John says, the fatalities had reduced markedly under oil-for-food.

I was correct in my supposition in #21 above, by the way.

The report of “100 bodies found in Baghdad” made it to the press preceisely becasue of its exceptional nature and not because such finds are a daily occurrence.

Of course it’s a daily occurrence. 2,660 Iraq civilians killed in September:

BAGHDAD, Iraq – More than 2,660 Iraqi civilians were killed in Baghdad in September, according to new Health Ministry figures…

That’s just civilians; add soldiers, policemen and militia members and you’ll have over 100 people killed in Baghdad on an average day in September. Add those who’d only been injured and died later, add non-violent excess deaths and you’ll probably have well over 200 excess deaths per day – just in Baghdad. And then there is the whole Sunni triangle, and Basra, and Mosul, Kirkuk, all those regularly bombed small towns along the Syrian border, etc.

One interesting aspect of the data (according to the NYT) is that for June 05 to June 06, about 70% of the deaths are not the responsibility of the coalition forces. That correlates with what we have been hearing from many other sources, that the civil war is in full swing, and that American forces are becoming bystanders in many cases.

Yes, for June 05-June 06, “only” 26% of violent deaths are attributed to the “coalition”. Still, by my quite possibly bogus calculation based on Table 4 (165/300 for proportion of reported June 05-June 06 deaths to total post-invasion x 0.26 for proportion killed by “coalition” x 601,027 for proportion of estimated total of violent deaths), this implies that the “coalition” killed 85,947 people in that period. Not too shabby for a bunch of “bystanders”.

The dead ones, if pollable, might have a different opinion. This isn’t frivolous…

Oh, I rather think it is. The live Iraqis polled are the mother and fathers, brother and sisters and sons and daughter of the dead. The wretched souls scratching together an existence in the midst of a “civil war”. And they say it is worth it.

Still, what would they know?

Brownie – If 98% of people in the UK decided it would be “worth it” to kill the other 2%, would that make it okay for the British army to go on and do it?

Since “Unknown” makes up about half the violent deaths, one cannot go from the datum that 30% of deaths were attributable to the coalition to the assumption that 70% were not.

robert asks, “David, did you ever put together an R package on Iraq?” No, but one of my summer interns (Kyle Campbell) did. You can download it here. After installing it, you can see the raw data, a cleaned up version and some nice graphics. Also, try:

> library(“lancet”)
> vignette(“deathrateanalysis”)

Again, it is nothing fancy, but I (and Kyle!) hope that someone finds it useful. Thanks to robert and russell for the kind words.

I like to think that my insistence on access to the underlying data is something that scientists of all partisan affiliations can agree on. I, for one, do not think that scientists who withhold their raw data (modulo privacy issues) on controversial topics should, as a rule of thumb, be believed.

Soru – I’m pleased you admit that Brownie’s assumption was “ridiculous” and you can see that it leads to “a ridiculous conclusion”. But this kind of reasoning is called “logic”, not “rhetoric”.

As I know you have trouble with this logic thing, I’ll throw in another pointer for free. Every single Iraqi civilian who has been killed in this war, and who would be alive today if it hadn’t been for this unnecessary and evil war, had a right to life. It was wrong for him to die and the US and UK governments are culpable in his death. The fact that a majority of living Iraqis might claim that his death was a “price worth paying” (if this is even true) would not change any of this. It would not mean it was morally permissable for him to die, or that the US and UK governments are not culpable.

Soru, Brownie, I’ll concede the point that as of February of this year, a majority of Iraqis polled felt that the invasion was “worth it.”

Now then. According to the same pollsters, as of last month, an overwhelming majority of the Iraqis want our (US/UK) troops out of their country within a year, if not sooner. Am I right in presuming that you’ll join with me, and them, in calling on our respective governments to bring this about? We all want what’s best for the Iraqis, don’t we? Or do we presume to know better than they do what’s good for them?

Soru – I’m pleased you admit that Brownie’s assumption was “ridiculous” and you can see that it leads to “a ridiculous conclusion”. But this kind of reasoning is called “logic”, not “rhetoric”.

You don’t think the idea of 98% of the british population supporting auto-genocide is just a little bit silly?

An argument of the form ‘Ridiculous facts + premise => ridiculous conclusion’ is not a logically valid way of disproving a premise. Sillyness in, sillyness out.

Every single Iraqi civilian who has been killed in this war, and who would be alive today if it hadn’t been for this unnecessary and evil war, had a right to life. .

And did those who would have died under Saddam have that inalienable right? Is it plausible Saddam would not have killed a single person?

By what authority do you claim the right to revoke the right to life of that single person?

Note: this is known as a reductio ad absurdum. It starts with your premise, adds known facts, and shows that your premise leads to a ridiculous conclusion. The intent is to show that your premise is ridiculous.

I think you’ll find doing things that way round is logically valid.

I definitely do think it would be a good thing if US forces were able to successfully withdraw from Iraq.

That wasn’t the question. The US is “able” to withdraw immediately, if it so chooses. Should it withdraw, in accordance with the wishes of the Iraqi people, or should it ignore those wishes?

“Q10. Thinking about any hardships you might have suffered since the US- Britain invasion, do you personally think that ousting Saddam Hussein was worth it or not?”

That question has always pissed me off, in that it is blatantly loaded. The first clause and the second do not have anything to do with each other. A comparison would make this clear.

Imagine asking, in, say, 1952 (or even better, 1966), someone in Czechoslovakia: “Thinking about what has happened since, do you think the war to oust Hitler from your country (and overthrow Nazi-ism) was worth it?”

Of course they are going to say yes. And yes, I’m not afraid to say that if I was an Iraqi even if my house had been bombed, even if my brother was in Abu Ghraib being tortured and/or murdered by the Americans I would still say it was ‘worth it’ because what the question is really asking, of course, is, ‘are you glad Saddam is gone’? And and the answer is, of course, yes.

To assume any differently would be to assume that the Hungarians or Czechs were ‘happy’ under Stalinism just because they were glad they had been liberated from Hitler (and make no mistake, they were glad, and they greeted the invading Russian army with far more enthusiasm and joy than the Iraqis ever greeted the British or Americans).

The question is not vapid questions about whether x or y was ‘worth it’. The only question that would have mattered in ’52 (or ’66) would have been ‘And are you happy about being under Russian occupation? Do you want Russian troops to leave your country?’ And that would have been very obvious at the time. Any other way of looking at the issue would have been seen as Soviet propaganda, and rightly so.

It’s equally obvious now, to those who have eyes to see.

Incidentally, it seems to me that David Kane is getting an easy ride here. Let’s taste some more of his wisdom.

“The central problem with the Lancet study was that it was conducted by people who, before the war started, were against the war, people who felt that the war was likely to increase civilian casualities and who, therefore, had a expectation/desire (unconscious or otherwise) to find the result that they found.” (emphasis added).

If you won’t consider hypotheticals, Stuart provided a real historical example of a majority deciding that it was “okay” to kill a minority.

You say that’s a ‘real’ example. It’s strange, I was not aware of any survey in 1945 that asked the germans ‘taking account of all the hardship you have been through, the rubble of Berlin currently around you, was everything worth it to kill the Jews’?

In fact, I think such a thing would be ridiculous.

Another example: ‘assume an inherently evil and dangerous race, say vampires, existed. Killing them would be necessary, necessary killing is not evil, therefor genocide is good’.

A ridiculous assumption leading to a ridiculous conclusion does not invalidate the stuff in the middle.

Soru,
Feel free to do the math to see if that gives an Arab majority, for whatever value you see that as being.

There is definitely a value, because the Kurds haven’t lived in Saddam’s Iraq since 1991 and there hardly was any invasion, occupation or much invasion-realted casualties in the Kurdish area.

From their point of view, the Americans invaded a dangerous and hostile neighboring country, which is a completely different story.

Your numbers still give me 55% of “worth it” among the Arabs, assuming 70% of the Arabs are the Shia. Not an overwhelming majority. Also, I’m surprised that only 81% of the Kurds feel this way.

Soru, am I going to get a response to my question…a real one, this time?

Should it withdraw, in accordance with the wishes of the Iraqi people, or should it ignore those wishes?

My non-expert judgement is that the current best strategic plan is to make an attempt to withdraw.

Not ‘cut and run’ at any cost, but a recognition that if we get all the troops out and the elected government is still in place, that counts as a win.

Sadly, I don’t remotely trust Bush to do that. It would be a good thing if there was at least as much focus on the stragic fuck-up Bush is currently making as there was on his mistakes of 4 years ago.

That should read “Iraqis in 2023″…

And while you’re here, allow me to call bullshit on this

The live Iraqis polled are the mother and fathers, brother and sisters and sons and daughter of the dead. The wretched souls scratching together an existence in the midst of a “civil war”. And they say it is worth it.

It does seem more likely on the face of it that the “wretched souls” who lost family members in this war would be among the 10 million Iraqis who voted “No”.

Saddam was bad. This is so universally agreed on it only gets debated in places like Iraq, and other dark corners of the Muslim world, if at all.
The fallback corollary for war supporters is that anything that got rid of Saddam is perforce good – “worth it”.
That’s one of those logic things, where the first part seems to be connected to the second, but isn’t.
Also if you don’t think anything that got rid of Saddam is a good thing, you want him to have remained in power. Since it was agreed beforehand that Saddam being in power was a bad thing, you are bad as well.
“We went in and deposed a murderous dictator.”
Which, while true, is pretty darned (morally) inconsistent of “us” considering how many murderous dictatorial lowlifes “we” have propped up, trained, maintained, protected, and, when things at home got too hot for them, sheltered here in the land of the free.
The real danger now is not the continuing deadly spiral of fragmenting Iraqi society, as awful as that is and promises to be – it’s the shell-game misdirection of putting it all on Bush, the sin-eater, and driving him out into the wilderness.
So that the heinousness of what was done in and to Iraq can be a “mission accomplished” – without the diminishing of power the consequent shame of being responsible for those immoral and illegal acts would bring.
Who benefits from Iraq as it is now, anyone?
Not the US, obviously not the Iraqis, certainly not Hezbollah.
Who has enough power to manipulate the American people into supporting an invasion that has done nothing but profound damage to America?
It seems almost a second-stage delusion to see it as all and only incompetence and short-sightedness on the part of some hyphy Republicans .
Jim Harrison says “There has to be a price for killing a half a million people.”
And of course there is, inevitably, because there’s a price for everything. It’s a question of who pays it, in the end.
Given the levels of deceit and intrigue at work it may be just a tad specious to fasten all that punitive cathartic fire on the hapless little men currently bearing public responsibility for what’s occurred.

It does seem more likely on the face of it that the “wretched souls” who lost family members in this war would be among the 10 million Iraqis who voted “No”.

Who needs polls and peer-reviewed studies when CT has its very own Mystic Meg.

I wonder how many of the 500,000 who marched against war in February 2003 knew they did so against the wishes of the majority of Iraqis? And what can we learn about the motives of those who did know, but who marched anyway?

61% includes the Kurds.

A hierarchy of Iraqis, eh?

Yuck!

A follow-up to my earlier question to Brownie: Does your solidarity with the Iraqi people extend to agreeing with the 61% of them who feel that attacks on US troops in Iraq are justified?

uncle,

I share the desire to aim for that, yes. However, if I were an Iraqi, I would reserve the right to review my position in a year to see how the ground lies, just as I don’t deny the possibility that in years come – and especially if things continue as they are – a majority of Iraqis change their minds about the “worth it” question.

If you ask me what I would like to see happen in a year’s time, my answer will at least in part be based on my estimation of how things will look in a year’s time. If I turn out to have been way off, it doesn’t invalidate my initial response, but neither does it mean I am precluded from reassessing my position. I take it you accept that at least some of those agitating for a withdrawal within a year may do so because they are optimistic about the security situation a year hence? I also take it that you wouldn’t refuse such people the right to take a different view when/if they turn out to have been overly-optimistic?

A follow-up to my earlier question to Brownie: Does your solidarity with the Iraqi people extend to agreeing with the 61% of them who feel that attacks on US troops in Iraq are justified?

No.

Now explain what this changes and how?

I am glad that brendan feels like I am getting an “easy ride” here. In any event, I stand by the passage he quoted but note that it was about the 2004 Lancet paper, not the current one. I thought (and think) that the political attitudes of the authors (and Lancet editors) tainted those results. I was especially suspicious of the Falluja data and of the fact that the 95% confidence interval barely excluded 0. (Recall this CT thread.)

But that opinion was about the 2004 paper. The 2006 paper is much stronger and the reported effect is much larger. It is almost surely true that all reasonable changes in the statistical methodology would still yield a large estimate for excess mortality.

However, I am always suspicious and distrustful of scientists (left, right or center) who refuse to release their underlying data and/or answer reasonable questions about the methodology employed. Unreplicated results are, IMHO, not valuable because a lack of replication indicates either error or uselessness.

I am always suspicious and distrustful of scientists (left, right or center) who refuse to release their underlying data and/or answer reasonable questions about the methodology employed.

David Kane is getting an easy ride, because the authors of the 2006 study have not refused such a request, and until they do he really should forbear from making conditional attacks on their integrity as researchers.

Brownie – You appear to believe that the (alleged) fact that a (narrow) majority of Iraqis are in favour of the original war means that it was morally permitted. People, including me, have already given multiple arguments why this view is false, most of which you have not seriously addressed. But if you really believe this, do you also think that the fact that a similar majority approves of attacks on coalition forces means that such attacks are morally permissable? If not, why not?

engels,

Thanks for the advice.

If you did not mean to imply that views of Kurds on the war are any less valid than the views Sunnis or Shia, then what point were you making? We’re all aware that Kurds are more sympathetic to the west generally, but unless you mean this necessarily erodes their status as Iraqis, your “61% includes the Kurds” comment is utterly irrelevant.

This is the Harry’s Place style of argument…

Thank you very much.

The key point is not that there was a ‘war’ but that there was an invasion and occupation. An unprovoked invasion in which the US and the UK were the aggressors

And if they still answered that question in a way you didn’t agree with, how else would you reword it?

Brendan,

I’ll ask my friends at Mori to see if I can get them to frame a question in the only way you will accept.

although one fashionable with your right wing friends (who you disapprove of…in public).

Good giref! I don’t need to come here to get smeared, you know? I can get this at HP.

When the views of 50+% of the Iraqi people happen to coincide with your own, you draw great “strength” from this and see it as a vindication of your opinions, full stop.

I’ve highlighted your obvious falsehood. I even allowed for the fact that the majority Iraqi response to the “worth it” question could reverse over time.

“Vindication”? “Full stop”? I think you need to rein it in a bit. In fact I know you do.

Further, you appear to be suffering under the delusion that my agreement with most Iraqis on one point compels agreement on all. This is nonsense, which is why I never called you out on the fact that you share the majority Iraqi view on withdrawal but not on the “worth it” question. Nor must you.

I do happen to think that the fact successive polls show majority Iraqi support for the war is relevant and I do genuinely wonder at how widely known this is. I have personal experience of friends who vehemently opposed military action in 2003 who subsequently completed a volte-face upon learning the majority Iraqi view, although this is far from typical I admit.

You appear to believe that the (alleged) fact that a (narrow) majority of Iraqis are in favour of the original war means that it was morally permitted.

Well then appearances really can be deceptive, can’t they? I’ve neither said nor implied such a thing. My primary motivation for raising this issue is that I never cease to be amazed at how few opponents of the war are aware of it.

This evening’s discussion has done little to disabuse me of this belief.

I’ve neither said nor implied such a thing. My primary motivation for raising this issue is that I never cease to be amazed at how few opponents of the war are aware of it.

So Brownie, now that you’ve completed your social research exercise into the opinions of opponents of the war, perhaps you can resist raising any more issues which you admit are irrelevant to the topic of this thread, and to the question of whether the war was justified, and answer a question which actually has some bearing on these issues:

Knowing what we know now, that 600 000 Iraqis have died as a result of this war, who would have been alive under Saddam’s regime, would you not agree that the claim that the war was justified for humanitarian reasons now appears to you to be horribly mistaken and that it has, on the contrary, been a moral calamity of horrific proportions, whose supporters should be thorougly ashamed of their bad judgment, and whose prosecutors should be indicted on war crimes charges?

So Brownie, now that you’ve completed your social research exercise into the opinions of opponents of the war, perhaps you can resist raising any more issues which you admit are irrelevant to the topic of this thread, and to the question of whether the war was justified

You can’t help yourself, can you?

I don’t admit the views of Iraqis on the war are irrelevant either generally, or specifically on this thread (given the way the thread has developed). Neither do I admit they are irrelevant to the question of whether the war was justified. The poll findings are very far from the final word on this or any other matter, but that doesn’t render them irrelevant either.

Please try harder to stop misrepresenting my position.

Knowing what we know now, that 600 000 Iraqis have died as a result of this war, who would have been alive under Saddam’s regime, would you not agree that the claim that the war was justified for humanitarian reasons now appears to you to be horribly mistaken and that it has, on the contrary, been a moral calamity of horrific proportions, whose supporters should be thorougly ashamed of their bad judgment, and whose prosecutors should be indicted on war crimes charges?

Christ, you like asking questions, don’t you?

The trite answer is that I reject the premise of the question. The serious answer is that I question my decision to support the war every day and, although I didn’t need a Lancet paper to get me here, just the possibility that Iraqis could have died in such numbers is hugely significant; more so than anything else.

I wonder if this surprises you and if it does, I wonder why this should be so?

Of course not: they’re relevant when you agree with them, they’re irrelevant when you don’t.

You’re doing it again. Which poll results did I claim were “irrelevant”?

I’ll ask you again. Please stop misrepresenting me.

BTW what any of these polls have to do with Chris’ post beats the hell out of me…

“I wonder how many of the 500,000 who marched against war in February 2003 knew they did so against the wishes of the majority of Iraqis?”

I was one of the one-and-a-quarter-million, and I have friends in the military, one of whom came home wounded. I’m sorry, but I was more anxious about British servicemens’ fates, knowing that your government had consistently undersupplied them and was busy undermining their morale by merging regiments.

Shorter Soru: The idea that it is wrong to sacrifice the lives of 600 000 people for the sake of some ‘greater good’ is a legal nicety which has no place in the real world. Forget it, Jack, it’s Chinatown!

Brownie – If you want to address any of the points I have made to you, feel free. Whining about people “misrepresenting” you (#154), and then refusing to answer their questions about what your argument is (#155), is not an argument. Making completely content free posts, like your last one (#161), is not an argument. Ignoring all the points other people make, and the topic of the thread (#76 ff.), is not an argument.

Alternatively, you could just go back to posting on Harry’s Place, where you all appear to get by just fine without worrying at all about this “argument” thing, and which would probably be a better outcome for all concerned then your continuuing your efforts to lower the quality of the debate here.

Like most people in this world, Soru, I am unable to work out what the fuck your position is supposed to be. So it is a bit difficult for me to engage in “ludicrous” attempts to “distort” it.

Which of the words or concepts in post #151 are beyond you?

I hate it when people throw round the phrase ‘cognitive dissonance’, but you do seem to be having a rather large amount of trouble grasping some pretty elementary ideas and arguments, and that does seem to be causing some hostility.

I suggest you try to think about these things again when you have calmed down.

And I hope that can be the last thing I say on this. I don’t think any reasonable person would think there has been anything of substance in either your or Brownie’s comments, for at least the last ten posts or so.

Soru et al.’s position would seem to be that Saddam was so terrible, so provably heinous, that the virtual destruction of Iraq entire and the subsequent decimation of the Iraqi people, while regrettable, is certainly justified, since it became a necessary consequence of the task of removing him.
This does have the unfortunate result of making them look as though they’re defending the devastation of a country and its people in the name of its liberation – which is absurd, of course.
Possibly there is another explanation.