The Chronicle of Higher Education has an excellent article following up on the Lancet study. That study is still basically unchallenged, by the way; however many epidemiologists you ask, they’re all going to give the same answer, that it was good science.
The Chronicle’s angle is on the strange fact that the Lancet appears to have shown that the Iraq War made an already horrible state of affairs much worse, and that nobody seems to think that this is something worth thinking about. There was a brief kerfuffle of interest around the time of publication, but other than that, the reaction of the world’s media to the fact that we spent $150bn on trying to help the Iraqis but did it so badly that we increased their death rate by over 50%, appears to be “ho hum”.
Les Roberts, the principal author, is going through long dark nights of the soul, wondering if it was a tactical mistake to request accelerated peer review and to have been so vocal about the US elections (btw, the Chronicle reiterates the point we made here earlier; that accelerated peer review is uncommon but by no means unknown with important papers). The Lancet editor Richard Horton refuses to comment, and well he might given that he wrote an entirely misleading summary of the paper which referred to “100,000 civilian deaths” when the paper did not make this distinction.
But there is no way on earth that I am going to write a comment harping on about this or that minor faux pas on the part of the authors.
Because the fundamental point that Roberts makes in the article is absolutely correct; it is a far greater disgrace that 100,000 people[1] can be needlessly killed and everybody carries on as they were before. You don’t have to accept an entirely consequentialist view of wars to accept that the consequences of wars have to be relevant to assessing whether they’ve succeeded or not. The best evidence that we have is that the consequences of this one were bloody disastrous. And as far as I’m aware, the list of war supporters who have seriously engaged with the possibility that this war was a failure numbers two; Marc Mullholland and Norman Geras. Marc mentions the Lancet specifically and ends up worried about his previous position; Norm doesn’t and doesn’t. If you know of any other examples, I’d be very grateful. But I honestly think, that’s it.
Other than that, the response in the world of weblogs has been exactly the same as the rest of the media; in the immediate aftermath of the report, half-assed attempts to rubbish the survey, or links to same. Then, when this didn’t work, just pretend that it’s all been dealt with and move on. Maybe say “I’ll get back to you on that” and never do. After a few months of this concerted inattention, many pro-war voices have even decided it was safe to use the old slogan “well Iraq is certainly a better place because we got rid of Saddam”, when this claim is quite obviously highly debatable (just like “of course the world is a safer place because we got rid of Saddam” …)
It’s an absolute intellectual disgrace. It might be good enough for Her Britannic Majesty’s Foreign Secretary but surely we ought to hold ourselves to higher standards than that. The debate over whether this war worked is vitally important, because we are talking about setting a precedent for an entirely new world of international relations, and the debate is not being carried on honestly. This is quite literally madness, and also quite literally suicidal.
I think I ended every single Lancet post with the observation that you can tell a lot about people’s character by observing the way in which they protect themselves from hostile information. Les Roberts ought to take some grim pleasure in the fact that the world has paid his work possibly the highest compliment that the establishment can pay to a piece of information; they regarded it as dangerous enough to ignore it, even at the cost of their own credibility.
Footnote:
[1]As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t like this 100,000 number, and it is irksome that the Lancet’s lasting legacy has been that the “100,000 dead!” factoid has become a commonly used stick for antiwar hacks to beat prowar hacks with. But as I say above, there is no way that I’m going to pick nits on this sort of thing while there is such a huge act of ongoing intellectual dishonesty on the other side. The pro-war side have brought this on themselves; until they start engaging with the issue, they can live with it.
{ 171 comments }
The 100,000 number is in error because Iraqis are exactly 3/5 of a person. The correct number is thus 60,000 human beings.
I think part of it has to do with the polarisation of war opinions. In almost all cases, the remaining pro-war types have either decided to ignore any “bad news” or unconsciously discount it, while anti-war types are just overwhelmed by the multi-faceted horror of the situation and our apparent powerless to do anything about it. For example, I’m practically incandescent with rage about the detention without trial, torture and rendition situation, but even I can’t summon up the energy and outrage to comment about every revelation. There’s just too many and it’s so depressing that it keeps getting worse than we ever imagined.
Daniel, would Andrew Olmsted count in that thoughtful-war-supporter category?
… and a number of Americans also. Let us recall Tony Blair’s statement that he had overstated the death count in Saddam Hussein’s mass graves by 8000%. In other words, by quite a bit. Another datum down the memory hole.
Okay: as someone who thinks the most vocal proponents of this war and its most vocal opponents are pretty much equally confused, I’ll bite. Just for fun. 1) It’s not “nit-picking” to question the 100,000 number when the study is based on such a tiny sample size (relative to the number of people concerned) that the margin of error is simply enormous. Though I doubt that the lack of attention to the study is due to intellectual scruples by anyone, it would, I think, be wise not to jump on this one study until a hell of a lot more information can be gathered. 2) If the Lancet article constitutes proof, or at least overwhelming evidence, that this war has been a disaster—if the article allows one to draw the final conclusion that this war wasn’t worth fighting—then wouldn’t a similar study conducted in London in 1941 have required precisely the same conclusion about that war—that it should never have been fought and that the people of Britain would have been better off if the treaty with Poland had never been made or never been honored? I mean, is it really surprising that more people in Iraq have died since a war began than before a war began? If that is the fact on which the case against war rests, then the case was made before it ever began—there was no scenario in which fatalities in Iraq, over a two-year term, would have been lessened by the beginning of a war. The are two vital truths that almost no one in this whole ongoing dispute seems willing to acknowledge: first, that it is impossible to know what would have happened if it hadn’t been fought; and second, that twenty months is not enough time to know either what the cost has been or whether the ultimate benefits (if any occur) will justify that cost. Historians and social scientists, of all people, need to be the ones saying “It’s too soon to tell.” Truth doesn’t move at the speed of journalism, or even of the blogosphere.
dunno. Andrew Olmsted is a new name on me. If he did, chuck up the link; it would be nice to have a sort of roll of honour here.
Ayjay, two points: 1. It’s not “nit-picking” to question the 100,000 number when the study is based on such a tiny sample size The sample size wasn’t tiny, as every epidemiologist interviewed by the Chronicle says. It was over 7,000 people in 33 neighbourhoods. While the 100K number has a lot of uncertainty, the qualitative “worse not better” conclusion doesn’t. 2. We didn’t start World War 2. Hitler did. I don’t accept any slippery slope type argument which depends on there being no difference between defending oneself against aggression, and being aggressive oneself. They are two very different decision problems.
dsquared, I said that the sample size was tiny relative to the number of people involved, which I think is fair. As the Chronicle article says, “the researchers admitted that many of the dead might have been combatants. They also acknowledged that the true number of deaths could fall anywhere within a range of 8,000 to 194,000, a function of the researchers’ having extrapolated their survey to a country of 25 million.” And as every schoolchild knows, Hitler did not invade or declare war on Britain. (Actually every schoolchild doesn’t know that, but I’ve always wanted to use that phrase.) But the British government felt that his threats to other countries (and to his own people) were ultimately dangerous to Britain, and the U.S. government made the same argument about Saddam’s aggression against Kuwait, the Kurds. the Shiites, etc. I am not saying that those arguments had equal validity!—only that they’re versions of the same kind of decision about going to war against someone who hasn’t attacked you directly, which was why I used the comparison.
Britain had treaty with Poland, don’t forget. Now obviously it was up to Britain whether or not to honour it, as they didn’t with Czechoslovakia, but it was still a treaty obligation.
I find the study not particularly forceful because it took the wimpy way out and failed to bother with the number of guerillas killed. The moral distinction between killing a lot of civilians and killing a lot of insurgents is rather large. The moral distinction between those killed trying to reinstall a Baathist government and those not is also rather large. If the war ends up being a failure (and that certainly seems more probable to me than it did 9 months ago) we can revist the “was it worth it” question. Still seems premature to me.
They dropped the Falluja sample. In other words: they knew that their methodology was flawed, so the fudged the numbers to make them look better. Given that, why should we believe the latter number? Especially given that their study failed to even address other studies, such as iraqbodycount.net, let alone offering explanations for the discrepancy.
That may be the dimmest comment I have ever seen. Dropping the Fallujah sample lowered, rather than raising, the estimated number of deaths caused, and Iraq Body Count counts all deaths of CIVILIANS REPORTED IN THE FOREIGN PRESS, an obiously smaller number than all deaths. Any other comments?
sebastian, I find the study not particularly forceful because it took the wimpy way out and failed to bother with the number of guerillas killed. http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/05/middle_east_shooting_in_tal_afar/img/3.jpg“>Tell that to this little girl, I am sure she won’t mind and neiher will any of her living relatives.
In other words: they knew that their methodology was flawed, No, they knew Fallujah was an outlier. Especially given that their study failed to even address other studies, such as iraqbodycount.net, let alone offering explanations for the discrepancy. These objections are all old news. Read Daniel’s original posts about it. Iraq Body Count is a passive reporting system that generates its results in a completely different way from the survey. As for the guerilla thing—let’s first just figure out how many people died, before deciding how many of them deserved it.
The utilitarian argument is so weak, it has to be projected into an indefinite future. If Iraq will become an utopia a hundred years from now, are we justified in committing a de facto, slow genocide at present? You aren’t even reaching the mentality of the die-hard supporters of the war. Good intentions are all, and the rest is “God’s will,” so we should persist in doing “God’s work.” Meanwhile, insurgents and terrorists find their motivations in the present misery. The destruction now – utopian future meme bears a distressing resemblance to the Christian Apocalypse mythologeme. If someone approached me with a gun, shot me in the kneecaps, and took all my money, while promising to invest it in a scheme that in some indefinite future would grant me an indefinite return—without promising to pay for my medical bills—I’d regard him as a criminal.
ayjay, you wrote “the sample size was tiny relative to the number of people involved”. This is rubbish. What matters is not the relative swample size but the actual sample size. Whether you population is 250 million or 250 thousand, you need the same sample size.
Say, I’m a war supporter who has “seriously engaged with the possibility that this war was a failure.” I don’t blog, though, and neither do many others. Given that, in the States, the initial support for the war was in the 75-80 percent range, and that now less than half the populace says it was worth it, I’d say I’m far from alone.
Daniel, I don’t have a specific post of him looking at the Lancet study, frankly. I have, however, been impressed with the way that he (as a war supporter) is looking with an open-mind about whether we were right to go to war and what the consequences of the war have been, particularly for the US military (I understand he is or was an US military officer, which might explain it).
http://andrewolmsted.com/
If someone approached me with a gun, shot me in the kneecaps, and took all my money, while promising to invest it in a scheme that in some indefinite future would grant me an indefinite return — without promising to pay for my medical bills — I’d regard him as a criminal. Hmmm. Well, Sara, after thinking it over, I’m inclined to agree that in such a situation you’d have some justification for calling that person a criminal. And tim lambert, I’m afraid the rubbish is on the other foot. What you say about sample size would only be true if what you are testing is absolutely homogeneous. If you’re trying to figure out what is happening in an entire country, a country in which conditions vary enormously from one region to another and even from one town to another, you need as large and as widely distributed a sample size as possible to make reliable judgments. That’s one of the reasons why the study’s authors themselves acknowledge such a large margin of error.
Worst. Comment. Thread. Ever! Good, albeit depressing, post.
ayjay, you’re wrong. Random sampling does not require that the population be absolutelly homogenous.
Whether the number of Iraqi dead is 8K or 200k, whether they were armed combatants or bystanders, the fact remains that not one did anything to warrant a death sentence until their country was invaded, and invaded without casus belli as understood by the Augustinian definition of just war.
Many of the commenters don’t seem to have read the linked article. It’s an excellent piece for a general audience. Here are two excerpts that bear upon points of contention in this thread:
So the dead may not have been predominantly insurgents. Epidemiologists. What do they know?So by this standard, if epidemiologists had found that civilian deaths in France circa 1944 and 1945 were “worse, not better” than in 1942 and 1943, then the Allied invasion of France would have been unjustified? Almost any war is going to lead to more civilian deaths than the immediately preceding period. If you impose that test, then you can only intervene in midst of a large genocide. If the level of civilian deaths in Iraq continue into the indefinite future, then the war is a failure. However, if the situation alleviates and a more just, pluarlistic regime emerges, I don’t think supporters of the war should hang their heads.
Great post! The opportunity cost of that $150B is also staggering. I saw figures about the vaccination fund set up by the Gates Foundation – BillG put in $750M, various donors added $580M, and the vaccinations they’ve done are estimated to have saved 670K lives. That works out at $1985 per life saved. And at that rate the $200B we will soon have spent in Iraq would save over 100M lives, or 4x the population of Iraq. So it isn’t just the deaths we’ve caused and the damage we’ve done; it’s also a huge opportunity cost. Make vaccines not war!
“So the dead may not have been predominantly insurgents.” But may have been killed by insurgents, no?
However, if the situation alleviates and a more just, pluarlistic regime emerges, I don’t think supporters of the war should hang their heads. Right, and if Sara’s kneecap-shooter were to magically return in 20 years and hand her $1 million she should shower him with flowers and chocolates. This incredibly costly war was sold on the most obviously false pretenses imaginable. It has lowered America’s standing in the world, it has cost untold numbers of perfectly good lives, and it threatens to completely destabilize the Middle East if not much more of the world. Even if this all magically “works out” you will not persuade me that the hundreds of billions of dollars should not have been spent on something else. Just about anything, really. Of course, it could just be that the outward, medium-term appearance of things “working out” would actually be the worst possible long-term outcome—how better to embolden Glorious Leader to undertake even more dangerous adventures? Once the rabid Republicans and the spineless Dems have firmly convinced the rest of the world that the 800-lb. gorilla has truly lost its mind, I’m going to start watching for the rest of the world to start fighting back like they mean it. As much as anything, Bush’s war is showing that there are lots of ways to badly damage the American psyche (and American soldiers) that have nothing to do with a large standing army or even advanced weapons. But, hey, if blind optimism works for you knock yourself out, I guess.
There’s no self-loathing in conquest.
“That may be the dimmest comment I have ever seen. Dropping the Fallujah sample lowered, rather than raising, the estimated number of deaths caused” Your point is invalid. Let me reiterate: the authors’ chosen methodology produced a number which they didn’t believe was correct, or which they didn’t like, or which they didn’t believe they could sell, or whatever. So they simply rubbed the Falluja count out of the final numbers. This calls their entire methodology into question. What plausible reason have we for believing that the resulting number is accurate? How do we know that other clusters were not “outliers”. How do we know that the other clusters were not affected by whatever methodological flaw corrupted the Falluja count? Also: it has been pointed out that if you take their Falluja fatality number, then one in six Fallujans have been killed. If you then factor in a likely injury ratio, the entire population of Falluja has been killed or injured by the US! The Falluja number is patently ridiculous, as the authors conceded by rubbing it out. And they used the same methodology in all the other clusters! Is there no scepticism out there?
Some people have no shame. It amazes me how people who don’t seem to have even taken an introductory statistics class don’t mind making absolute fools of themselves.
John Isbell, You are being ripped off, the army will give you anything between 20 Iraqi’s to the American and 100. am, What number do you think is correct? Which research is better (and before anyone leaps in the IBC figure is a different number and the IBC have themselves said their figures are not incompatible)? What is the correct figure now? If the paper were demonstrated to be spot on, however you might be satisfied, what would be your response? In your statistical analyses do you always include every measurement you make? Do you believe that the concept of an outlier is a fraud? Have you considered taking their reasoning at face value? How often do you question statistics in refereed papers? Do you know why we don’t keep records? Do you know that not to do so is a breach of the Geneva convention? What do you think you would get if you sampled Fallujah now? If there are shortcomings in their research, how might they be overcome? Would you be willng to help?
It appears that the invasion of Iraq was a humanitarian catastrophe of approximately half the scale of the recent tsunami, at a cost perhaps a hundred times greater (if one may compare the cost of taking lives war with that of saving them). Yet some continue to insist that there must be a pony in here, somewhere.
I would just like to assure readers that I don’t post these Lancet updates purely for the purpose of enticing people to say stupid things about statistics so that I can mock them and feel all superior. I admit that was part of the original motivation, but not really all that much any more.
Has anyone else noticed that “8,000 to 200,000” rapidly became “up to 100,000” casualties, even when being cited in anti-war arguments? If that’s not just a false impression of mine, then I think part of the rather subdued reaction may have been sheer cognitive dissonance.
Another point worth noting is that these figures refer solely to civilian casualties, excluding Iraqi soldiers killed during the invasion. Pro-war writers seem to have started, on the basis of the WMD rationale, by acting as if the war was one of self-defence with Iraq as the aggressors, and therefore that military casualties could be disregarded. When they changed their mind and decided they were actually liberating Iraqis (including, presumably, soldiers) the fact that tens of thousands of them (we’ll never know how many, but entire divisions were bombed into oblivion) had been killed in the process was quietly forgotten.
The reason practically nobody talks about the Lancet study, is that it is morally flawed. Look, if the police go for a “dynamic assault” on a hostage situation, (And a tyrannical regime like Saddam’s IS analogous to a hostage situation, I think.) you don’t, 1. Mark the police down for killing the hostage holders. or 2. Lay all the blame for hostages killed by the criminals on the police. Besides which, there have essentially been TWO wars in Iraq. The first, over very quickly, to depose Saddam. And the second, waged by Bathists and others, to see to it that Iraq does NOT become a free country. The second war is not between us and Iraq, it’s between the “insurgency”, which to a large extent consists of foreigners, and Iraqis, with us as allies to the Iraqis. And we didn’t start THAT war, which is causing most of the causalties.
Brett, I see, the insurgency was set to start if we invaded or not, right? You might not realize this, but systematically destryoing all the institution in a country makes the American govt. slightly culpable for the repercussions of that action. Especially when many people said this is exactly what would happen before the War. Stop repeating talking points, and attempt to start using your own head.
Brett, there is always an inquiry into the handling of hostage situations, and whether the actions taken by the police were justified or whether they made the situation worse. The police carry out careful audits of what happened, and have changed their tactics materially over the years, with the result that hostage situations are generally well handled and these days usually end without loss of life. This is the case in the UK and USA, anyway. In Russia, they tend to just take the view that it is the god-given right of the special forces to storm in and shoot, and that anyone who criticises this is failing to blame the hostage-takers. I don’t have enough evidence to support a causal claim, but the last two big hostage crises in Russia (the theatre massacre and the Beslan massacre) have ended in tragedy. You don’t appear to be very interested in learning lessons from Iraq. Why not? [parenthetically, Brett’s position is close to that of Norman Geras on the moral issues; I don’t agree that the insurgents are morally obliged to offer a cakewalk, or that if they were it would mean we were morally entitled to assume one, but the position is defensible. But there are the practical issues of whether this war was executed well or badly, and I don’t see many supporters considering those either]
bellmore, the problem with your scenario is that many of the so-called “hostages” have started shooting at the “police”. It’s not just former regime types who are in the resistance. And please, please drop that “to a large extent foreigners” nonsense. US commanders have acknowledged that the insurgents are at least 95% Iraqi.
By the way, how can a seemingly sane person believe this: And we didn’t start THAT war [against the insurgents], which is causing most of the causalties. Of course we did. If we hadn’t gone in there, there would have been no insurgency. It’s practically part of the definition of an “insurgent”.
Great post, I thought the Timberists had lost their nerve following the assaults of the internet islamophobes. the reaction [...] appears to be ?ho hum?. That’s human nature for you. People ignore painful notions. It’s still a disgrace, an essential one. As for your question, Johann Hari has been penning some very intellectually honest articles lately. But he still thinks the war may have been worth it based on some early opinion polls (Saddam was outed!)…
Actually I probably ought to have mentioned Hari up top and if I can be bothered to do an update I will, thanks.
dsquared: “as far as I’m aware, the list of war supporters who have seriously engaged with the possibility that this war was a failure numbers two” You’re too modest. You leave yourself out. You weren’t against war, just invasion in 2003 on the assumption that Bush would be out in 2005 and so invasion could have been led by a nicer man. As you say, invading made insurgency inevitable, so even a “nicer” invasion would have had these insurgency consequences. Matthew2, when you say Johann Hari has been “penning some very intellectually honest articles lately”, do you actually just mean you agree with what he writes now? And, ergo, tha what he wrote before cannot have been intellectually honest because you didn’t agree with it?
Speaking about police/hostages: compare this to infamous 1993 Waco incident. Except it’s at least 1000 times the magnitude and completely outside of the jurisdiction. Another point worth noting is that these figures refer solely to civilian casualties, excluding Iraqi soldiers killed during the invasion. Yet another point is that (IIRC) these numbers represent excess deaths, those above of what would’ve happened under Saddam/sanctions. That is impressive.
If you want me to concede that Bush is largely incompetent at anything but winning elections, you’ll get no argument from me. Both the 2000 and 2004 elections were, from my perspective, a choice between a perhaps competent man who I thought would competently do the wrong thing, and somebody whose aims I thought at least somewhat agreeable, but who had no skill at anything but politics. Well, you can amend incompetence by hiring the right people, but there’s no fixing competent wrongheadedness. So I still think I cast the right vote, even if it did’t work out as well as I hoped.
Since the election I believe more than I ever did that all significant political debates in the US are now just matters of affiliation. Bush is in the driver’s seat, and people affiliate for him or against him. The otherwise-rational conservatives who remain on Bush’s team, I am convinced, remain there on the basis of a personal anti-liberal existential commitment that they made during some important change of life, perhaps when they rehabbed after the sixties while blaming liberalism for all their problems. (The pro-conservative aspect of that kind of rehab is always weaker than the anti-liberal one). For them to cease to be conservatives now would require a second existential crisis, and most people don’t want to have too many of those in one lifetime. It’s not just Iraq. There are still plenty of fiscal conservatives who, for that reason, refuse to vote for a Democrat—flying in the face of 24 years of political reality. Their politics is like their body type, changable only with major surgery. And as I’ve said many times already, the starve-the-beast Armageddonist neo-Confederate World War Four advocates are influencing policy now, and we aren’t. (And neither are the pitiful rational conservatives who are continuing to support Bush.) We’re just watching, and so are they (whether they know it or not.) People are pleased that Bush’s atempt to destroy social security seems to be failing, but that’s sort of as if in some counterfactual world New York City, all alone, were making a stout defense against the forces of Robert E Lee. Bush has the Democrats fighting in their last ditch. And no, I don’t think that I am the irrational one here. The Bush loyalists are a bunch of very sick puppies.
John, the liberation motivation was there from the beginning, and anyone who says otherwise is either lying, ignorant, and exercising wishful thinking. The WMD motivation took priority because it was the only one of quite a number of motivations that every single party to the deliberations was willing to agree to, including the intelligence people, the Bush advisers, the people in Congress who agreed with the Bush people, the allies who were strongly considering endorsing it, and the pundits willing to argue in favor o fit. That doesn’t mean that the other reasons weren’t there in the minds of Bush and a number of his advisers, and these other reasons might have been foremost for some people. They certainly weren’t invented after the war effort began, because Bush’s State of the Union arguing for invading Iraq had it all there, and the Senate resolution that Boxer said didn’t have it also did have it.
You know, if you’d stop paying attention to your internal imagery, and look at who’s actually voting Republican, you’d realize that they’re not “Bush loyalists”, they’re Gore and Kerry anti-loyalists. That for the most part he hasn’t attracted voters, he’s just gotten the people YOU drive away. You could take the Republican coallition apart at the seams, if you weren’t so obsessive about gun control and late term abortion. Toss in doing something about illegal immigration, (Which both parties defend because it provides their financial backers with cheap labor that doesn’t dare complain about working conditions.) and the Republicans would go the way of the Whigs.
You have to give Andrew Sullivan credit as a war supporter who has consistently criticized the conduct of the war and takes seriously the possibility that it could be a failure. However, looking at the period where war is ongoing and active and comparing it to a pre-war period seems to me to be a fairly poor measure of the war’s long-term effect. Very few societies—not even Hitler’s Germany—are so bad that war isn’t worse while it is ongoing; the real key is the steady-state after the war vs the steady-state before.
Sez Brett Bellmore: The reason practically nobody talks about the Lancet study, is that it is morally flawed. Ignorance Is Strength, right, Comrade? I share Daniel’s despair at the collective shrug over the Lancet study, but I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised. Didn’t somewhere between 2 and 3 million Vietnamese civilians lose their lives in the process of being saved from Communism? Don’t hear much about them either. John Emerson hits the nail on the head: anyone who’s still on the reservation at this point can’t credibly claim to stand for anything like a coherent set of principles, because this administration’s policies are utterly incoherent. It’s purely a case of “Bush good, not-Bush bad.” It’s not about being conservative, it’s about being “anti-left.” (Paging Andrew Sullivan…) And Brett is nice enough to confirm this with his latest comment—why, he’d vote for an inarticulate buffoon, if it meant saving America from the unspeakable horrors of a President Gore or a President Kerry. Come to think of it…
Well John S, I thought my sarcasm was apparent enough. I really disagree with Hari, but at least he is presenting an honest argument, and not running around screaming “Saddam=evil” and “islamofascists”. He has the guts to reconsider his hawkish positions, and this is very rare. I think his pre-war arguments were misguided and not convincing, but they were argued and you could reasonably disagree. If only all debate was similarly rational.
The “list of war supporters who have seriously engaged with the possibility that this war was a failure” is surely quite long. You don’t have to travel very far; I seem to remember a post by Belle Waring on the subject. Another name that springs to mind is Michael Ignatieff. The fact that you mention just two (and add Johann Hari when prompted) suggests that you have in mind a particular subset of war supporters.
Jeremy Pierce, the “liberation motivation” might have been “in the minds of Bush and a number of his advisors”, but in fact practically all they talked about, ad nauseum, was “Saddam, WMD, al Qaeda”.
BB, I’m sure you will appreciate the irony of your twin statement about people being anti-Kerry but wooable without our obsessive gun control and abortion stances, given that Kerry had more than one gun photo-op and explicitly stated his personal opposition to abortion. Call it what you will, I look forward to you turning it into obsessive support. Limber up first, though, says a 40-year-old.
Right, and if you really thought that Bush’s policy goals were as malignant as you claim, and he was startlingly competent, you’d favor an incompetent John Kerry instead. Because we both understand that, if you’re trying to do the wrong thing, being competent at it only makes things worse.
“given that Kerry had more than one gun photo-op and explicitly stated his personal opposition to abortion.” I care about your party’s policies, not the masks you put on at election time. You’ve really got to get over this notion that everyone who disagrees with you is a gullible idiot, and the problem is that they’re being taken in by the wrong lying propaganda, when they should ideally be taken in by your’s. I mean, Kerry flys off to Washington to vote for gun bans on Super Tuesday, and thinks posing with a dead goose is going to help him? That just compounds being wrong on the issue with being insulting, too.
Some people are saying that it isn’t surprising that more people are dying after a war than before. That’s true, but it’s not what prowar types always argue. Wait long enough in a discussion like this and someone will trot out estimates of how many people Saddam killed, estimates that range from 300,000 to millions and based on less evidence than we have in the Lancet study, and then they’ll divide that number by the number of years Saddam was in power, and then give a small estimate for how many Iraqis have been killed by the US in the past 20 months, and then say the latter is smaller both in magnitude and in average rate and reach the triumphant conclusion that the war is killing fewer than would have died if we hadn’t invaded. I’m surprised that hasn’t happened yet, so I just stepped in and filled this yawning void in the thread so far. The Lancet study appears to refute this argument, since the death rate has gone up. The main weakness in the Lancet paper is the claim that most of the violent deaths were caused by American air strikes. That’s literally true of the sample, because of the Fallujah outlier. Whether it’s true of the country as a whole is unknown, because reporters can’t travel around freely and I get the impression from US government claims that our bombs only kill insurgents even when dropped on cities—if so, this is a breakthrough in weapons technology whose significance is of great theological importance, since we no longer have to kill a bunch of people and let God sort them out when our clever little bombs can do it for Him. It’d be interesting to know how many 500 to 2000 lb bombs the US has dropped in urban areas, on the off-chance that maybe our bombs are still incapable of making fine moral distinctions. In some article I saw after the Lancet paper, the authors said they had wished they could have taken one or two more samples in heavily bombed areas like Fallujah or just had been able to do more samples in general—what they did was okay for giving the overall mortality picture, but if you want a detailed breakdown of how many people are dying from various causes you need a bigger sample. That’s obvious in hindsight—you see one neighborhood like the Fallujah outlier appear in a sample of 33 and you ought to wonder what the true proportion of badly bombed neighborhoods really is. If it’s really as high as 1 in 33 then probably a lot more than 100,000 have died.
“Some people are saying that it isn’t surprising that more people are dying after a war than before.” No, we’re saying that it isn’t suprising that more people are dying DURING a war than before. The war isn’t over.
On the liberation/humanitarian argument, if that was sincere it wouldn’t pop up only when we want to invade for other reasons. And anyway, there are more cost-efficient ways to save lives than by starting wars against evil dictators we used to support. Ask Jeffrey Sachs.
BB, I’m sure you will appreciate the irony of your twin statement about people being anti-Kerry but wooable without our obsessive gun control and abortion stances, given that Kerry had more than one gun photo-op and explicitly stated his personal opposition to abortion. Call it what you will, I look forward to you turning it into obsessive support. Limber up first, though, says a 40-year-old.
Brett Bellmore – To be truly successful the Democratic Party would have to do something about how religious group perceive them. It has never been a politically viable position to be perceived as anti-religion. Considering that this is a single voting issue for a significant percentage of the voting public.
“I care about your party’s policies, not the masks you put on at election time. ” I had always thought that the gun rights issue was a proxy for civil liberties. Thanks to Brett, now it is clear to me that it is not. Brett, you’re an intelligent fellow, why is possible gun control more important than actual arbitrary detention without recourse to trial? I think the ability to embrace this sort of inconsistency is at the heart of the denial of the outcome of the Iraq war.
To get some perspective on this ‘debate’ I think you have to ask yourself two questions: 1: Do you think the pro-war side would be putting on their ‘statistician’ hats and attempting to argue about sample sizes if the Lancet article showed that, say, 5,000 people had died as a result of the war? 2: Granted that the results of the study are provisional, why do no pro-war people argue that the solution is for more and better research? On the contrary: what we get here is the remarkable argument by one of the posters that it’s actually immoral to count how many people die as a result of our actions in attacking a country that posed no threat to us. Given this sort of rhetoric, we should be careful to assume our own moral superiority when it comes to making smug little generalisations about Arab terrorism, and the ‘moral failure’ of contemporary Islam.
Hopefully the Democrats will take a principled stance on issues, and not pander to disaffected “moderates” who believe that gun control is tantamount to oppression, no matter that it costs them votes. After all, it’s not as if this one issue will a priori spell their destruction. On the other hand, the issue of late term abortion is one in which I find myself in agreement with David Velleman over at left2right.
“Also: it has been pointed out that if you take their Falluja fatality number, then one in six Fallujans have been killed. If you then factor in a likely injury ratio, the entire population of Falluja has been killed or injured by the US!” Is that not flawed reasoning? The Falluja cluster is a cluster in an analysis of Iraq, not an independent study of Falluja itself – so you can’t extrapolate the cluster to the whole of Falluja because it isn’t designed to provide an estimate of deaths in Falluja, only to contribute to an estimate of deaths in Iraq as a whole. So while asking one person in every town in Britain how old they are might give you a reasonable estimate of the average age in Britain, the person you asked in Carlisle isn’t going to give you a good estimate of average age in Carlisle.
What reaction were you looking for, other than “ho, hum”? From where I’m standing, it looks like the results of the Iraq war have precluded further Middle East military adventures. Bush is already re-elected; nothing to be done there. The number of Iraqi civilians killed doesn’t seem to be influencing suggestions for what the US should do there; I can’t see how a rapid withdrawal of forces is going to lead to anything but even more intense civil war, yet that seems to be what’s suggested.
The gun rights issue isn’t a proxy for civil rights, it IS a civil rights issue. As is late term abortion. And campaign censorship. The truth of the matter is that Democrats and Republicans are pretty much a wash on civil liberties; You both have your civil liberties you care about, and civil liberties you attack. Republicans tend to excuse their own attacks from a cost/benefit, necessary evil perspective, while Democrats rather hypocritically attempt to pretend they’re not bad on some civil liberties, by defining away the liberties they don’t like. It all comes down to which you place more value on. I happen to think that freedom of political speech, and gun ownership, are pretty darned important. And, Brendan, that’s not what I said. Counting is fine, my problem is with the moral conclusions being drawn from the data. Saddam’s regime wasn’t the Iraqis’ government in any meaningful sense, they had no choice or control. It was exactly analogous to a hostage situation. We, or anybody, had the right to go in and free them. We did so, with comparatively little loss of life. At THAT point, the “insurgency” started a war to recapture Iraq, in order to impose a new tyranny. The subsequent death toll has been a consequence of their war, a war of agression being waged against other Iraqis as much, or more, than it’s being waged against us. Blaming us for THAT war, the one THEY decided to wage, is moral idiocy.
Brett Bellmore: I guess you didn’t get the memo that Iraqi citizens might reasonably view the “coalition presence” as an “occupying force” and the Allawi government as “complicit” in the occupation. Or is it only when they decide to do something about it that they become “Bathists and others, [fighting] to see to it that Iraq does NOT become a free country”?
Brett, are you trying to prove James Emerson’s point? All you needed to do in 2004 was repudiate George Bush; then you could have your party back. But you didn’t, and now it’s not your party anymore, it’s his. By the time you get it back there won’t be much left to want.
“Granted that the results of the study are provisional, why do no pro-war people argue that the solution is for more and better research? On the contrary: what we get here is the remarkable argument by one of the posters that it’s actually immoral to count how many people die as a result of our actions in attacking a country that posed no threat to us.” Perhaps I don’t count as pro-war or something, but I would love better research that bothered with noting how many people were killed AND how many of them were insurgents AND how many of them were killed by the insurgents. I’d rather win the war now, too while I’m wishing.
brendan, I was pro-war and have changed my mind for many reasons, including the Lancet study. I basically don’t agree with many of the attacks on the Lancet study. But although you’re right to say “To get some perspective on this ‘debate’ I think you have to ask yourself two questions: 1: Do you think the pro-war side would be putting on their ‘statistician’ hats and attempting to argue about sample sizes if the Lancet article showed that, say, 5,000 people had died as a result of the war?” But do you think the anti-war side would accept such results without a squeak? My point being that many people on both sides are so locked into their position they will automatically give lots of kudos to anything that backs them and heap brickbats on anything that contradicts them.
Brett: “You know, if you’d stop paying attention to your internal imagery, and look at who’s actually voting Republican, you’d realize that they’re not “Bush loyalists”, they’re Gore and Kerry anti-loyalists.” Isn’t that what I said? They really are a bunch of sick puppies. I’m especially talking, though, about the opinion leaders who should know better, but who continue to support Bush. (I especially mean the ones who aren’t being paid to do so.) And Brett, you’re exactly what I was talking about—a deranged monomaniac, one of the worst of the worst. You’ve had plenty of time here to show a capacity for thought, and you’ve failed or refused to do so. You played your own small but disgraceful role in what I suspect will the greatest disaster in American history, and I cannot forgive you.
“All you needed to do in 2004 was repudiate George Bush; then you could have your party back.” It’s not my party, and never was; If Badnarik wasn’t such a loon, and Kerry had managed to stay campaigning, instead of voting to renew the “assault weapon” ban, I’d have voted LP like I did in so many prior elections. Hell, in 2000, I voted for Forbes in the Republican primary.
The gun rights issue isn’t a proxy for civil rights, it IS a civil rights issue. [...] Saddam’s regime wasn’t the Iraqis’ government in any meaningful sense, they had no choice or control. Well, Saddam’s regime did have, apparently, one of the best (if not the best) civil rights record on earth. Every household had at least a couple of fully automatic AK-47, not to mention all those RPGs and surface to air missiles. I see a slight contradiction here.
No contradiction: I never said it was the only civil rights issue.
The lancet study is bollocks. Working the numbers it seems to show a pre invasion life expectancy for men of 698 years. The data is flawed. more detail on my site.
I’d rather win the war now, too Then why don’t you go fight it?
No contradiction: I never said it was the only civil rights issue. But apparently it outweighs indefinite detention without trial, extraordinary rendition, torture…oh, and making sure us awful homos remain firmly in our second-class status.
Hahahaha. Oh god that’s fantastic. “Sagenz” deserves a Golden Flypaper award or something. He’s calculated the “life expectancy” for Iraqis from the Lancet figures, assuming that they maintain the same death rates seen for the different age groups in the study (pre war) Thus, ignoring the fact that (most doctors agree) as people get older, they are more likely to die. He even says “the figures only look at all realistic for the elderly!” As I say, I don’t put up these posts purely to laugh at innumerates, but neither am I going to pass up an open goal if offered.
“If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold.” If you are a true born again believer, the data is telling you some very frightening information; that Americans are the offspring of Lamech, who honed his father’s (Cain) killing technique to a fine art. The bible believer does not need the studies; all you need to do is multiply American deaths by a factor of 77 and you get the opposition death toll. It’s fun, easy and biblical. Of course the Mormon’s will have trouble with this, because they think the “mark of cain” is black skin, but the data seems to point in the direction of white skin. “Ye are of [your] father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.” Does the preceding verse describe anyone you know?
If you voted for Bush because Kerry voted for the assault weapons ban, then you’re just not serious about politics. Even if the assault weapons ban was a dumb law, it was a dumb symbolic law, easily evaded by anyone who cared to do so. No wonder we’re fucked.
All discussions of the Lancet study are exactly the same. Starts with the DEVISTATING critique (I would note that Andrew Olmstead, whoever he is, is not a thoughtful-war-supporter, as a user of the DEVISTATING critique), follows up by regirgutating a combination of the Fumento and Slate innumeracies and then ends with the defenders going into a tizzy of innumeracy. With life-expectancy-is-a-constant-across-your-life boy up here, it’s clear we’ve reached the final stage.
If you voted for Bush because Kerry voted for the assault weapons ban, then you’re just not serious about politics. Even if the assault weapons ban was a dumb law, it was a dumb symbolic law, easily evaded by anyone who cared to do so. No wonder we’re fucked.
Blaming us for THAT war, the one THEY decided to wage, is moral idiocy. I’d say it’s “moral idiocy” to simply assume that the insurgents have no valid reason for taking up arms—particularly in the face of things like Abu Ghraib—and to still be pretending at this late date that they’re all “foreign fighters” and “dead-enders.” On the electoral front, I’d say it’s “moral idiocy” to be talking about a President whose Administration has clearly and brazenly broken any number of laws while in office, presided over a military scandal several orders of magnitude worse than the My Lai massacre, all-but-destroyed his country’s moral standing in the international community and is well on his way to ruining its economy as “somebody whose aims I thought at least somewhat agreeable.” When you say: You could take the Republican coallition apart at the seams, if you weren’t so obsessive about gun control and late term abortion, I think you probably believe this, but it’s poor advice of much the kind that has landed the Dems in their current mess. The Dems obviously gain little or nothing, politically, from moving right—because they have no way of convincing the right that any such move would be sincere—and plenty to lose, since there’s a limit to the amount of betrayal their own base will tolerate. The correct answer is not more misguided attempts to be RepublicanLite. It’s to have the guts to offer a genuine alternative, like putting up a candidate who will unequivocally oppose disastrous policies like Iraq, and torture, and the PATRIOT Act, and thus offer an actual alternative for the many conservatives who are honest enough to their own principles to vote against these things even if it means compromising on gun control and abortion.
Brett, in his own words, actually gave evidence for Dr. Slack’s point against him. He admitted that the Democrats actually aren’t pushing gun control any more, but since they used to do so, he’ll never vote for them. Doesn’t give the democrats much reason to try for his vote, does it? That’s a second level of looniness to lay on top of the looniness of being a single-issue Second Amendment voter to begin with. There’s always a certain risk involved for someone like me when he declares that his opponents are deluded and dishonest and unworthy of even the most minimal respect. But when Brett’s around, that risk is enormously reduced.
Oh, come on, Brett is not such a bad guy, give him a break. Nobody is perfect.
Abb1—is that Moral Equivalence or Relativism? (And how do you tell them apart, anyway?) As for me, I’m in favor of Standards, Moral Clarity, and requesting your enemies to go die.
When the US is liberated by the freedom-loving mujahideen, Brett (hopefully) will be one of the pistol packin’ dead-enders and terrorist insurgents and you’ll be maintaining blog called ‘Seattle Burning’ or something. We need Brett.
“nobody seems to think that this is something worth thinking about” possibly explains why “That study is still basically unchallenged”
At the risk of saying something stupid about statistics so that you can mock me and feel all superior… I think there is a serious and substantial critique of the methodology that the epidemiologists have missed (largely because they’re not geographers). I posted it before on Tim Lambert’s blog, where it was more-or-less ignored. Here’s a cut and paste: “Part of the sampling procedure involves: (1) drawing a map, (2) generating a random easting and northing, (3) going to the nearest 30 houses. It seems to me that this method is quite seriously flawed – though I admit I can’t think of any improvement to it off the top of my head. The idea of sampling is to choose the population studied at random. The study’s technique (partly) selects a geographical location at random, not a chunk of population. This will systematically over-sample the population in areas of low population density and under-sample the population in areas of high population density. There are going to be variations in population density, because that’s how human geography works. If there is any difference in mortality between high and low density areas, this is going to throw the results of the study. Even a small difference in mortality between high/low density areas could have a large effect on the extrapolated results.” I still haven’t had a thoughtful response to it.
At the risk of saying something stupid about statistics so that you can mock me and feel all superior… I think there is a serious and substantial critique of the methodology that the epidemiologists have missed (largely because they’re not geographers). I posted it before on Tim Lambert’s blog, where it was more-or-less ignored. Here’s a cut and paste: “Part of the sampling procedure involves: (1) drawing a map, (2) generating a random easting and northing, (3) going to the nearest 30 houses. It seems to me that this method is quite seriously flawed – though I admit I can’t think of any improvement to it off the top of my head. The idea of sampling is to choose the population studied at random. The study’s technique (partly) selects a geographical location at random, not a chunk of population. This will systematically over-sample the population in areas of low population density and under-sample the population in areas of high population density. There are going to be variations in population density, because that’s how human geography works. If there is any difference in mortality between high and low density areas, this is going to throw the results of the study. Even a small difference in mortality between high/low density areas could have a large effect on the extrapolated results.” I still haven’t had a thoughtful response to it.
“He admitted that the Democrats actually aren’t pushing gun control any more, but since they used to do so, he’ll never vote for them.” Geeze, John, according to you I’m supposed to forget how Kerry voted in March, by November? When it was the only frigging time he even BOTHERED to vote that year? You’re not asking that I eventually let go of a grudge, you’re demanding that I develop Alzheimer’s! Get real. And if you really think Democrats stopped pushing gun control at the federal level, you’re not paying attention. They paused until the elction was past. That’s all. They’ve already resumed introducing new gun control legislation, such as Senator Levin’s proposal to ban .50 rifles.
OK, Brett, you’re loony for only one reason and not two. My bad.
study’s technique (partly) selects a geographical location at random, not a chunk of population. This will systematically over-sample the population in areas of low population density and under-sample the population in areas of high population density. Don’t worry about this. The “clustering process” selected different governorates to receive diffferent sampling rates, at least partly to mitigate this problem.
“Here’s the other horrifying, sort of spectacular fact that we don’t really appreciate. Since we installed our puppet government, this man, Allawi, who was a member of the Mukabarat, the secret police of Saddam, long before he became a critic, and is basically Saddam-lite. Before we installed him, since we have installed him on June 28, July, August, September, October, November, every month, one thing happened: the number of sorties, bombing raids by one plane, and the number of tonnage dropped has grown exponentially each month. We are systematically bombing that country. There are no embedded journalists at Doha, the Air Force base I think we’re operating out of. No embedded journalists at the aircraft carrier, Harry Truman. That’s the aircraft carrier that I think is doing many of the operational fights. There’s no air defense, It’s simply a turkey shoot. They come and hit what they want. We know nothing. We don’t ask. We’re not told. We know nothing about the extent of bombing. So if they’re going to carry out an election and if they’re going to succeed, bombing is going to be key to it, which means that what happened in Fallujah, essentially Iraq—some of you remember Vietnam—Iraq is being turn into a “free-fire zone” right in front of us. Hit everything, kill everything. I have a friend in the Air Force, a Colonel, who had the awful task of being an urban bombing planner, planning urban bombing, to make urban bombing be as unobtrusive as possible. I think it was three weeks ago today, three weeks ago Sunday after Fallujah I called him at home. I’m one of the people—I don’t call people at work. I call them at home, and he has one of those caller I.D.’s, and he picked up the phone and he said, “Welcome to Stalingrad.” We know what we’re doing. This is deliberate. It’s being done.”
It just goes to show you how low the level of political discourse has fallen when a propagandist like Hersh is corroborated by deeply flawed and politically motivated statistical mumbo-jumbo. I don’t know what you think you’re trying to prove but I can assure you that the American people know in their hearts they’re the good guys in this conflict. We’re not evil. What else matters? Nothing.
Fifi, you’re kidding, right? A parody? I hope? If not, you’re exactly what I was talking about.
“I don’t know what you think you’re trying to prove but I can assure you that the American people know in their hearts they’re the good guys in this conflict. We’re not evil. What else matters? Nothing.” You are being satirical here, right? Please tell me this is a joke…
I haven’t read any of the other threads on this issue at CT, so I don’t know whether it has already been covered or not. But there are two things with the mortality study in the Lancet: (1) Most people concentrated on the issue of how representative the sample is. Yes, the small sample size is quite normal for health statisticians, but only under three circumstances: (a) that the issue you study isn’t too complex, (b) that you have a stable environment where you can run repeated tests, (c) that you have comparative data to see whether your sample is an outlier or not. ad (a) general mortality rates in a country are complex at the best of times, even more so under conditions of civil war ad (b) the Lancet didn’t run repeated tests, the study isn’t reproducible ad© there are hardly any good comparative data, and those which exist suggest that the Lancet study is an outlier (see below) In conlusion, the Lancet sample is sufficient for hypothesis-generating and to guide further research, but in itself it would be unwise to prove anything with it as it doesn’t meet two crucial scientific tests (repeated, reproducible tests; comparative data) (2) But the more important point is not sample size; what’s important is what they compare, ie the “before” and “after” The 98,000 (8,000-194,000) number comes from a 1.58 increase in the overall mortality rate in Iraq from 5 before the war to 7.9 after the war. There’s no other data than the Lancet’s study of 7.9 for after the war as of yet. But there are other numbers for the before the war scenario. In the 1980s, the last time international agencies could check any real numbers, Iraq’s mortality rate was always in the region of 7 to 8 (per 1,000 people). According to the World Bank’s “World Development Indicators” (http://www.worldbank.org/data/wdi2004/tables/table2-1.pdf) report, the 2002 figure for Iraq was 8 as well. And if you look at some other reports from various reports, you will find that most reports put the figure somewhere around 8. Let’s compare this with some other countries. The US had a mortality rate of 9 in 2002, the UK 10, the average for high-income countries is 9 too. The average for low-income countries, where Iraq belongs to as well, was 8, The world’s average was 9. Now think back: The Lancet study suggest that in 2002 the mortality rate in Iraq was 5. This means that prior to the war, (a) Iraq had one of the lowest mortality rates in its recent history and (b) that Iraq had one of the world’s lowest mortality rates. In other words, if you believe the Lancet study, then Iraq before the war was one of the safest, healthiest and best places to live in the world. Do they really believe that? In conclusion, whatever the problems of their small sample size; even if we accept their mortality rate of 7.9 after the war, set against the most likely number of around 8 before the war, it would suggest that there hasn’t been a great increase in excess deaths. So unless some better data comes out, the civilian death toll of the Iraq war stands at about 15,000 (from Iraq Body Count)
Mortality rate in United States (CDC final data), 2002: 8.45 per 1000. Mortality rate for cluster groups, 1/1/02 through 3/18/03: 5 per 1000 (95% CI 3.7-6.3).
‘number cruncher’: repeating an array of fallacious statements does not make them any more accurate. You may think so, on some perverted statistical basis, but it ain’t so. So unless some better data comes out, the civilian death toll of the Iraq war stands at about 15,000 (from Iraq Body Count). Oh, come on, apply the same fine toothcomb to the IBC —a passive reporting system—as you did the Lancet study. I double-dare you, you lazy git. Onto Sebastian: I would love better research that bothered with noting how many people were killed AND how many of them were insurgents AND how many of them were killed by the insurgents. And in the meantime, you’re simply happy to brush off the research that does exist? Well, that’s rather nice of you. I never knew that a statistical study was statistically flawed if it it didn’t precisely reflect Sebastian Holsclaw’s wishlist. Ah well. I hear that the weather in Iraq is at its pleasantest this time of year. Why not hop on a plane and do the ‘insurgents or killed by them’ study yourself?
jack wrote:
Please provide a citation.number crunching phil smith: A mortality rate of 5/1000 for Iraq seems perfectly plausible, if you consider this list of countries with the lowest death rates, where Syria ranks 20th with 5.12/1000. You’ll also notice that there is not a single western country in it. Iraq has young population, whereas western countries have a lot of elderly people. As it has been noted up-thread, it has been known to medical science for some time, that as people get older, they become more likely to die.
Some more data on the mortality or death rate per 1,000 in Iraq before the war: Source: UN Population Division & Unicef Downloadable for example at: pdf.wri.org/wr98_hh2.pdf Mortality rate in Iraq: 1975-1980: 8.8 1995-2000: 8.5 1980-1991 doesn’t produce any good data because of the Gulf wars; “smart sanctions” were introduced in 1996, so sanctions don’t have a great influence on the data (beyond what was the government’s responsibility). Average figures are especially valuable as they eliminate statistical outliers. I think it can be safely said that Iraq’s “natural” mortality rate is somewhere around 8 per 1,000. Of course, Les Roberts et al. think that the mortality rate in 2002 was 5 per 1,000. Here’s the challenge: Can anyone find anywhere in the academic literature and scientific databases a source which would correspond to Roberts et al finding of 5 (+/- 10%) for a year before the Iraq invasion? All the statistics for various years before the invasion lie somewhere around 8, which is the best scientific data we’ve got so far. Up to now, Roberts et al are the only one who claim it was 5. Now the question is, which claim looks more likely, is based on more solid methodological grounds, is validated by reiterated tests, and provides greater overall consistency with other comparative historical and cross-country datasets? I think it’s pretty obvious that Roberts’ sample is the outlier here, not all the other studies before. A more careful peer-review process would have pointed this out and had given Roberts the opportunity to revise & resubmit his work after another round of sampling and a more solid methodological basis. Roberts should have published his initial data on his website, if he wanted to influence the US election with it. But with the premature publication, the Lancet unfortunately lost a lot of academic credibility. (Counterexample: Suppose a Bush-supporting team had found that the mortality rate in 2002 was 10 and after the invasion 8, with a reduction in deaths by probably somewhere around 50,000—do you think the Lancet would have published it?)
victor falk, hmmm…. Take a look at http://millenniumindicators.un.org/unsd/mi/mi_series_results.asp?rowId=561 from the UN and you’ll see that Iraq has substantially higher under 5 mortality rates than other middle eastern countries (up to 3 to 4 times higher). Ditto infant mortality and maternal mortality. You’re assuming Iraq’s overall mortality rate is like its neighbouring countries, but that doesn’t look to be a good assumption. Still, nick, it sounds like you’ve got all the answers: “‘number cruncher’: repeating an array of fallacious statements does not make them any more accurate. You may think so, on some perverted statistical basis, but it ain’t so.” In the interest of learning, can you share them?
Purveyors of stale arguments probably don’t want to know that they have already been dealt with. But without leaving the precincts of Crooked Timber, one can find commentary on the general rise in Iraqi mortality rates, child malnutrition and murders in Baghdad. These threads provide other links.
Kevin P In the Saddam days, it was not too difficult for ordinary Iraqis to own sporting firearms. The AK-47s that you love were restricted to the Baathists. “Left side of the blogosphere”, huh? “Sporting firearms”, huh. Well, why don’t you provide a citation, Kevin? Quick googling reveals:
“the Lancet didn’t run repeated tests, the study isn’t reproducible” That isn’t what reproducible means. It is quite possible, should someone else want to, to repeat the study, so it is reproducible.
“In conclusion, whatever the problems of their small sample size; even if we accept their mortality rate of 7.9 after the war, set against the most likely number of around 8 before the war, it would suggest that there hasn’t been a great increase in excess deaths.” For your argument that the pre-war mortality figure is incorrect you’d probably want to imply that it was due to systematic under-reporting of pre-war deaths and concomitant over-reporting of post-war deaths (otherwise any methodological differences would affect both pre- and post-war mortality figures). But then, as you suggest, if we think the death rate hasn’t gone up we should be very very suprised, who doesn’t think death rate goesup significantly in a war zone of this kind, even war supporters should be sceptical of an argument that says that the current war zone is a safer place than just before the war!
Thanks Kevin Donoghue, those links were fascinating. Sorry to be rehashing stale arguments. Still, I have to say that I’m not as convinced as you are that the argument over the infant mortality statistics has been comprehensively demolished. There is an issue there; dsquared and Chris Lightfoot brush it aside by saying that the UNICEF figures are rubbish (for 2002, absolutely fine before). Now – dismissing a report as unsound because it has an unhelpful message – doesn’t that sound like the kind of thing pro-war people are saying about the Lancet report? By the way, why isn’t dsquared sticking himself in as one of the war supporters who have had the decency to review whether the war’s been a failure?
John S, Just briefly as I am pressed for time (and a bit sick of the whole Lancet controversy): I wouldn’t say that “the argument over the infant mortality statistics has been comprehensively demolished.” But to undermine the main finding one would have to argue that the study undercounted pre-war infant deaths but not post-war. It is genarally agreed that a study like this can easily give a downward bias as regards the absolute numbers, before and after, but what is in question is the trend. For that purpose the methodology looks sound to me – not that that’s much of a recommendation; what little work I have done with stats related to financial data obtained without personal risk. As to D-squared’s position, he can speak for himself but I gather he was against the war from the start unless undertaken by competent management. If he gets into any dictionary of quotations it will probably be for this oft-quoted question: “Can anyone, particularly the rather more Bush-friendly recent arrivals to the board, give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics: 1) It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration 2) It was significant enough in scale that I’d have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it) 3) It wasn’t in some important way completely fucked up during the execution.”
john s, I dealt with the infant mortality argument here.
Sure, Kevin: I’d say that getting reelected was probably a major goal of the Bush administration, and you probably heard that he was running, and he DID get reelected.
heh—getting reelected was however not a policy initiative.
john s if you check the list, you’ll notice that it includes countries like Nicaragua that ranks 15th with 4.76/1000, the Dominican Republic 13th with 4.68, Solomon Islands 8 with 4.19, Libya 4th with 3.5, and Jordan 2nd with 2.62, all not noted for their outstanding health care. This is because the death rate is much more corelated to the demographic structure, ie the proportion of young to old peeople, than infant mortality, which is a good indicator of the overall quality of health care, but not of overall mortality (Sweden has the lowest infant mortality of the world, 2.77, and one of highest death rate in the western world, 10.38). More succintly: infant mortality tells you about next to nothing about the death rate. According to the CIA World Factbook (data available here in a nice 3-D staple diagram), the death rate in Iraq was 6.4 in 2000, 6.21 in ‘01, 6.02 in ‘02, 5.84 in ‘03, and 5.66 in ‘04*. The conclusion you can draw from those numbers is that Iraq has a young population. So my assumption that Iraq would have a death rate roughly simililar to Syria’s seems to be correct, even more so than I expected. *note to more stats: I’ve risen and met your challenge: the CIA agrees with Les Roberts et al.; when you say “Average figures are especially valuable as they eliminate statistical outliers. I think it can be safely said that Iraq’s “natural” mortality rate is somewhere around 8 per 1,000”, I reply no it’s not and it’s bad statistics, unless you expect the death rate to remain constant over time.
…It wasn’t in some important way completely fucked up during the execution. Cutting taxes? It was a major policy