Talking rubbish about epidemiology

just so. and, although you don’t bother to say so, provided that the 100,000 estimate is unbiased and the loss function is symmetric (I’ve not seen the original study, but one assumes these standard conditions are met) then it’s just as likely that there were MORE than 100,000 deaths.

One other thing that never seems to get mentioned is that the 95% confidence interval only reaches down to 8,000 deaths _after_ the researches jettisoned a huge high end outlier. If you include the outlier, (the falluja data), then the figure of 8,000 deaths would be close to 4 sigmas from the mean. What can we conclude from this? It means that if the actual number of deaths were 8,000 or lower, there would have been well less than 1 chance in 1000 that they would have aquired the sample data that they did.

The issue of what to do with outliers in statistical samples is tricky. But you can remove a huge outlier, and then act as if the 95% confidence interval has the same interpretation it would have if you had not removed the outlier. AT THE VERY LEAST: the study shows that there were at least 8,000 excess deaths PLUS the total number of deaths in falluja.

One other thing that never seems to get mentioned is that the 95% confidence interval only reaches down to 8,000 deaths _after_ the researches jettisoned a huge high end outlier. If you include the outlier, (the falluja data), then the figure of 8,000 deaths would be close to 4 sigmas from the mean. What can we conclude from this? It means that if the actual number of deaths were 8,000 or lower, there would have been well less than 1 chance in 1000 that they would have aquired the sample data that they did.

The issue of what to do with outliers in statistical samples is tricky. But you can remove a huge outlier, and then act as if the 95% confidence interval has the same interpretation it would have if you had not removed the outlier. AT THE VERY LEAST: the study shows that there were at least 8,000 excess deaths PLUS the total number of deaths in falluja.

Oh, sock thief, now that’s really really really devastating.

There is a bit of self-selecting at work here – what pro-war, pro-civilan-death statistician would volunteer for the fool’s errand of examining a sloppy and indiscriminate aerial bombing for signs of a beneficial effect on the civilian population?

So quite rightly the author is anti-war. You can wait for the Department of Defense study, and place it on your bookshelf alongside your industry-funded product safety studies.

So, by this line of reasoning, there would be some magic number of casulties where it would be okay to invade in Darfur. So what if we were sure we could keep civilian casulties below 90,000 in Darfur and since 100,000 are going to/already have died, would that make it okay? If Darfur turned ugly and the deaths went to 100,001 would that mean we wasted our time?

If Iraqi civilian casulties were high, especially in Faluja, an area ordered evacuated by the coalition, but Iraq is turned into a proto-democracy with a brighter future, does that mean we did good or bad?

To me the two most interesting facts—

1. Violent deaths obviously skyrocketed after the invasion. Out of 8000 people,there’d been 1 violent death in the period (about a year) before March 2003, and 21 after (if we exclude the Fallujah outlier for some reason) and 73 if Fallujah is included.

2, 61 out of those 73 deaths were caused by Americans, 58 from the air. Fallujah, of course, heavily biases this conclusion–maybe the percentage of American-caused deaths is lower if Fallujah is excluded, but I didn’t see anyplace in the paper where that breakdown is given. I suppose the sample (21) would be too small to mean much.

One criticism that you don’t take on here is the observation that 100,000 people in a year and a half is 183 people a day. This would imply that there’d be some days when thousands of extra people died, which would surely have shown up in the news somewhere. It seems to me like a good argument for less than 100,000, but I’d be interested to hear your take.

Ummm, Sebastian…try reading the study. The mortality numbers for the last year of Saddam’s regime come from exactly the same survey as the mortality numbers for the invasion and post-invasion period.

d-squared asks for a “convincing explanation of why it is that the study had a lower death-rate than the national average before the invasion and not after the invasion.”

My theory is this: the unit of analysis is crap. The study asks about deaths of household members over a four year period. But a household is not well-defined over time because people move in and out.

I hope to elaborate on this argument in a day or two on my blog. But if you grant me that the household is an ambiguous concept in longitudinal studies, then it follows that:

1. As we go farther back in time, the household becomes a fuzzier and fuzzier concept, so more deaths are missed.

2. Because the study does not carefully define what counts as a death to a household member, interviewers have flexibility about which deaths to count. Interviewers know the purpose of the study is to count civilian casualties, and they are naturally concerned about civilian casualties. So in ambiguous situations, interviewers count violent deaths, but not deaths from natural causes.

3. Household dynamics (people moving in and out of households) are different during a war than before the war.

Also, the 275-birth period was one year and a couple of months in late winter, while the 366-birth period was one year and several months of spring and summer. Seasonal fluctuations of >10% in birth rate are quite common, as far as I know.

One criticism that you don’t take on here is the observation that 100,000 people in a year and a half is 183 people

That’s implicitly taken on in my comment about extrapolation. I don’t think that using extrapolated numbers like that 100,000 figure is a legitimate way to summarise the results of a linear regression and wish that literally f’kng everybody didn’t do it.

One additional point regarding the data from the Iraqi Body Count site. Iraqi Body Count has strict criteria for inclusion: it counts noncombatant civilians who die violently. All nonviolent deaths are excluded, so are deaths of Iraqis involved in fightng either as insurgents or on behalf of the new Iraqi government. The Lancet study attempts to measure gross mortality from all causes.

There’s a central issue that neither the Lancet article nor this discussion appears to be touching: how many of the dead were bad guys?

According to the authors, 29 of the 61 reported killed by U.S. forces were men of military age. Now, I understand that the question may be beyond the scope of the paper, but in talking about the result it’s only fair to note that the express purpose of a lot of that military activity over there, is, well… killing bad guys.

It’s hard for me to see how these conclusions are all that different from IBC assuming that every dead guy in civilian clothes must be a civilian. What’s DOES the well-dressed terrorist wear to a battle these days, anyway?

I don’t mean to impugn the study or its methods; it appears rigorously and honestly conducted. But if you’re sophisticated enough to be concerned about the position of zero with respect to the confidence interval, then you’re sophisticated enough to make a mental subtraction for the people we went in to kill in the first place.

For a MUCH less rigorous study, based on IBC data, that DOES try to take this into account, see Putting Civilian Deaths in Perspective.

Cheers,

Jason G. Williscroft
The Dead Hand

Marcus,

You are quibling over terminology when you claim the unit of analysis is a person. The Lancet study states:

“We designed the cross-sectional survey as a cohort study, with every cluster of households essentially matched to itself before and after the invasion of March, 2003.”

As I pointed out, one cannot casually decide to match a household to itself at an earlier time, because households change over time as people move in and out.

If this must be done, the researcher must be extremely careful to define just who is to be included in the “household.” If a household member leaves, are they still followed? Suppose they leave because they are ill, and can be better cared for in another household. If they die while in the other household, is their death counted? How about temporary absences, such as to attend school? And on and on. The Lancet article answers none of these questions and gives me no confidence that the researchers were working from a careful definition.

I hate to wade into an otherwise immaculate statistical squabble in my muddy boots, but someone ought to point out that there’s no good reason to think that the invasion improved life for the Iraqis.

Quite apart from the insurgency and its attendant combat, gunfire and bombings, there is by all accounts a general breakdown in law and order. Murder and kidnappings are commonplace. The hospitals have been gutted. Power and water remain in shorter supply than before the war.

In other words, there’s every reason to expect the mortality rate to have increased significantly as a result of the occupation.

i wasn’t going to check out jason’s table until i read the above comment.

now that i’ve seen the evidence, i can only conclude that malnutrition of children under 5 in iraq did not occur before 1998, and was totally eliminated again in 2003. i’m convinced!

Yes ragout I read the wrong line in the table. As you say, I was completely mistaken on that point. My apologies.

Chris,

Your honest reply makes me sorry I was so rude. In my defense, I was irritated by your sarcasm.

A while back on my blog I posted a few links to Medical
Surveys on torture and falsification of death certificates in Iraq.

If the John Hopkins University report on Iraqi deaths (mostly women and children) turns out to be accurate, I wonder if a different perspective might apply? Given an Iraq population of 25 million, the 100 thousand computes to .004. Extrapolating that percentage to the US population yields roughly 1 million hypothetical casualties. So, again hypothetically, let’s say an invading army came here to free us from an evil dictator. For those here comfortably and cavalierly supporting the Iraq war, the implication is that 1 million war supporters should, logically and smilingly, line up in front of a vast, empty mass grave for their voluntary sacrifice-for-freedom execution.

Who asked those (purported) 100,000 Iraqis (mostly women and children) if they were willing to let their bodies be scorched and shredded in order that Sadam be removed? But the whole idea of statistics is almost as depraved as our war supporters, in effect, reducing the situation in Iraq to a sports scorecard. One innocent, involuntary civilian death in Iraq, owing to our ideology and munitions, is an abomination. And how grotesquely arrogant and hypocritical it is for our war planners to brush these deaths aside as “collateral damage.” Would Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, or Wolfowitz be so cavalier about sacrificing themselves or their loved ones if the situation were reversed? Simply, an inhumane and unspeakable hypocricy. Heart-crushing madness.

Ragout: According to the Lancet article, the 95%CI with all the data (falluja included) was 1.6-4.2 _fold increase in death rate_.

I quote: “When included, we estimate that the rate of death increased 2·5-fold after the invasion (relative risk 2·5 [95% CI 1·6–4·2]) compared with before the war. When Falluja was excluded, we estimated the relative risk of death for the rest of the country was 1·5 (95% CI 1·1–2·3).”

8000 excess deaths would fall outside of that CI.

But in any case, the appropriate thing to do with the outlier is exclude it, come up with a CI without, and then estimate the total deaths in falluja another way, and add it to the CI you got without.

Lenin,

That was roughly the point i was trying to make. Its too bad the authors didnt make that point explicit in the article. A CI is just one way of looking at the range of possible values. There can be other indicators that can offer suggestions on how to interpret the CI.

Ragout: the statistics around the Falluja issue are actually very complicated — not intuitive at all. The point I was trying to cite was Eric’s…that the 95% lower bound of 1.6 (60% mortality increase) including Falluja is clearly much higher than the lower bound of 1.1 without it. But you are *also* correct to say that once you include Falluja there is no statistically significant increase in the mortality rate after the war. It is a modelling difference.

If you model Iraq as a set of regions with different death rates, and you are trying to sample enough regions to get a good estimate of the mean postwar death rate, then the inclusion of Falluja drives the regional variance in death rates so high that your study no longer has the statistical power to say very much. (Which does not say anything about the death rate being lower, just about your study not being statistically powerful).

But if you model Iraq as a set of *individuals* who either die or don’t die, and try to estimate the mean chance of an individual dying before and after the war, then you have a Bernoulli distribution that is much easier to model (lower variance). This is the same assumption made in public opinion polls. It is this assumption that gives a lower bound estimate of a 60% increase in Iraqi mortality rates once you include Falluja.

I don’t think either modeling decision is “right”, I think this is the level where stats becomes an art (and too complex for me). To their credit the authors report both interpretations, which is where you got your finding.

“There appears to be a fundamental misunderstanding of war here: The purpose of war isn’t to make things better during the war, it’s to make things better after the war is over. And it’s not over yet.”

Here’s another perspective which takes a somewhat dimmer view of war:

Opening statement of United States of America, Nuremberg Tribunal, Trial of the major Nazi defendants.(21 November, 1945)

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/proc/11-21-45.htm

MR. JUSTICE JACKSON:

Any resort to war-to any kind of a war-is a resort to means that are inherently criminal. War inevitably is a course of killings, assaults, deprivations of liberty, and destruction of property. An honestly defensive war is, of course, legal and saves those lawfully conducting it from criminality. But inherently criminal acts cannot be defended by showing that those who committed them were engaged in a war, when war itself is illegal. The very minimum legal consequence of the treaties making aggressive wars illegal is to strip those who incite or wage them of every defense the law ever gave, and to leave war-makers subject to judgment by the usually accepted principles of the law of crimes.

[…]

It had been little discussed prior to the first World War but has received much attention as international law has evolved its outlawry of aggressive war. In the light of these materials of international law, and so far as relevant to the evidence in this case, I suggest that an “aggressor” is generally held to be that state which is the first to commit any of the following actions:

(1) Declaration of war upon another state;

(2) Invasion by its armed forces, with or without a declaration of war, of the territory of another state;

(3) Attack by its land, naval, or air forces, with or without a declaration of war, on the territory, vessels or aircraft of another state; and

(4) Provision of support to armed bands formed in the territory of another state, or refusal, notwithstanding the request of the invaded state, to take in its own territory, all the measures in its power to deprive those bands of all assistance or protection.

And I further suggest that it is the general view that no political, military, economic, or other considerations shall serve as an excuse or justification for such actions; but exercise of the right of legitimate self-defense, that is to say, resistance to an act of aggression, or action to assist a state which has been subjected to aggression, shall not constitute a war of aggression.

It is upon such an understanding of the law that our evidence of a conspiracy to provoke and wage an aggressive war is prepared and presented.

Daniel, could you do a “statistical analysis and epidemiology for dummies” post explaining why extrapolations are a bad idea? How do you get any kind of death toll estimate from surveys if you don’t extrapolate? I’m not challenging your statement–this is a request for free tutoring on the subject.

Speaking entirely as a layman, the Lancet results seems pretty sketchy. Can you really extrapolate from 146 deaths to 100,000? Seems like even small changes in various demographic factors would throw the numbers way off. But like I said, I’m not a statistician.

But I can say with confidence that the IBC numbers are not reliable. A simple spot-check will reveal that in many cases, IBC records that a news organization reported a casualty, when in fact that news organization merely repeated the claim of a third party (such as Saddam’s Information Minister) that a casualty occurred, but did not verify the casualty itself. That’s bogus.

Donald; it’s actually pretty intuitive. It’s always dangerous to estimate a big number from a small sample. What happens is that you scale up your error along with the estimate. The intuitive way to grasp the idea is to think of the underlying mortality rate as a signal, and the estimate as a signal plus noise. If you get crappy radio reception, you can’t make it better by turning up the volume; you just amplify the noise along with the signal. What I don’t like about extrapolated numbers is that they create these big eye-catching headlines which are just bound to catch the attention of people who don’t realise that the only signal here is the small number about relative risk ratios.

I’ve got two observations:

1. Self-reporting without checking of death certificates is highly liable to even a small number of liars completely skewing the study (think of ten people out of the nearly 1000 asked each making up between 1 and 3 violent deaths each)

2. Do the authors use a different definition for infant mortality than Unicef? The latter claim infant mortality was 102 in 2002, this study claims it was about a quarter of that, and rose to 57 after the war.

Heiko: they checked for your 1 as far as was possible. There is certainly an issue here, but the opposite problem would have been just as great or greater; requiring the certificate in every case would have resulted in huge undercounts (and probably dead researchers). On the occasions when they asked for a certificate, it was produced.

Your 2) is dealt with above; the survey compares own-averages to own-averages. Also note that movements in infant mortality aren’t what’s driving the post-invasion variance; movements in deaths of males aged 15-59 are.

and the number of innocent civilians killed by US bombing is more like a few thousand and quite similar to both the number of innocents killed by terrorists/insurgents and the number of terrorists/insurgents killed by coalition/Iraqi forces.

Suppose it’s so. Does that make the issue of civilian casualties completely unworthy of attention and/or concern and/or debate?
Is a few thousand innocent casualties simply a side effect of even the most modern hi-tech wars, to be accepted and forgotten, nevermind if the wars are legitimate or not?
I don’t think the exact count – which is by definition impossible – is the really important aspect here. But it seems I’m wrong.

Hi dsquared,

on 1) see above, they didn’t ask for death certificates for infants and did not get death certificates in all cases when they asked. They were merely satisfied with the explanations given (recent death, husband away and death certificate locked away for example). It doesn’t take very many fabricated deaths to massively skew the results, when the total number of self-reported violent deaths ex Falluja after the invasion is 21.

on 2) firstly, they do claim a substantial increase in infant mortality (from 29 to 57) and this is an important statistic, because (either because of Saddam, or because of Saddam and sanctions or because of sanctions alone – take your pick) infant mortality pre-invasion was very high compared to neighbouring countries. If you did take the post war number from the study of 57 as accurate, and the Unicef number of 102 before the war as accurate as well, you’d get something like 80,000 children saved. Not that I trust the study sufficiently to actually believe either the post or the pre-war estimates (and I also think that violent death and death from disease should not be treated as one and the same).
Secondly, it does matter who got killed and who did the killing. Most of 100,000 killed being from coalition bombing is rather different from 2500 innocent civilians killed through coalition bombings and small arms fire, 7000 insurgents, baathists and foreign terrorists killed by coalition and Iraqi forces, 4000 innocents, Iraqi forces and terrorists killed by ordinary criminals (compared to say 2000 before the war), 2000 police officers and Iraqi forces killed by terrorists/insurgents and 6000 innocents killed by terrorists/insurgents.

That’s the rough kind of numbers I take to be realistic (from studious reading of all Iraqi blogs and many other sources). 100,000 civilians killed by coalition bombings seems a pretty outlandish claim to me, and I don’t think this study has much of a basis for making it.

Two more points:

1) I do believe infant mortality may have dropped (though maybe not halved as yet), because a lot of things are available now that weren’t before the war.

2) If you look at the infant mortality statistics for Zimbabwe you’ll find numbers that follow a rather similar trend as under Saddam (first continued improvement and then a sharp deterioration). Personally, I believe that sanctions had nothing to do with increased infant mortality, and that the sole person to blame here is Saddam. Oil for food was designed to hurt the dictator and protect the children, but of course, got abused by Saddam.

Cluster sampling is NOT random sampling. It is accepted that it prone to higher rate of error than other sampling methods. It is chosen when sampling is difficult. Fair enough, but people should be aware that this study only gives us a measure of the measure of uncertainty (rather a lot) the authors have of the number of deaths, rather than a precise figure.

Also coalition activity was not homogenous across the country. Some areas had higher levels of military activity and some areas would have had higher levels of targets. It is therefore not the same as cluster sampling when looking at a more homogenous threat, such as sampling for the effects of a radioactive leak on a population, and therefore more prone to error depending where the samples where taken.

Questions also need to be asked about the pre-war death collection statistics. The study was done with the involvement of the Iraqi governates. can we be sure that deaths due to Saddam’s regime would have been lost to to inherent bias.

Also before we get all righteous about this, please remember the other scientific research done in Iraq:

Respondents were a mean age of 38 years and were mostly of Arab ethnicity (99.7% [1976/1982]) and Muslim Shi’a (96.7% [1906/1971]). Overall, 47% of those interviewed reported 1 or more of the following abuses among themselves and household members since 1991: torture, killings, disappearance, forced conscription, beating, gunshot wounds, kidnappings, being held hostage, and ear amputation, among others. Seventy percent of abuses (408/586) were reputed to have occurred in homes. Baath party regime-affiliated groups were identified most often (95% [449/475]) as the perpetrators of the abuses; 53% of the abuses occurred between 1991 and 1993, following the Shi’a uprising, and another 30% between 2000 and the first 6 months of 2003.

Hi Mona,

I care a lot about Iraqis, and I think so do you. Are you aware of the many Iraqi blogs around? That’s how I heard about Zeyad’s cousing being forced to jump into a river by US troops. He drowned, they tried to hush it up and eventually ended up in court.
That’s also how I know that Najma’s father in Mosul nearly got killed in a car bomb, or that Najma is looking forward to moving into the new school building that’ll be ready in January.
http://astarfrommosul.blogspot.com/
Najma is a sixteen year old girl from Mosul and a wonderful writer, my absolute favourite among the bloggers (you’ll find links from her site to others, Zeyad’s is Healing Iraq).

Now, your “political points”. Yes, I do think that the issue of civilian casualties is enormously important. I don’t buy any of the conspiracy theories, this war was primarily fought to help the Iraqi people throw off tyranny (indirectly making the US safer), and it does matter, whether the US is causing more suffering than it’s preventing.

Whether the Pentagon should try to estimate the number of civilians/combatants killed is another matter. I prefer independent estimates myself, truely independent ones if at all possible (the authors of this study clearly have an agenda, and I find it hard to accept them or Iraqi body count as independent).

Wish you well.

Hi Donald and dsquared,

1) Do you think the results of a study that looked at just under 1000 households, and noted 21 self-reported violent deaths ex Falluja can truely be taken as the basis for claiming of the order of 100,000 deaths from coalition bombing?

2) Yes, I didn’t go into detail as to what the basis for my numbers is. They are estimates (and I don’t believe them to be al that accurate), but they aren’t taken from thin air and I believe they give a far truer picture than this study. For example, the Iraqi government has provided statistics on numbers of people killed in suicide attacks:
http://healingiraq.blogspot.com/
(eg 20 suicide attacks in September killing a total of 168)
Coalition commanders have provided estimates on the number of insurgents killed or captured. Hospital officials in Falluja have provided numbers on people killed there. And through reading 30+ Iraqi blogs, I’ve got my own unscientific self-reporting sample (where the number of deaths caused by the coalition is more like 10-20% of the total rather than 80-90%).

Furthermore, I’ve got numbers from other conflicts, eg numbers for people killed in Germany in WWII (which is my home country), when cities got systematically carpet bombed (my home town of Dueren was nearly completely destroyed through allied bombing, at least 3500 civilians died).

Close to 100,000 civilians dead from bombing in Iraq I find very hard to swallow from that angle alone.

One final point before I go to bed. The study kindly also references the CPA’s historical assessment (from http://www.cpa-iraq.org) of their achievements:
“The Ministry is focusing on maternal and child health with the ambitious but attainable goal of reducing the infant mortality rate by one half by the end of 2005.
There is no statistical evidence to support an increase in the infant mortality rate in Iraq since March 2003.
The Ministry is working to immunize the country’s 4.2 million children under the age of five against preventable diseases such as polio, tetanus, diphtheria, measles, and tuberculosis.
More than 30 million doses of children’s vaccinations have been procured and distributed.
Routine vaccinations are available to newborns, children, and mothers every day at Ministry of Health facilities across the country and are promoted nationally through immunization days on the 22nd of each month.
Infant mortality is 108/1000”

108 in 1000 is slightly over 10%.

Under 5 mortality is 131 in 1000, or slightly over 13%.

Taking the relative increase claimed by the study (roughly a factor 2) at face value and applying it to the absolute value provided by Unicef and the CPA (as a further aside, the WHO page referenced by the study also provides overall death rates, which have been discussed elsewhere in this thread, and for 2001 they give a figure of … 8, see above in the thread for the significance of this), we’d be looking at something like a fifth to a quarter of Iraq’s children dying before their fifth birthday.

Now, if the pre-war number is truely wrong (implying Unicef didn’t get their numbers right), there is no basis whatsoever for claiming sanctions killed anyone (leaving aside whether the US or Saddam is the real culprit). 29 per thousand is, as the authors say themselves, rather comparable to the rates in neighbouring countries. If the pre-war numbers are correct, however, the study’s numbers are very, very suspect.

http://mikejericho.blogspot.com/2004/11/100000-deaths-in-iraq.html

Suppose the authors of this study have an agenda. Suppose Lancet got their research from Indymedia and Information Guerrilla. Suppose the numbers are all wrong.

What agenda does the Pentagon have in refusing flat out to provide body counts? If the numbers of victims were so much lower than the estimates, why, the Pentagon should have all the interest in making that known. Maybe, if they cared about Iraqis so much, they could have some interest in reparations, too.

No I don’t get my news from blogs, Iraqis or otherwise, just like I don’t get it from Indymedia or Information Guerrilla, or from my cousin. I prefer the nasty big mainstream media, because like Lancet studies, even if they may get it wrong, at least they have an editorial system and responsibilities for what they publish.

Finally, I think you’ll find that the opposite of the belief that the war was right because its purpose was delivering Iraqis from tyranny is not a “conspiracy theory”, but the belief that the war was wrong because the WMD pretext was false and the decision was illegal and bombing Iraq has created more terrorists, and other such beliefs that do not require elaborate fantasies but contrasting interpretations of the same facts. Fact: Saddam has been removed. We can choose to see only the positive effects of that, and consider any negative ones a taboo not to be discussed, or we can enlarge the view and indeed discuss the taboo. Fact: the war was illegal by international law standards and requirements. We can choose to disregard international law in favour of US policy and doctrine on the war on terror, or we can discuss why should the US be above the law. Fact: impossibly exact counts aside, many Iraqis were bombed and killed. Cos that’s what bombs and wars do. We can choose to ignore that by reiterating fact 1 – Saddam was removed – maybe with a corollary of “why, do you want him back??”, or we can discuss whether indifference to civilian victims may be an ideological consequence of a war whose justification has by now boiled down to “erring on the side of caution” or “better kill them there than them killing us here” (where them makes no distinction between terrorists and civilians, Iraqis and Saudi hijackers, etc.).

I think if we’d cared so much about Iraqis, we wouldn’t have bombed them, and made them pay twice for being under a dictatorship for 30 years, a dictatorship that was previously supported by us, and that we could have found other means to deal with especially as it didn’t seem to have much to do with 9/11 whereas other regimes who seemed a lot more related to that event are still our well-financed allies, but hey, I’m probably being too simplistic. Debating figures is just too complicated for me. I don’t even care that much for Iraqis, to be honest, otherwise I suppose it’d be more blindingly clear to me that killing a few thousands of them and turning their country into a terrorist haven was a Good Thing, because it got rid of Saddam, and that’s all that matters.

Hi dsquared,

I do think their numbers are clearly untrustworthy. What you call statistics collected on the ground could also be called hearsay/rumour collected from an extremely small sample. If their methodology is so poor that they can provide a pre-war estimate of 29 for infant mortality when Unicef gives 102, I don’t think anything else they purport to derive from their “data” can be given much weight.

I can claim a cluster sampling from blog reading. Najma is in Mosul, Zeyad in Basra, Dilnareen and Kurdo in Kurdistan, Faiza in Baghdad. Nicely distributed across the country and each blogger represents a cluster of people. I’ve got a similar number of clusters as this study. I can even claim that I’ve got better reasons to trust their answers, because I haven’t just talked to them for half an hour, but have heard what they’ve got to say for a period of usually about a year, often on a near daily basis. My sample might suffer from sampling bias, people making stories up? How about theirs?

Now, I wouldn’t trust such a small and non randomly sample to provide me with reliable numberical estimates. I do trust it enough though to tell me, in particular that 80-90% of violent death being attributable to coalition bombing is simply not credible.

But leave that aside and look at one of the numbers I estimated which you don’t deem credible (based on your analogy, 0% chance of them being true???).

The government and coalition do provide numbers for policemen killed in action. I would claim with near 100% certainty that the true number is not less than 500 and not more than 10000, and is most likely around 2000. That’s based on actual body counts.

Heiko: It looks very much as if you have been casting around for a reason to reject unpalatable information and have now grasped at the straw of the infant mortality number. Would you care to explain to us why it is that you think that the difference between this number and a UNESCO estimate calculated five years earlier invalidates the entire survey? I suspect that you don’t actually have a principled objection here.

Also note that an “actual body count” will tend to significantly underestimate death rates due to a bombing campaign, because the bodies of people who die in buildings which get bombed are not always available to be counted.

Hi dsquared,

Unicef, on their website, give a number for the year 2002, namely 102. That is essentially the same time period as for the study we are discussing here.

http://www.unicef.org/publications/files/pub_children_of_iraq_en.pdf

In this report, they are referring to a Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey conducted in the year 2000. The number of households that took part was 13,011.

I’d have to send Unicef an email to ask how they derived their number for 2002. But I don’t really see any reason to doubt their numbers.

And infant mortality is enormously important. “Half a million children by sanctions” is based on these infant mortality numbers and how much larger they are than those for neighbouring countries.

You ask me to explain why this error with regards to infant mortality pre-war invalidates the whole study. Unicef’s report certainly invalidates their numbers on infant mortality. There is no way that either 29 or 57 are accurate numbers for infant mortality in Iraq, particularly pre-war, but even the post-war number is a somewhat hard to swallow nearly 50% drop from the Unicef number for 2002.

Other numbers, like violent deaths in Fallujah in particular, but also to some degree the number of people murdered by Saddam in 2002, produced by this study are really hard to check.

But if this study can make 500,000 children killed through sanctions disappear into thin air just like that, why indeed trust them on a claim that 100,000 civilians have been killed by coalition bombing?

Hi Tom,

I just had another look at the passages you cite.

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/proc/11-21-45.htm

“How a government treats its own inhabitants generally is thought to be no concern of other governments or of international society. Certainly few oppressions or cruelties would warrant the intervention of foreign powers. But the German mistreatment of Germans is now known to pass in magnitude and savagery any limits of what is tolerable by modern civilization. Other nations, by silence, would take a consenting part in such crimes. These Nazi persecutions, moreover, take character as international crimes because of the purpose for which they were undertaken.”

I have no difficulty in interpreting the invasion of Iraq as a humanitarian act and a war of defense of an ally, the Iraqi people.

It’s quite clear that for a war to be morally reprehensible and illegal, the motives matter enormously. Nazi Germany engaged in a war of conquest and subjugation. The declared aims of Operation Iraqi Freedom were to free Iraq from tyranny and protect the world from a dictator.

I find the alleged ulterior motives (stealing oil, personal vindictiveness for an assassination attempt on Bush senior, gaining dominance and bases in the Mid East for the sake of oppressing Arabs, a crusade against the Muslim faith) rather unconvincing.

Donald: the reason I didn’t find myself grouching at your use of extrapolation is that it wasn’t in a headline or executive summary and was fairly clearly flagged for what it was; an illustrative number and a reality check on the calculations. I only really dislike extrapolated numbers when they’re presented as The Truth.

http://obsidianorder.blogspot.com/

Any comments?

Heiko, I’ll concede that that quote can be read as “the threat is not imminent, but we must act.” Given the immediately following sentence, I would say that it can also be read as “we have no way of knowing whether the threat is imminent or not, so we must act.”

But that’s a minor point that I’m more than happy to concede. Your claim was not, in fact, bullshit, and I was hasty in labelling it as such.

On the other hand, the claim that Iraq under Saddam posed a “threat” to the security United States–imminent, emergent, or any other kind–is bullshit of the highest order. The weapons that we were told were there, were in fact not there. Period. Everything else is grasping at straws.

If you want to argue that we invaded Iraq for the good of the Iraqi people, then do so. But you also need to take into account that the people of this country were led into war under false pretenses.

heiko, sorry I’m not too inclined in rehashing all the arguments about the war, but on the subject of where I prefer to get information from, I think blogs, including Iraqi ones, can be great for commentary and opinions, and cousins are great for family news and gossip, and first hand experience is certainly great for, well, first hand experience, but my point was rather obviously and simply that a news organisation, whatever its size, or, as in this case, a medical journal, have a full set of editorial and professional rules and standards, as well as legal responsibilities that cousins and blogs alike don’t have. I’m not counting in the “mainstream media” category the kind of tabloids that encourage people to believe a pedophile is round every corner or that aliens might have landed at Roswell. That a study is published in a journal like Lancet doesn’t mean it’s automatically The Truth, also because it’s not about truths but estimates, but it carries more authority and uses more rigorous methods than the ideological complaints of some ambitious instapundits who never even set foot in Iraq. That’s all.

Also, there has been no major terrorist attack in the US over the last 3 years. How does that square with supposedly being less safe after the removal of Saddam?

I don’t know, I’m not in the US. Good for you, by all means. We just don’t know that no terrorist attacks in the US after 9/11 is a side effect of Saddam being gone.
People in Madrid, or even, gosh, Iraq!, might not feel so safe, and the correlation with the war in Iraq there _does_ seem a bit stronger. So, it just depends where you’re sitting. I thought we were discussing Iraqi casualties, terrorists in Iraq, the effects of the war on those Iraqis we all care so much about, right?
But thanks for clarifying your priorities.

The important thing as far as I’m concerned is the position of zero in the confidence interval

Zero? Why zero. For there to be no effect, the confidence interval will contain 1. IIRC, when the CI contains 1 then it is usually viewed that there is no impact on relative risk for whatever phenomenon you are studying.

Hi Mona and Donald,

I am not sure whether you are still following this thread. I’ve been away on business for a little while.

I think the issue of sources is important for both your responses.

The Lancet is a medical journal, which gives anything published in it an instant air of credibility. However, I’ve never heard of a single instance where an author could dictate the date of publication to a scientific journal with the express purpose of influencing an election, and insist on a peer review and publication process condensed down to a fraction of what is usually done.

THAT heavily undercuts the credibility of the study (because it is a scientific journal, I’d still tend to believe that they misrepresent their facts, as opposed to outright making it all up).

I did find the Knight Ridder story in my google search and dismissed it as not credible. There is no independent confirmation of any of the salient facts claimed in it.

In fact, far from confirming the Knight Ridder story the actual data reported in the Lancet undermine it and agree with my own estimates.

If you go and have a look at the study, which is available for free download after all, you’ll find that while their estimate for extra deaths excludes Fallujah, they INCLUDE Fallujah for the following statement: “Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children.”

Excluding Fallujah, in fact their data nicely confirm my own estimates.

The raw data (violent fatalities) for Fallujah are:
28 children
38 men
5 women

The ratio of child deaths to those of women in Fallujah is hard to explain, except when you suppose that they are actually made up.

For the rest of the country, we have:
4 children
13 men
2 women
2 elderly

Have a look at:
http://obsidianorder.blogspot.com/

“Conclusion:

Based on the data in the study, we can reasonably estimate (in other words guess) that 23000 +- 9000 combatants and 7000 +- 9000 non-combatant civilians were killed by coalition military forces. This is comparable to other estimates, within the large margin of error.”

That’s the Lancet study.