is your argument that once people have risked being killed they’re allowed to misrepresent the facts?

i mean, all due respect to them for putting their lives on the line. but, frankly, why bother if you’re going to fuck up your credibility in such a major fashion once you’re done? they could have gone to a couple of anti-war demonstrations and played then played russian roulette. same result for less money.

You forgot to mention St. Urho, patron saint of Finnlanders, who got rid of the grasshoppers, except he didn’t really get rid of all of them, just a lot of them, statistically speaking.

Daniel,

The best Lancet critic seemed to be Ragout, last seen blogging about wooden carpets. He doesn’t really count though, since he acknowledged that some flaws in the study would imply that deaths were under-counted.

Eliminating him for excessive integrity, who is the best of what’s left? I grow tired of arguing with people who turn out to know even less than I do.

AFAIK the raw data is not available. Aside from the factors you mention the main reason for the wide CI is that cluster sampling was used. This was unavoidable but, as explained in this link (which Daniel dug up), it has drawbacks:

http://www.mori.com/pubinfo/aiz/cluster-sampling-a-false-economy.shtml

I ought to emphasize that I’m not doubting anything in this study – but I am curious as to why the confidence interval is so wide. I assume they’re deriving the confidence interval from the sample standard deviation, and the confidence interval is so wide because the variation between clusters is unexpectedly large, even when Falluja is excluded. This makes we wonder what the shape of the distribution is.

(I say that the high variance is “unexpected” in the sense that their choice of sample size didn’t anticipate it – but it’s highly plausible, as we ought to expect many more casualities in areas where there has been a lot of fighting, such as Fallujah. And sure, larger sample sizes are usually nice to have, but sometimes you can’t obtain them without undue cost or risk to researchers, so the statisticians have to make do with what they can get).

No. It shos that the invasion of Iraq has led to many thousands more people dying than would have died if there had been no invasion. Given that all the prior spurious justifications for war have evaporated, and the only argument the pro-war side has left is that Iraq is a better place because of the invasion, this is certainly a material point.

Remember Speteber 11th, 2001? Remember how the events of that day shocked, not just America, but the world? Well, the real low-ball figure for the number of people we’ve got killed in Iraq is about three times the number who died when the twin towers collapsed. Most of those deaths weren’t on camera, though there are a few disturbing minutes of gun camera footage floating around the internet if you want to look. It doesn’t makes those deaths less significant.

And that’s going with a really low estimate. On the high side, it could be more than sixty times the 9/11 casualties. There’s no reason to think the low number is more likely than the high number, except maybe that the low number causes your conscience less irritation.

Even the low end of the error bars is appalling. I don’t know how anyone could describe that estimate as “totally worhless” without being a moral cripple.

Well all ya gotta do, TallDave, is get yer ass over to Eye-rak, knock on the doors of lotsa randomly-selected households, and ask questions about deaths in the family. That’s what the Lancet team did. Be sure to get death certificates, otherwise the 101st Keyboard Division will be mighty sceptical of the results.

And if you come back one head shorter, well, those are the breaks.

I’m trying to collect the broadest range of comments possible.

Thanks.

A study that proves only that there were at least 8,000 excess deaths and no more than 194,000 is totally worthless, even leaving aside the many methodology problems that have been brought up.

I’d like to see a real study done, with solid methodology agreed on by representatives of both the left and right beforehand, to settle this issue fairly. We could all agree to accept its result, whether it finds a 95% probaility of 250,000 excess deaths or 250,000 lives saved.

“Therefore, when taken in total, we concluded that the civilian death toll was at least around 100,000 and probably higher”—Garfield/Roberts cited in The Independent, Dec. 12

“got a bit carried away” is something of an understatement here, considering that this is how the study’s results have been reported by almost every major newspaper. Here are 18,000 more examples. (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&newwindow=1&c2coff=1&q=%22100%2C000+civilians%22+iraq&btnG=Search)

“at least” in ordinary colloquial english refers to the lowest, or “least” conceivable figure. “At least” 8,000 (with 95% confidence) is accurate. “At least 100,000” is simply false. 100,000 is the midpoint of a rather wide interval of conceivable values. It may be the ‘most likely’ value in a statistical sense, but it isn’t at all the least. You could reinsert the discarded Falluja numbers, but then we’re back to explaining where 200,000 extra dead went.

The NYT reported some months back that “easily more than half” of the Palestinian deaths in the fighting over the past few years were civilian and some lefty sites have said close to 80 percent. Are we supposed to think the Americans in Iraq are much better at singling out insurgents from innocent bystanders than the Israelis? Admittedly this isn’t a very strong argument—it assumes both countries are making efforts to avoid civilian casualties and if the Israelis can’t do it, neither can we. I doubt either the Israelis or the Americans have been trying as hard as possible to avoid civilian casualties.