Denial …

Very small correction:

“It is, however, possible for Dick Cheney or Jack Straw … to be sacked ignominiously …”

Jack Straw, a mere Secretary, can be sacked ignominiously from his position. Dick Cheney, as a Vice President, cannot (short of impeachment).

And pundits are never sacked for hackery.

“I mentioned before that it was a little bit irritating that the point estimate of 100,000 excess deaths had become such a totem in the Iraq war debate, rather than the (in my opinion much more shocking) fact that nobody has managed to come up with a reasonable confidence interval for excess deaths that includes zero.”

Got it. Any war that causes more than zero deaths is unjust by definition. A philosophy, to be sure. Pacifism is, in fact, a philosophy. But if it is that is not maintained by very many people. And if that is your standard-any excess deaths greater than 0 is bad-be honest about it, and accept that you have boxed yourself out of a reasonable debate.

“b) a disruption to infrastructure about as bad as that caused by Hurricane Katrina.”

???Eh?? Katrina inundated 80% of the city. 80% of the residents were homeless (with evacuation orders, its actually 100%), 80% of sewer, electricity, garbage, telephone (and school buses-haw haw) were either ruined or made temporarily unusable. How is the situation in Iraq comparable? 80% of the population of Iraq is about 19 million people-are there 19 million homeless in Iraq? How does this statement make any sense?

Steve

But, of course, a study that compared Normanday in 1943 to Normandy in 1944 would have found ‘excess deaths’ in far greater proportions (especially if no distinction was made between deaths of soldiers and civilians and no distinction between deaths caused by the German army vs the Allies). How would you escape the conclusion that Normanday was much worse off at the end of 1944 than the end of 1943?

Could Saddam’s brutal police-state have been deposed with a far lower loss of life? When? How? By whom? Out of a population of 25M, what is an acceptable number of excess deaths in such a situation? Bear in mind the numbers in Saddam’s mass graves, the numbers killed in his wars of aggression, and especially, the numbers slaughtered by Saddam the last time Iraqis tried to take matters into their own hands (following the first Gulf War). What other future horrors were in store for the Iraqis if the Saddam and Sons dynasty had continued for decades to come (especially after the sanctions regime had been disintegrated and enforcement of the no-fly zones discontinued)? What would Saddam have done to the Kurdish autonomous zone?

If you were an Iraqi Shiite or Kurd, what risk of death would you have accepted as a part of a deal to be rid of Saddam? Is 1 in 250 much too high?

Steve, don’t be obtuse…

The reason that zero excess deaths are part of the conversation is that the 101st Keyboard Division has tried to claim that by merely removing the admittedly murderous Saddam Hussein regime, the invasion has actually saved Iraqi lives. This comment from 2004 is pretty typical of the genre:

Iraq’s liberation was a just war, and the cleanest-fought war in history. The net gain in lives saved by the war grows every day that Iraqis aren’t being thrown into plastic-shredders feet first.

I assumed that Daniel’s point in saying that zero excess deaths has not been part of any serious estimate was to suggest that all these claims about net lives gained by the invasion had about as much basis in reality as those mobile bio weapons labs we were told about.

Note, too, that Daniel emphasized that there were in fact a lot of excess deaths. The amount of excess death would not be very morally significant if his argument was that any level of death above zero made a war unjust. Instead, Daniel is suggesting that: a) any serious consideration of the justness of a particular war needs to take account of the number of lives that the war in question takes; b) this war has taken a huge number of lives; c) the supporters of this war simply refuse to consider the scale of its human destruction when defending it.

If nothing else, Steve’s posts provide yet more evidence for point “c.”

And one further point, Slocum, your argument depends on the assertion that the excess deaths were a necessary condition for these freedoms to be gained. But a massive excess due to the incompetent prosecution both of the war and of its aftermath was clearly not a necessary condition for freedom or constitutional government (and may very well turn out to have undermined its possibility).

Does that mean you acknowledge the 100,000 excess deaths estimate while accepting it as a reasonable price for deposing Saddam’s brutal police state?

I acknowledge it is conceivable — especially if the 100,000 includes (as I understand that it does) deaths of isurgents in combat. It struck me at the time that the study and its publication was highly political, specifically intended to have an impact on the U.S. election. That the researchers were not unbiased, however, does not mean their methods were necessarily slipshod or the results were invalid. I retain some skepticism based on the difficult conditions under which the survey was conducted and some based on the methodology (that is, asking people about deaths when some of the respondents could be considered partisans of the defeated regime strikes me as a situation where there might be biases in the respondents reports). But I acknowledge these are not the doubts of a trained statistician. They are only the gut feelings of a layperson.

As well, I am quite troubled by not making distinctions between deaths of civilians caused by coalitions forces and deaths of insurgents and, especially, those of civilians caused by insurgents. The Iraqi insurgency has adopted a policy of mass civilian slaughter via suicide bombers. I think the Lancet survey has, unfortunately, encouraged such a strategy. That is, the insurgency is, I believe, keenly aware that western public opinion is critical and that it cannot win militarily but that it might win by changing public opinion in the west. When pundits treat the massacres by suicide bombers as just more ‘excess deaths’ when they consider them not as indications that efforts to defeat the terrorists should be redoubled but rather that those efforts should be abandoned — this is a clear incentive for even more mass slaughter by suicide bombers.

But are the deaths worth it? I don’t think it’s possible to tell yet. If Iraq descends into another brutal tyranny, then no, clearly it won’t have been worth it. If Iraq ends up approximately as well governed as neighboring Turkey, then yes, I believe it will have been (but more importantly, I belive the Iraqi people will think so too and by a wide margin).

Let me ask one more question. What about excess deaths in Afghanistan? More or fewer than in Iraq? And was throwing off the yoke of the Taliban worth it?

“The Iraqi insurgency has adopted a policy of mass civilian slaughter via suicide bombers. I think the Lancet survey has, unfortunately, encouraged such a strategy.”

Yikes. No wonder the US has adopted the humane policy of not thinking about how many civilians have been killed in Iraq. It’s the only way to save them.

Abb1,
Is invasion always a crime?

Given that Afghanistan was not invaded to get rid of the Taliban but because of this fellow named Osama bin Laden, its a stupid question. And given that the goal of getting bin Laden was not successful, no it was likely not worth it.

In any case, not invading now leaves open the possibility of invading later; not carrying out a bad plan leaves open the possibility of later carrying out a good plan. Part of the cost of a bad invasion is that it makes a later good invasion impossible.

We put far more troops on the ground in Iraq than Afghanistan even though the countries are of comparable size and the terrain in Afghanistan is much more challenging. But the Iraqi insurgency adopted tactics that the Taliban did not–in particular, destroying civilian infrastructure as quickly as it could be built and slaughtering civilians en masse with suicide bombers.

Could better planning have prevented these tactics from being adopted or, if adopted, from being successful? Would the stopping of looting in the early days or the holding of earlier elections have prevented these things? I’m skeptical–after all, the insurgents didn’t want better public order, they wanted chaos. They didn’t want earlier elections, they want NO elections at all.

But mostly, I think, this was an opportunity that would not have been a repeated. It was not a choice between this flawed plan and a later perfect plan–that, I think, is an illusion. It was this plan, this administration, this historical momement–or it just was never going to happen.

The alternative was the disintegration of sanctions, the re-suppression of Iraqi Kurdistan, and the resumption of Saddam’s WMD programs. In a matter of years, we’d have been living in a world with a genuinely nuclear-armed Saddam bulking up on $65 a barrel oil. A Saddam who had gone to the brink and successfully stared down the U.S. and world community and won.

But apparently there are still some people out there with a little bit of credibility intact (no really) who think that they can still get away with this one.

Who is Seixon that you credit him/her with credibility? (That’s just a question; I really don’t know.) I noticed this gem in the comments on his post on the Lancet study:

I am a scientist but not a statistician, but in my own opinion, the sampling errors are most evident in the fact that the estimated excess number of deaths in the Falluja area was 200,000. This would imply that nearly half of the Falluja population was killed following the war.

The silliest arguments seem to be the most resilient.

People have died who did not need to. Does the quant. change that? Not for them.

Perhaps in their last moments those persons thought ‘Thank God, for George Bush and Dick Cheney–Halliburton will save my children’s lives.’ Or not.

The Lancet persons got it right, the first time, and even more right as the series extends. And will extend.

In a better world there would be a Weisenthal who would pursue.

David — I’ve been told that the 1852 measurement of the height of Mt. Everest came to exactly 29,000 feet, but that they added 2 feet for just that reason. (It’s now at 29,035, with a stop at 29,028. Some of that is growth and some is more accurate measurement.

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0193535.html

Question: since the Lancet study, are there any other recent reliable estimates of Iraqi deaths or casualties that people know about? For the past year, for instance.

Well, then I suppose you must believe the North Koreans should consider themselves fortunate that Kim Jong Il was not deposed as the Taliban in Afghanistan were or the Baathist in Iraq.

There are many, many better alternatives to a brutal, repressive, authoritarian regime. Unfortunately, better alternatives are not automagically guaranteed.

Sweden was a much better place to live in than Yugoslavia during Tito’s regime. Tito was no great shakes, but his death did not automagically lead to Yugoslavia becoming Sweden.

I can think of a very large number of countries indeed in which I would rather live in than Kim Il Jong’s North Korea, but the distinct possibility exists that a post-Kim North Korea could become an even worse hellhole than it already is.

Long-term dictatorships tend to be at complex, but stable equilibria. (Neither Kim, nor Saddam, are supermen. This comic-book simplification of the role of individual dictators, is one that annoys me to no end). To lift a country up from such a position, into a better, more stable one, is a doable but very hard problem. It is certainly no cakewalk to be accomplished by merely deposing the dictator du jour, be he Idi Amin, or Samuel Doe, or Mengistu Haile Mariam, or Mobutu Sese Seko, brutal monsters all of whose deaths did not result in one whit improvement in the living conditions in the countries affected (Zaire, Liberia, Ethiopia).

This is a hard problem, a largely unanswered one that has faced a large number of African countries for decades – how to break the vicious cycle of poverty, corruption, ethnic strife, and struggle for resources, and move into a pattern of medium to long term stability and growth. I see no sign yet that Western war supporters have moved beyond empty sloganeering and domestic political jockeying (which is, let’s face it, certainly 90% of what drives domestic US opinion vis-a-vis Iraq), to confront what has historically been a very difficult problem.

Let’s grant for sake of argument that the war has led to X excess deaths. But what if time goes by and after, say, 15 years of no-Saddam-rule, the excess deaths (over the entire timespan) goes negative?

That’s only relevant if the prerequisite for the total number of excess deaths becoming negative after 15 years is that the number be positive and large during the period during and for 18 months (and counting) after the invasion. Otherwise you ought to be arguing for negative excess deaths now and in the future.

But for that to be true, you have to argue that the only means for deposing Saddam was a bloodily-misexecuted invasion which would kill tens of thousands of people. Which brings us to,

I suppose that is the crux of the matter and someone with something substantive to say might actually have asserted how they think it could have been conducted better.

To be honest, I think you ought to be defending your implied assertion that this has been the best of all possible wars. In any case, there are lots of possibilities for improvement. An obvious one right now would be to resist using aerial bombing in counterinsurgency operations — that appears to be the cause of a very large fraction of the casualties of violence. That would, presumably, mean that more troops would be needed in the occupation force.

des von bladet,

Given the number of deaths we’re talking about, that’s an awful lot of biers.

“positive steps have occurred (in Lebanon especially but also in Egypt)”

Post hoc ergo propter hoc

I believed in the principle of the war for humanitarian reasons — it was always pretty much justified to remove Hussein on those grounds. It was, therefore, difficult for me to oppose the invasion, but I did on the grounds that the Bush administration was incompetent and that I felt the outcome had every good chance to be appalling and would have nothing to do with concern for human rights (let alone lives) and everything to do with control of political situations where resources were concerned and with domestic political considerations.

Had Bush actually been competent, the left would be in grave trouble domestically, but it would have been worth it to praise Bush for dethroning the monster and putting in some kind of stability. Humans in Iraq and around the world would have been better off.

But the point of the study and this thread remains because my suspicions were correct, sadly. Iraq was botched — the invasion itself went fine, even if the Republican Guard was told to melt away — and botched much worse than even my scepticism could guess. The Lancet study is good because it gives a reasonable statistical range of “extra”, war-caused death that no one otherwise would have bothered to count.

It should also be noted that there is very little “success” in Afghanistan in a democratic sense. Yes, we have moderate participation in the elections. Yes, there is no uniform and ongoing totalitarianism. These are at the same time both monumental successes (think of what the Taliban were doing to that society in every arena) and all the same halfway successes that distract from the real problems. It is not at all clear to me from this distance that Afghanistan has a central government but rather a loose federalish type thingie with a bunch of warlords over whom it hopes to establish control at a later time. It’s not clear to me that the same thing that is happening in Iraq won’t come to Afghanistan in a more intense way. Plus, too, Afghanistan had had three decades of more or less constant violent bloody civil war in a way that Iraq had not, though this is not to discount the effect of the Iran-Iraq war or the internal state violence.

Finally (for this post) Afghanistan is a different place and therefore militarily it seems to me the “same” approach would not have worked there — to the extent it has. In Afghanistan, much of the world joined us, bankrolled us, and has remained to rebuild with us. Can you imagine how Iraq might be different had we worked to get even some of that support? I think the radically unstable outcome of an incompetent war must be placed against the possibility that something vastly better might have been arranged — for all concerned, even US domestic security — by working through the UN more thoroughly and persistently prior to any eventual war.

But all that’s under the bridge now, right? There’s only forward. But let’s not go forward with the people who brought us the now. Oh, well. I’ll post now..

“positive steps have occurred (in Lebanon especially but also in Egypt)”

Post hoc ergo propter hoc

“It’s strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. … When I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world.”

– Walid Jumblatt

That’s not to suggest, of course, that the Lebanese only woke up and started resisting Syrian domination after the invasion of Iraq or that no Egyptians advocated for democracy before. But it seems wilfully obtuse to believe that Iraq (along with repeated U.S. declarations that the policy of tolerating dictatorships was a mistake and would not continue) made no difference in the dynamics of the region. Does anybody really think that Mubarak’s baby-steps were unrelated to U.S. pressure?

A minor correction. Of the 100,000 deaths in the Lancet study, I think 60,000 were from violence (about one third of that from murders) and 40,000 from increases in infant mortality, accidents, etc…, so more than a third died from violence. If you lump the murders in with infant mortality and accidents and so forth, then you’d have around 40,000 violent deaths caused by Americans and insurgents during the first 18 months, which is consistent with the 25,000 war deaths in the first year found by the UNDP survey.

All of this excludes Fallujah. I wonder what a detailed survey of Fallujah (and ex-Fallujah) residents would show. The UNDP survey ended in the spring of 2004, before the bombing campaign during the summer (which racked up the large death tolls in the Lancet study) and before the final assault took place.

What’s the difference between ‘decent left’ and ‘neocons’? Neocons don’t pretend to be a part of the left, they openly admit to being nationalists in the manner pjs described above (good vs. evil), thus they obviously are rightists. This sets very clear battle lines, why all this DL crap?

The 100,000 estimate of excess deaths are dependent on an impossibly rosy picture of the years before the invasion. Have we all forgotten the estimates of millions of Iraqis who were dying during this period because of sanctions? It’s unreasonable to speak of excess deaths since we can only measure present deaths. Further, there is no way to measure the alternative for the same post-invasion time period. What if Saddam’s regime had imploded without the US invasion?

We do know that many Iraqis have lost their lives and that conditions in Iraq are not improving.

I can think of a very large number of countries indeed in which I would rather live in than Kim Il Jong’s North Korea, but the distinct possibility exists that a post-Kim North Korea could become an even worse hellhole than it already is.

Elliot, excuse me? Please name them. You can make the point that some dictatorships are worse than some other situations without going completely crazy.

And one further point, Slocum, your argument depends on the assertion that the excess deaths were a necessary condition for these freedoms to be gained. But a massive excess due to the incompetent prosecution both of the war and of its aftermath was clearly not a necessary condition for freedom or constitutional government (and may very well turn out to have undermined its possibility).

Chris, slocums argument appears to be that the zero excess death standard for war is ridiculous. Daniel’s position “I mentioned before that it was a little bit irritating that the point estimate of 100,000 excess deaths had become such a totem in the Iraq war debate, rather than the (in my opinion much more shocking) fact that nobody has managed to come up with a reasonable confidence interval for excess deaths that includes zero.” appears to be that such a standard is not ridiculous.

From my point of view such a standard is both ridiculous and a straw man. I know you don’t like multiple reasons for war, but that doesn’t mean that multiple reasons for war were not given (and accepted).

But in any case, if a zero excess death standard were adopted, terrorists can make all invasions impossible by credibly threatening to blow up at least one person if the invasion continues. Bush’s policy may be too aggressive, but this proposed counter-policy is far too passive.

Almost all of the territory of the US was “relatively peaceful” on 9/11/01. I guess all that handwringing about the WTC and the Pentagon was just glass-half-emptyism.

Uncle Kvetch, I have repeatedly heard that very argument about the 9/11 attacks right here on this board. Are you being intentionally ironic?

Every time I see the pro-invasion bunch try to do their propaganda about this study they demonstrate that they STILL don’t understand the basics of what the study is trying to show and how it was conducted. In this comments thread it seems that many still don’t get what “excess deaths” means (excess over Saddam Hussein, not over zero). That’s what happens when you put all your effort into misrepresenting something, you find yourself unable to actually understand it.

The neocon argument here comes down to saying, yes, today we look like murderous incompetents, but when one considers the glorious neocon future our bloody means of progress are fully justified! You can’t make an omelet without killing lots of Iraqis! Hmmm…sounds familiar.

Saying there are “positive developments” in Lebanon and Egypt is premature to say the least. A make believe election in Egypt. In Lebanon, what exactly is gained by Syrian withdrawal and who are we to crow about it? Syria has a better claim to exercise sovereignty in Lebanon than we do to Iraq. Plus Syria actually ended a civil war and saved lives in Lebanon, not to mention overseeing a vigorous and functioning democracy there. We have not yet shown the capacity to do any of those things in Iraq, so I think we should show them some respect. Again, neocons lecturing us about Lebanon generally succeed in displaying their ignorance about that nation.

Slocum says:
“I suppose you must believe the North Koreans should consider themselves fortunate that Kim Jong Il was not deposed as the Taliban in Afghanistan were or the Baathist in Iraq”

As many posters highlighted, the question here is not whether it was a good thing to get rid of Saddam, but rather whether the cost was worth it in view of the possibility of other alternatives (like sanctions that obviously had weaken Saddam, like sanctions that obviously made Qaddafi to negotiate, like funding of opposition, like the US does in Venezuela, like political pressure in form of aid, like in Egypt, etc.). Obviously Saddam out was good for the people, but the cost (a completely dilapidated country with looted cultural treasures and destroyed health and social infrastructure and, possibly, 100,000 dead!) was not. Slocum’s, Hitchens’ and other’s arguments –mostly in a variation of the ‘what, you liked Saddam?’– could easily be used to justify removing the head of a patient with brain cancer, and then fire back at the complaining family with “what, are you in favor of brain cancer?”

I lived in the 70’s Argentina, where a tyrant regime killed, tortured and ‘disappeared’ thousands, in sadistic ways that have not even reported to have been used by Saddam. My family and friends had many reasons in the form of dead, tortured and jailed people to hate the Military Junta for, but I don’t remember a single person in Argentina, a single person, that in 1982 was hoping the British bombed their way into Argentina, invaded, destroyed our buildings, set up checkpoints in our neighborhoods, destroyed whole towns, all in the name of riding my country of our monster dictatorial Junta.
Slocum’s cold pricing of human suffering, in the form of “how many dead people is worth getting rid of the monster” is obscene in his disregard of other alternatives.

“Of course, there were critics of the plan who now appear prescient. But there are also critics whose predictions were wildly off the mark—those who predicted new Stalingrads or massive refugee flows into neighboring countries, for example.”

The point isn’t simply that Eric Shinseki was right — though he clearly was correct that more troops were needed. The point is that when Shinseki publicly stated his belief that more troops were necessary he got sacked.

In contrast to Shinseki, a large number of people in the Bush administration have been wrong about lots of very important things. Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz …. Who amoung these have been sacked, demoted, disciplined?

As to critics who were “wildly off the mark” do you mind naming a few of the prominent elected officials amoung their number? The only ones I can think of were “wildly off the mark” primarily because they believed the lies and disinformation presented to them by the likes of Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz.

did sebastian h. just demand that another poster list all the countries the other poster thinks are NICER than north korea? or am i being dim?

Ah, yes, which is due to misreading on my part. Many apologies.

“The fact that we kicked the inspectors out in order to go ahead with our invasion tells you all you need to know about the relation between our actual motives and Saddam’s supposed WMDs.”

No it doesn’t. Who stopped the inspectors from returning in 1999, 2000, and 2001? What triggered the bombing that caused us to remove the inspectors in 1998? Wasn’t it that they had been restricted to their hotel rooms?

if that is a sign of an intolerable war in Iraq, what is that sign of in New York?

An intolerable crime, as you well know. What a pity you show no interest in finding, arresting, and trying the conspirators.

Actually, it wasn’t the critics who said the invasion was going to cause massive refugees as it was the lunkheads at the Pentagon, who decided to plan, not for a guerilla war, not for looting, not for guarding arms dumps, not for even searching with any precision for the fearsome WMD, but planned, instead, for a refugee situation, on the analogy of Gulf War I. This was the first of the insane War analogies that have studied the Department of War’s apologetic for the third rate execution of a third rate invasion. That Iraq was not, um, occupied in Gulf War One seemed to be overlooked the slightest bit. Where were the refugees going to go? And how does a massive refugee problem fit with the logic of thinking the Iraqis would welcome the invaders with flowers and candy?

Well, of course, when you plan for a disaster that isn’t probable and you are the Bush administration, your admirers use this as a plus: wow, look, no refugees! The funny thing is, of course, that after the war was in its second year, in Falluja and now Tal Afer, the U.S. created refugees nevertheless, being an occupying power that has decided to bomb its own occupied territory — and was, in line with the 100 rate of incompetence with which the grand war has been conducted, unprepared for them! Is that cool or what? You can never underestimate the Bushies ability to fuck things up, because they will always turn around and surprise you by fucking things up even more.

des #32

My imaginary opponents too are perhaps willing to wait 18 months to begin the tally. Whatever. This is still short-term as opposed to long-term (I believe I gave the example of 15 years) accounting.

elliot #36

“What a non-negative excess civilian death rate means is that more civilians are dying than would have done so had Saddam remained in power.”

Thanks for explaining the concept of excess civilian death rate to me. But I understood the concept beforehand, thanks.

“The best long-term solution for Iraq would have probably been a transition to a stable Mubarak or Gaddafi-like authoritarianism”

Ok. This doesn’t answer my question “in what way”. You have stated your desired end, not the means. Were we going to hope that one of Saddam Hussein’s sons (or grandsons?) upon succession would, of his own volition, decide to become more Mubarak-like? Which one? What else happens in the meantime? Do you care?

“since his sons were almost certainly incapable of retaining power after his death”

You think so, huh? Well, we’ll never know and never have to find out. But it certainly is interesting to learn that your calculations are based, in part, on the (blue-sky) assumption that one of Hussein’s sons would have lost power. I am not so sure.

pjs #45

“despite the plausibility of calculations like the one referred to in this post.”

This is not the first odd reference to the Lancet study being “plausible”. The reason that “plausibility” an odd standard is that in most circumstances I would prefer that calculations be accurate not merely “plausible” before I draw conclusions from them. I have never seen argument-from-plausibility so heavily relied on in my life. Is the argument here really that the 100,000 is “plausible” therefore we are required to take it at face value? Give me a break.

mq #57

“If I claim to conduct an invasion for humanitarian purposes, and some opposing force demonstrates that the conditions created by my invasion allow them to forever make the humanitarian situation worse than the period before I invaded, then yes this is a dispositive argument against my humanitarian claims.”

Actually it’s an argument, if anything, for further standing up to that opposing force after the invasion (if the invasion happens). Unless you’re saying that this opposing force is also somehow immortal?

Any group of people which would pledge, and actually follow through on a pledge, to perpetually indefinitely terrorize and murder a nation of people for all time because of some invasion that happened in year Y, needs to be destroyed.

Your position, I guess, is that such an opposing force needs to be respected and given free reign over the territory they propose to perpetually devastate? because that’s more moral? LOL

As I said in #28, but sebastian put better in #54 and who I’ll quote: “if a zero excess death standard were adopted, terrorists can make all invasions impossible by credibly threatening to blow up at least one person if the invasion continues.” This is a position which amounts to saying we ought to respect and create safe havens for thugs and killers most willing and able to hold the people around them hostage. It betrays an astonishing sympathy for tyranny. Zero excess deaths is the standard you adopt if you want to make it as easy as possible for tyrants to hold on to and wield power. Why would “liberals” be attracted to it?

Analogy: A man with ten children kills one of them. The authorities decide to charge him. They go to his house to arrest him, but he refuses to come out, and holds the other 9 children hostage. The authorities then raid the house and apprehend the man but not before he kills another of the children he was holding hostage in the chaos.

The arrest led to an “excess death”. Conclusion: It was… wrong to arrest the man? Leave the man be, in the house with nine children? Because after all he only killed one of the kids, and that was a while ago anyway, he hadn’t killed any in a while. Leave the murderer to his dominion over them, because this is better than the alternatives.

Thus says a “liberal” in the year 2005.

US authorities might well engage in negotiations. But probably not for a decade.

Good point abb1, if what you’re saying is that a realistic alternative means of apprehending which predictably decreased risk to innocents was proposed and successfully implemented. Correspondingly, I would have been all in favor of a realistic alternative means of ousting the Hussein regime which would have entailed a predictably decreased risk to innocents.

That is not what is on offer in this thread or from most “liberals” anywhere else, however. What they are *actually* saying is “just don’t apprehend”. Different animal.

Well, Blixa, another problem with your analogy is that the US government has no jurisdiction outside the US borders. So, yes, don’t apprehend, sheriff.

The Branch Davidian scenario is an excellent example. The children in question were nearly all killed (even if 100,000 is accepted as the proper number of excess deaths it doesn’t represent all or nearly all of Iraqis). Furthermore the fire which killed them was set by religous zealots who killed their own children.

“the US government has no jurisdiction outside the US borders”

US can’t ever fight wars outside its borders. Got it.

Notice that the results of the Lancet study are no longer being denied by the war-bloggers? They’ve retreated to ‘it was worth it’ arguments.

Actually I believe it is “even if true it was worth it”.

Even in abb1’s Brazilian-army scenario, I’d still blame McVeigh and Nichols (and whatever accomplices they may have had) for the 168 dead in OKC.

abb1, apparently, would place primary blame on the Brazilian army and not on McVeigh/Nichols.

If he’s consistent of course.

Of course primary blame is on those who attacked the Branch Davidians, there’s no doubt whatsoever – they are the authorities, it’s their job to make sure McVeighs don’t snap. You can blame McVeigh all you want, it doesn’t make any difference.

You are going to say, I guess, that they can disrupt many of these things. Well, duh. People in any country can disrupt these things given sufficient desire.

OK, I’m lost. At this point I don’t even know what you’re attempting to argue, Blixa. It seems that you’re essentially saying that there is no possible way for anyone to realistically assess the job the coalition has done in Iraq, because things could always be worse. And since things could always be worse, we should just presume that the best of all possible US administrations is doing the best of all possible jobs in this, the best of all possible wars.

Patently ridiculous, but I have to give you props for your inventiveness.

The only problem is, even if your doggedly sanguine view of the present were justified, it’s insufficient. It’s not enough for things to be “not as horrible as some people claim” in Iraq. At some point they have to start getting better, unless you’re comfortable with 100-150,000 coalition troops more-or-less keeping a lid on things indefinitely.

This war is your baby, Blixa, so the burden’s on you. How and when do we get out of this?

Seixon,

A sample of households is random if, at the outset, each household has an equal probability of being selected. You believe, wrongly, that because some households got knocked out of contention during the sampling process the sample was biassed. Best to thrash it out at Tim Lambert’s blog. Daniel’s post is not meant to re-open the statistical arguments.

you or many of the other ADD crowd which now effectively insists that all wars need to wrap up in time so as not to interfere with the new fall TV season or something

Whatever, Blixa. I give up. You’re the one who really cares about the people of Iraq (except the ones who are already dead as a direct result of our actions–they’re merely “trivial” in your view), and anyone who disagrees with you is only worried about their favorite TV shows, or something. If that’s how you want to frame the debate, it’s your prerogative. You shouldn’t be surprised when no one wants to discuss things on your terms.

Let me do another example, Lancet essentially did the following…

In a poll of 1,000 Americans, 67 from Texas are chosen to be interviewed via a random sampling of the nation. 114 are chosen in California, and so on.

Now Lancet decides that it wants to cut down on the number of states it wants to call. So they pair up California and Texas and decide that one of them will receive all the people chosen in the other.

A number between 0 and 53,000,000 is chosen at random (the combined populations of Texas and California). If the number is between 0 and 20,000,000 then Texas gets them. If it is between 20,000,000 and 53,000 then California gets them.

The number picked turns out to be 45,567. Texas gets all of California’s 114 selected persons.

Now Lancet will call 181 people in Texas, and 0 in California.

You have got to be smoking some serious reefer if you think this results in a randomized sample, and a representative result.

Question to Seixon regarding no 51. You wrote:

IraqBodyCount has the count now at 25,000-29,000. I’d say that is generally close, although I think that because of insurgents the last year, the total is more around 35,000-40,000.

Naked numbers are bad. Would you mind telling us what Iraq Body Count counts?

One caveat. This question is trickier than you thought.

“The mere observation that we haven’t and can’t zero-out violence in Iraq is boring. We haven’t, can’t, and never well zero-out violence in the United States, let alone Iraq.”

No one here is talking about “zeroing out violence” in Iraq. We are talking about a nation in the process of becoming a failed state, a super sized Lebanon, as a direct result of our actions. This is not a matter of routine crime. If you are just going to shrug and pass it off as no big deal then you need to explain why just about every other nation on earth manages to keep terrorist types under some kind of control; why is Iraq the exception? Our invasion, our presence. It is dishonest to try to pass it off as only the terrorists fault; if a government fails in its duty to maintain order then the ensuing crime spree is the fault of both the unleashed criminals and the incompetent/corrupt police force.

Yes, Saddam kept the lid on. That does not excuse his crimes. However, it does mean that we have a moral responsibility to at least do better than he did. So far it appears we are not. If you were truly concerned with the Iraqi people that would disturb you more.

As far as what we can do: we can leave. Can’t you see or understand that the terrorists gain strength from an occupation that is widely seen as a quasi-imperialist power grab?

Who the hell said that? Who are you quoting? Me? Because of the sentence I wrote containing the phrase “trivially true”?

Yes. Goodnight.

I’m a little surprised to see prowar types stlll citing the suffering of Iraqis under sanctions as a justification for the war. Surprised in part because the suffering of Iraqis under sanctions never was a great concern before and also because some of us who were opposed to the sanctions thought the silver lining to the war was that no matter how stupid Bush was, the US could at least improve Iraq’s infrastructure faster than Saddam’s engineers could in 1991 (under a sanctions regime designed to inhibit repairs).

Well the point of the Lancet paper is that mortality rates didn’t go down–they went up. Yes, this is partly because the insurgents target infrastructure, but that shouldn’t have come as a surprise to war planners since we did exactly the same thing in 1991 and for the same reason–to destabilize the regime in power. So it’s a little bit pointless to defend the war on the grounds that sanctions were bad. Yeah, they were, but now things are even worse.

Finally, the sanctions regime was crumbling for a reason–the US was (justifiably) losing the propaganda war. If my memory is correct, that’s why Colin Powell favored smart sanctions, the kind that supposedly wouldn’t hurt ordinary civilians but would keep the lid on WMD development. And yeah, that would imply that Powell knew (in early 2001) that Iraq had been successfully contained, but at a cost in civilian suffering that was giving a propaganda victory to Saddam. Hence the interest in smart sanctions until 9/11 happened.

Kevin, I if you could have just responded to that example above… I know it might be hard, because I am quite aware of elementary sample theory, and you are still not getting it. If you could just look at my example above, and please tell me how in the world that is a “random” sample, I’d be much obliged.

No. 101,

Iraq Body Count keeps track of all deaths that are attributable to the USA, either through direct killing, or through negligence under the terms of the Geneva Conventions. So as I said, this number will be lower, since it only accounts for violence which is why I said 35,000-40,000. The overlap of 12,000 on top of 25,000-29,000 should, if only thinking about violent deaths, result in somewhere around 32,000.

No. 107,

Of course the mortality rates went up during the war and immediately afterwards. I mean, that is like reporting that there is snow down in Antarctica. When you have an Iraqi insurgency killing hundreds of Iraqis a month, of course the mortality is going to be higher. It will be that way until the insurgency is taken care of, and that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.

Half my post disappeared. To finish, IBC and the UN report show roughly similar percentages for the number of children killed by violence divided by the total number of violent deaths, where children are defined as people under the age of 18. But Iraq Body Count shows 1300 children killed by violence over the first two years and the UN survey found nearly 3000 children killed by war related violence in the first year (12 percent of 24,000). Even if we assumed that all these deaths occurred in the first year, that would mean IBC is picking up less than half the total and if we assume that the deaths occurred at the same rate over the first two years, then IBC counted less than a quarter of the total.

I pick out children because most of them would be noncombatants–you can’t directly compare the total UN numbers to the IBC numbers since the latter is only for civilians. So the child to child comparison may give some indication of how well the IBC methodology works.

“If something can get worse it will
Is a phrase I’ve often sardonically used
But here’s some grist for Mr Murphy’s mill
I used to be disgusted
Now I’m just amused”

We are not amused.

Oh, here’s the link (click)

“I acknowledge it is conceivable—especially if the 100,000 includes (as I understand that it does) deaths of isurgents in combat. It struck me at the time that the study and its publication was highly political, specifically intended to have an impact on the U.S. election.”

And similarly:

“As well, I am quite troubled by not making distinctions between deaths of civilians caused by coalitions forces and deaths of insurgents and, especially, those of civilians caused by insurgents. The Iraqi insurgency has adopted a policy of mass civilian slaughter via suicide bombers. I think the Lancet survey has, unfortunately, encouraged such a strategy.”

As for that encouragement, one example – and only one among many that could be offered – of a corollary in the Palestinians’ use of media. In addition to that corollary, no one seriously challenged the viability of any of the statements of fact and suppositions in the above two quotes.

If you could just look at my example above, and please tell me how in the world that is a “random” sample, I’d be much obliged.

Seixon,

What’s your definition of a random sample? Mine is: a sample in which every element in the population has an equal chance of being selected. (You are entitled to your own private language, but bear in mind that if you say an estimator is biassed, the rest of us will assume, initially, that you are using that term in the way statisticians do.)

You have got to be smoking some serious reefer if you think this results in a randomized sample, and a representative result.

Not all methods of obtaining a random sample are equally good. The Lancet authors, being numerate people, were aware of this. We know this because they pointed it out.

1. Yes. Bad as he was, he was unlikely to kill as many people in ten more years as the invasion did in two.
2. Smart sanctions, continuing no fly zones, carrots and sticks to push the development of an independent civil society in Iraq.

Would you prefer to have had Saddam stay in power?

“…we will cut off their hands, heads and tongues as we did in Tal Afar,”

— Sadoun al-Dulaimi, the current Iraqi Defense Minister, two weeks ago.

“the only reason anyone can suggest that it might be worse not to have Dear Leader in charge is because we keep thinking that the end of the regime must be near.”

This is not sensible thinking. The regime in N, Korea, and Saddam’s regime in Iraq, are, of course, a couple of the most brutal in human history. Almost any government capable of controlling the country would be preferable. But of course, what we’ve created in Iraq is not a government capable of controlling the country–it’s chaos with guns.

The Lancet study has been discredited by the ILCS study, which used vastly better methods. As D^2 points out, both surveys found similar numbers of excess violent deaths. What he doesn’t mention is that the two figures are similar only if you exclude the 3% of the Lancet data where the most violence occurred. If you compare all the Lancet data to the ILCS data, you get very different counts.

Unfortunately, the ILCS study didn’t devote much attention to excess deaths from the war. Hopefully, someone will reanalyze the data, which should give us a much better picture than the Lancet study.

It’s also worth pointing out that the Lancet team did a lot to bring criticism on themselves. They rushed the study into print in order to influence the U.S. election (a month from the completion of fieldwork to publication!). A more normal timeframe would have allowed time for obvious objections to be raised, and the authors to acknowledge or rebut them. Note the Lancet study’s weak discussion of pre-war infant mortality, for example.

Finally, the Lancet team made Roberts their spokesperson. Roberts’ PhD and teaching are in environmental engineering, not epidemiology. His background is more in humanitarian and advocacy work than in academia. Roberts’ employment with humanitarian organizations provides an obvious incentive to use a methodology that overstates mortality, in order to attract publicity and raise money. It’s no wonder that this study arouses so much suspicion.

Daniel,

1. The ILCS survey did use vastly better methods, as I’ve discussed in great detail on my blog, and I know that you’re well aware of my criticisms. Sure, it’s because the ILCS had “far more resources so it didn’t have to make some of the compromises that the Lancet team made,” but that doesn’t change the fact that their methods were much better.

2. A lot of people were surprised that the Lancet figures for pre-war infant mortality were so different from the UN figures. This is an obvious objection that was immediately raised by respected researchers — one was quoted in Kaplan’s Slate article, although I’ve never seen you mention it.

In the end, I think you’re probably right that the UN figures were overstated, and so this isn’t a killing criticism of the Lancet study. The problem is that Roberts et al never addressed this obvious objection in their article. I suspect that this is due to their rush to print.

3. The Lancet figure excludes an atypical cluster with a hugely high death rate. The ILCS study doesn’t, so the figures are not comparable. It’s as simple as that.

You assert that there are no atypical clusters in the ILCS data, but you present no evidence. And this claim is just absurd. In the real world, everybody knows that there are some areas (“clusters”) in Iraq that have seen intense fighting. I see no reason to doubt that these were covered in the ILCS survey.

4. Yes, as far as I’m aware, all of Roberts previous research has been in this kind of mortality-in-conflict-areas study. I think this makes him less credible, because it suggests that he’s an advocate rather than a disinterested researcher.

Granted, one can say nice things about Roberts, as well as criticize him, but I linked to his bio! Read for yourself!

Michael B,
Coud you clarify what you’re saying in your last comment, please. Try to re-phrase it, I can’t understand anything there.

Once again:

What is your definition of ‘the Iraqi insurgency’?

What’s wrong with publishing this study in time for the elections, assuming the study is accurate?

Should negative consequences of policies be published/discussed or suppressed (to deprive the official enemies of propaganda and recruitment opportunities, presumably)?

Thanks.

Daniel: You mean the fact that the Lancet team got a good (later confirmed by ICLS) estimate of prewar infant mortality…This “good” estimate of prewar infant mortality is clearly a large weakness of the study. There simply isn’t any hard, on-the-ground data for the time period in question (no data at all for the period 1999-2003). The last real data was from 1999 when infant mortality was estimated at 10% and acute malnutrition at 9% for children under 5. The next hard data comes from 2003 when acute malnutrition was estimated at 7.7%. Infant mortality was estimated in 2004 at 5.8%.

What you are so adamantly defending is a forward projection estimate based on pre-2000 data and a backward (recall) estimate done in 2004 that estimates an infant mortality rate of 3% and acute malnutrition at 4%. This has to be believed in light of hard facts we do know about the time in question; a severe drought, a 6-month suspension of oil exports, massive fraud in the oil for food program, and heavy bombing of infrastructure. Roberts et al. think it perfectly reasonable that infant mortality rates were in line with those of neighboring states.

The cluster sampling methods are perfectly fine for real time data but there is no precedence or corrective feedback for historical estimates. Thus, estimates of present deaths are to be taken seriously but estimates of excess deaths are based on estimates of prewar mortality rates that are simply too weak to warrant such a strong defense.

Re Iraq Body Count:

Marc Herold’s precursor work on Afghanistan made some deeply flawed choices of method that led to extensive double- and fringe-counting on his part. The IBC crew has cleaned up their methodology considerably: practice makes perfecter. A couple more U.S. wars, and they should be very precise. But given the huge improvements in approach, it’s probably unsound to impeach the IBC work with the Afghanistan inaccuracies, even if IBC does acknowledge Herold’s inspiration. One obvious difference is that numbers generated by ground surveys in Afghanistan ultimately fell outside and well below Herold’s stated fatality ranges, while as Daniel acknowledges, IBC, UNDP, Lancet etc. have generally overlapping error margins in Iraq.

Re the Lancet:

I don’t believe the following statements are inconsistent:
1) The Lancet study was to some extent a first hack at the truth, and possibly rushed to release, with all that that implies;
2) Other studies (UNDP, IBC) have since derived fatality numbers consistent with the lower half of the Lancet’s probability range (

Blixa, do you have anything to offer aside from a contuation of your BS?

Well, Michael, you said (or quoted) that the Iraqi insurgency has adopted a policy of mass civilian slaughter and the Lancet survey has encouraged such a strategy. Presumably this means that ‘the Iraqi insurgency’ is trying to turn public opinion in the West against the occupation by mounting civilian casualties. I would like to see some evidence that this evil strategy indeed exists and so I asked you for your definition of ‘Iraqi insurgency’. But if you can present evidence without definition, go right ahead.

Am I confused or is this the story? The ILCC sample did not include an outlier (Falluja cluster) and the Lancet sample did. The Lancet then drops the outlier in doing up their final version. This would make the ILCC sample consistent with and confirmatory of the published Lancet version, with no statistical skullduggery involved. However, it is not consistent with a Lancet estimate based on the full sample including outlier. Is that all anyone is saying, because that seems the clear implication here?

Michael, your ‘corollary’ represents nothing. The issue there is not that some kids are throwing rocks, the issue is that the Israelis have no business being there, occupying someone’s land and being thrown rocks and shot at.

It doesn’t matter where Israeli police station is, it only matters that it’s on the occupied territories where it shouldn’t have been in the first place. All the Israelis have to do is get out of the territories and live happily inside their own country. And as long as they keep occupying, their constant complaining is sickening, to me at least. That’s all the ‘corollary’ there is.

abb1,

Your benighted Something=Nothing argument is oft-used in these confines, but no more convincing for that frequency of use. It’s also but one particularly stark example of the tactic already alluded to, that of studied avoidance. Especially so as the Pallywood evidence offered represents but the tip of the tip of the iceberg of evidence which could be offered. It would have been much simpler to dismiss me as a war mongering adventurist and enthusiast, adhere to Daniel’s reductionist line, and thus be done with it all without further ado.

Something=nothing is nothing if it’s not convenient and studied avoidance is surely convenient.

Bottom line: no random sample, no credible result.

That’s the Lancet study in a nutshell ladies and gentleman.

Daniel,

You say: the ILCS didn’t get any [Fallujah-like samples] at all

I am just dumbfounded by this claim. The ILCS was a large random sample of all of Iraq, and there’s no reason to doubt that it sampled Falluja and other especially violent areas. The kindest response I can think of is: you are misinformed.

Well, Michael, it’s just that your Pallywood evidence isn’t worth anything; what is it evidence of? I watched the video and I saw people living under military occupation protesting the occupation and trying to end it. I sympathize with their struggle and I don’t care what their methods are; they don’t have too many tactics to choose from.

Your video is alleging that they found an effective method in faking news reports; I’m sure this is mostly a lie, but if it is true – that’s great, more power to them.

Well the point of the Lancet paper is that mortality rates didn’t go down—they went up.

Surely the situation in Iraq is best split up into 3 eras:

1. pre-war: saddam in charge of country, leaky sanctions, coalition planes occasionally bombing uniformed iraqi forces, ongoing state terror.

2. war: Saddam in charge of country, effective embargo, coalition planes and troops openly fighting it out with uniformed iraqi forces, both sides using tanks and artillery, sometimes in urban areas.

3: post-war: coalition (later iraqi govt) in charge of country, no sanctions, coalition troops and planes fighting various un-uniformed insurgents, non-state terror, crime, etc.

You seem to be making a claim about 1 versus 3, but surely the lancet study shows nothing of the kind, as it lumps together stages 2 and 3, which have very little in common.

All the talk of cluster sampling and error margins, and even misuse of the word civilian, pale behind this basic sleight of hand by which the large number of deaths from the boundary period between the two regimes are entirely assigned to one and not the other.

You could use a similar statistic trick to show cancer is better than non-cancer, if the surgery required to cure it was somewhat risky.

soru

Why is the survey still a subject of controversy? Whatever it’s incidental political implications, it is written in the conventions of scolarship, i.e., it has footnotes, it’s transparent, the theory and methodology are explicit and elaborated; as are it’s uncertainties, limitations, and qualifications. Is not this formula de rigeur for this type of writing at least in part because it facilitates criticism and even the complete refutation of the work if need be?

Given the particularities of this genre, it seems there should be, and I think there are, conventions that indicate how the Lancet article should be evaluated, and how the results of the evaluation should be presented. It seems odd that (as far as know) there have been no reviews that engage the article at its own level. Instead, the has been punditry and blogwriting, which have very different standards of argumentation, epistemology, and civility, certainly more permissive and less rigorous. (The merits of these standards in there own spheres is another subject, though I would not wish to see blogs and pundits adopting the style and substance of professional journals.) I’m not saying that the popular commentators have no business talking about scientific writing, that their criticism is inherently presumptuous, or that they should not loiter in respectable neighborhoods but keep to their own side of the tracks. Rather, popular essays are not the tools to use for the task of demolishing a scientific article. I hasten to say that there will be exceptions. That the argument about the Lancet study continues on essentially the same terms on which began a year ago suggests that no such exceptions have occurred in this debate, and none should be expected.

I may have a misguided view of science (never my strong suit). Yet I think that there are knowledgeable persons (or institutions) who could evaluate the Lancet study in light of applicable theories and accepted methods, present their assessment in a form suitable to the project, and that the effort would not be unusually difficult as compared to reviews of other scholarly articles. Such reviews, I am increasing convinced, occur on a regular basis, and in general contribute to the advancement of science and knowledge. Who will rise to this occasion?

Ragout, I’ve downloaded and read exactly the same IBC study that you refer to and do not trust its validity even as a measure of trends, for one simple reason–reporters had more freedom in the early months of the occupation than they had later. There was more freedom for Westerners to move around in 2003 than there was in 2004. During the urban fighting in the summer of 2004, which was quite intense according to news accounts at the time, the military claimed to be killing large numbers of insurgents. Do you think they would tell us if they were also killing large numbers of civilians? Here’s a hint–think about Vietnamese bodycounts. Historians take for granted that many of those were civilians. And if western reporters aren’t free to move around and see for themselves, how would we know how many civilians our side kills? That’s the problem with the IBC methodology–I think to some extent they actually do a disservice with that study, with its calculations of percentages of people killed at this time or that or by this side or that carried to absurd numbers of significant digits. It looks very impressive until you realize that the data collection system is not even remotely an unbiased estimator. The Lancet study is much more honest with its very large error bars and numerous paragraphs devoted to outlining possible problems with its methodology. I think the numbers for the opening months of the war are likely to be reasonably accurate–again, reporters went around to various places in the months following and collected statistics and found, as IBC reports, that several thousand civilians died (my copy is on the home computer, not here). This simply wasn’t the situation when Fallujah was being bombed in the summer and fall of 2004. Read the Lancet report for its description alone –it was dangerous even to go there when they did and they saw large areas which appeared to be devastated and the people they inteviewed said that many people in the abandoned houses had been killed. Hundreds of thousands of Fallujans lived in refugee camps–have you read numerous interviews of Western reporters with Fallujans discussing what it was like? I haven’t. I do not think that the Western press had easy access to Fallujah and was wandering up and down the streets counting bodies so that IBC could collate them.

It’s also my impression that there have been similar problems in other wars. If you wanted actual bodycounts of civilians killed by insurgents in the French/Algerian war, you can find fairly detailed records, because that’s the sort of thing the French government would keep track of and pass on to reporters. If you want bodycounts of Algerian civilians killed by French air raids and air strikes and infantry in remote villages, you can forget about exact bodycounts. You have rough estimates alone and if you insisted on confirmed numbers of dead actually counted by reporters or found in morgues or in French government reports, you would end up with a huge underestimate. If you read Alistair Horne’s “A Savage War of Peace”, his history of the Algerian conflict, you’d find detailed numbers given for those deaths that the French government would naturally keep accurate numbers for and would be willing to dispense–when he talks about the number of Algerians killed by the French it all goes hazy and he is reduced to citing various estimates made by different groups.

Eudoxis, the Lancet paper does not say that the investigators wanted to exclude the most dangerous areas—they said they wanted to reduce their total travel time, because it was dangerous to travel in Iraq. (Which has something to do with my peculiar notion that Western reporters also couldn’t go around collecting civilian casualty reports on their own, not by that time.) They did not avoid dangerous areas–they went to Fallujah and if you have the paper you can read their description not only about how devastated much of the city was (in September 2004), but also about how they couldn’t leave their car parked in a random spot or use a GPS for fear of being killed for doing either one of these things. Sounds dangerous to me, but maybe you live in a rougher neighborhood than I do.

If the Lancet investigators had done what you suggest, they would have biased their survey towards a lower death toll. They didn’t, although they did throw out their Fallujah data because the death toll was so high.

Soru, does it not shake your faith in the occupation _just a little bit_ that they are demonstrably uninterested in collecting figures that might cast doubt on the wisdom of their invasion plan? In particular, casualty figures?

Given that the Lancet’s estimate is for the excess deaths to a time over a year ago, that the Iraqi infrastructure is still a mess, and that the civil war is ongoing, do you not think we may have reached the magic 100,000 already?

There’s nothing wrong with waiting for facts to come in before changing a position. Given how many facts we are already aware of, I can’t help wondering if I could come back to you in another 30 years for an answer, and hear “Not yet, not yet…”