“What exactly is “ad hominem” about my comment?”

An ad hominem argument is defined as “attacking an opponent’s motives or character rather than the policy or position they maintain.” So attempting to impugn the study by citing the actual or supposed political views of the Lancet editor or the authors of the report is necessarily an ad hominem argument.

In contrast, it would not be ad hominem if it you were to first show that the editing or reviewing of the manuscript was in flagrant violation of scientific standards, and then offer the editor’s political views as a possible motive.

Hi Donald:

I abandoned this thread for fresher, greener debate pastures a couple days ago, but decided to pop back for a look at anything noteworthy.

You make an interesting observation about whether I’m a ” war supporter,” still. I confess I haven’t really asked myself that recently, at least not with the ” supporter ” moniker.

I’m disgusted with the way things have turned out. If I’d known that in advance, I wouldn’t have supported regime change, although I usually try to avoid the ” if I’d known in advance ” supposition because it’s essentially worthless when reevaluating one’s previous stance.

Most of my anger arises from the belief that this could have been done much better. I’m not prepared to say, knowing what we know now, that it could definitely have been done ” right,” but certainly better.

Bush and his inner circle deserve much of the blame, naturally. But the more ahem “partisan” of their critics have been unfair in apportioning blame. I see plenty of the more vocal Bush critics giving both the military and the Iraqi people complete passes on the blame game front. That’s ridiculous.

It’s ludicrous to absolve the American military of its share of responsibility, whether by inept high ranking commanders in the Pentagon and in the field, or the small percentage of psycopathic grunts on the ground who committed war crimes.

It’s equally ludicrous to allow the Iraqi people to emerge blameless. Given a chance at a fresh start, freed from a brutal dictator by the only means that was likely to accomplish that (foreign invasion), they’ve squandered it in a frenzy of sectarian, tribal hatred.

Sorry for digressing. Back to the question of my ” support, ” or lack thereof, for the war.

I support the continuing presence of coalition troops in Iraq. I think there’s a subtle difference between that, and supporting the war. It would be better if there had been no invasion, although that comes with the caveat that we don’t know what Saddam might have done to his people had he been in power still. But there was an invasion, and we are where we are. We can’t change that.

U.S. troops are preventing a much higher death toll from occurring. It’s interesting to note (and this seems to have been overlooked by many who want the U.S. out of Iraq), that it isn’t just the Shiite dominated Iraqi government that wants U.S. troops to remain. Since the Shiites started fighting back, tit for tat, on the sectarian front, we’re seeing prominent Sunnis stating that U.S. troops need to stay, to protect their communities.

You’ve seen enough of my posts here and at Deltoid to know I believe Lancet 2’s death toll is grossly inaccurate. If the Americans were to abruptly pull out, it won’t be for long.

Additionally, if you can go to YouTube and watch a video of Horton venting his spleen at an anti-war rally, suspicions are going to be raised, justifiably or not. Horton has every right to do this and more, but if you are seriously looking to avoid the controversy that surrounds your work, it’s probably not a good idea. Grist to the mill, and all that.

You know, this kind of thing really pisses me off. It implicitly says that, even if he believes the numbers are correct, it’s poor form to go getting angry about them at an anti-war rally.

If he wasn’t ranting about these numbers, it’d make me a heck of a lot more suspicious than his being angry about them.

I believe there is at least something to be said for observable facts and I think you are a little too quick to discount some of the reasonable concerns being voiced e.g. death certificates. We’re told that it’s too dangerous to go to hospital to count death certificates, but it’s not too dangerous that 80% of Iraqis are going to hospitals to get deaths certified.

Who said that you had to go to a hospital to get a death certificate?

One cultural blindspot might be that, in America, doctors don’t make housecalls.

Do we know that’s true in Iraq? I would be mildly surprised if there weren’t house-calling doctors in Iraq. I would certainly be surprised if there wasn’t some entity capable of looking at someone who is stone-cold and say “Yeah, s/he’s dead; let me fill this out for you, so you can bury the body” without your having to go to a hospital, morgue, or doctor’s office.

Second, all excess death studies like this I’ve read are simply nothing more than “made-up-numbers”. My favorite example of this syndrome is the Irish Potato Famine. According to the “excess death studies” 1 million died of hunger, according to the extensive documentary evidence 20K died of starvation, and few hundred thousand died of the diseases of poverty and malnutrition at rates not all that different from the over-crowed slums of London or Liverpool of the 1840’s.

So when it comes to the facts in 1840’s Ireland I prefer to believe the research and opinions of a Dr William Wilde, the very conscientious Medical Census Commissioner, rather than some “excess death study” written by some twit with an agenda.

And when it comes to Iraq I tend to believe the hard numbers I’ve seen that show that the violent death rate in Iraq over the last few years is very high, greater than South Africa but lower than Columbia. But 10 times higher than under Saddam? I dont think so.

Lies, damn lies, and Lancet studies..

You do realise you sound like a three-year-old, don’t you? (Brownie, #78)

if you can go to YouTube and watch a video of Horton venting his spleen at an anti-war rally, suspicions are going to be raised (Brownie, #62)

Let me know when you want to debate like a grown-up. I’ll be right here. (Brownie, #206)

What exactly is “ad hominem” about my comment? (Brownie, #212)

ad hominem — an argument “against the man” or person. This is a device employed to attack not the issues but rather the one you are arguing with, especially on a personal level or basis. It is usually employed by those whose arguments are weak.

True, though nothing they say in that appendix would lead you to believe that they thought such an impressive transformation had occurred by 2002.

I just emailed Dr. Burnham about that graph, and he replied,

“Thanks for your note. We included this from a USAID document, although I think the original came from UNICEF. We have no data to back that up, but presented it only as a bit of background information from what is out there. We have not done IMR or CMR from this study as of yet.”

If it’s a UNICEF figure, that last mark on the chart is probably from the Iraq Child and Maternal Mortality Surveys, published mid-1999, on which UNICEF continued to rely until 2004. That would merely require that the mortality drop occurred between 1998 and 2002.

Assuming that the UNICEF survey was accurate in the first place, of course. I know nothing of their methodology or confidence intervals.

To sum up both your objections, WHO’s 2001 mortality estimates are very different from the Lancet studies’ 2002-2003 mortality estimates.

The WHO life tables are extrapolations of data from previous years—for instance, the table for 1999 relied on a variety of surveys, the latest of which was done in 1999. (See Life tables for 191 countries: Data, methods, and results for the gory details.)

So it’s possible that the WHO estimates are simply inaccurate for 2001, or at least less accurate than a post-2001 survey of that year’s mortality would have been. It’s also possible that mortality drastically improved between 2001 and early 2003.

To say the Lancet results aren’t “credible” based on conflict with WHO, you need to show that
a) WHO’s estimates are more likely to be accurate than the Lancet researchers’, even though only the latter used actual mortality data covering the time in question, and
b) mortality couldn’t drastically change in a year or two. Do you have evidence for that?

True, though nothing they say in that appendix would lead you to believe that they thought such an impressive transformation had occurred by 2002.

secondly,the WHO figure of 9.03 crude death rate if used in the research (rather than their 5.5 figure,based on analysis of a mere 82 deaths)would have changed the whole basis of the report.
They would have been left arguing that the invasion saved lives for the first two years.

What exactly is “ad hominem” about my comment? I’m suggesting that Horton’s behaviour unnecessarily politicizes the study on Iraq . The point is that even if it were true that nobody could produce coherent criticisms of the report – Lancet 2 would be the first epidemiological study in the history of the world that was beyond criticism if this were correct – Horton opens the door wide to complaints that he and his organ are less than objective; complaints that may well be entirely baseless.

I would have thought that supporters of the study should be as concerned about this as anyone.

The fact that the right wing is investing so much energy in ad hominem attacks on Horton indicates to me that they haven’t been able to find anything to attack the actual authors of the study. I suppose that possible political bias on the part of the editor might be a valid concern if the article were of flagrantly low quality and not up to scientific standards for the field of epidemiology. However, this is clearly not the case; the methodology is one that is standard and well-validated, and the authors do a good job of identifying and acknowledging factors that could potentially bias the conclusions.

This might be a reasonable thing to do, but we only know that now based upon the findings of the Lancet study that death certificates were issued for the great majority of deaths. Prior to the study, there was no way of knowing whether this would have been a valid methodology. And it still would require identifying every single local authority that is issuing death certificates. If there isn’t a reliable master list somewhere, this could be more difficult and less reliable than cluster sampling.

Or, if you prefer WHO figures from 2001—the same figures that gave a crude death rate for Iraq of 9.03—they give the UK a rate of 10.83. Does that mean Iraqis were healthier than Brits that year?