Interestingly, DK himself seems to have disappeared from view – he didn’t respond to comments on his now-vanished post (unless in the interval between my last viewing and its disappearance) and I can’t see anything from him in this thread.

I was traveling and giving a talk in Florida. Apologies for the absence.

And the denialists above seem eager to back away from his fraud accusation, even though it’s the only coherent basis for challenging the results.

Could someone please define some terms here. What is a “denialist”? Is it anyone with suspicions about the Lancet team? It is anyone who thinks that 650k is too high an estimate?

For the record, I do not describe myself as a “denialist.” I think that the mortality rate in Iraq is much higher post invasion than it was pre-invasion. Whether this “excess death” measure is 100k or 400k or 800k, I do not know. I have serious doubts about both Lancet I and II, but more on that some other time.

And, to be clear, I am not and did not accuse the authors of the Lancet article of fraud. They did not collect the data. They have no first hand evidence of how the interviews were conducted. I think that much (I think a preponderance but others will differ) of the evidence suggests that the data is inaccurate.

As to the response rate, I appreciate all the citations provided here and elsewhere. If I had been aware of them (alas, my googling skills are not what they should be), I would have mentioned them and moderated my language.

But, as Stephen Moore points out above, the response rate is still “spectacularly high”. Does Stephen Moore know more about conducting surveys in Iraq than anyone at CT? Perhaps, perhaps not. But I think it is too early to declare the fraud balloon to have popped.

And, as always, many of these questions would go away if the Lancet teams would release the data.

Average response rates in Iraq are, as of last summer when I was there conducting surveys, between 80% and 85% This is a long way from 99.2%.

Here is one from the International Republican Institute, done in July. The PowerPoint slides for that one say that “A total sample of 2,849 valid interviews were obtained from a total sample of 3,120 rendering a response rate of 91 percent.”

Above average response rate, but still a long way from 99.2%

And here is a report put out in 2003 by the former Coalition Provisional Authority, summarizing surveys conducted by the Office of Research and Gallup. In the former, “The overall response rate was 89 percent, ranging from 93% in Baghdad to 100% in Suleymania and Erbil.” In the latter, “Face-to-face interviews were conducted among 1,178 adults who resided in urban areas within the governorate of Baghdad … The response rate was 97 percent.” So much for Iraqi surveys with extraordinary response rates being hard to find.

You might agree that conducting surveys was considerably easier in Iraq in 2003.

The Lancet report study is bizarre in so many ways – ten times the number of deaths reported by anyone else, a spectacularly high response rate, no demographic questions were asked and we are expected to believe that as 2.5% of the population is killed, the bureaucracy is dutifully churning out death certificates for 92% of the deaths.

Bizarre.

Personally, the figures reported in Lancet II do not necessarily seem so far off by my “gut check”. This is a major war that has been going on for over 4 years now; we know modern military technology causes high casualties. We have been getting reports out of Iraq of brutal, constant violence for years. Civilian Iraqis have reported huge death tolls in their own neighborhoods that were so routine that they did not make the press:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/10/19/riverbend/

But I don’t know that the Lancet II numbers are right, no one does. There are lots of opportunities for non-sampling error here. One, pointed out in the paper, is differential migration from high-mortality areas. The sampling design was based on regional population counts from several years ago. If people have migrated from high mortality areas (as seems likely), these counts could now overrepresent populations in dangerous areas. This would bias death counts high.

Posted by Brett Bellmore

Brett, stop lying. The IBC figures are 50K civilians killed by violence, whose deaths were covered by English-language media, accessible online. Multiplied by the factors indicated by references 11,22-26, this means at least 250K civilians killed by violence. Not ‘all deaths, from all causes’, but civilians killed by violence’. And that’s a low-end estimate, for a sub-set of the deaths covered by the Lancet study.

Iraq is too dangerous a place to even merely count the dead, which ought to embarass any remaining apologists for the invasion.

What else is there to say?

But maybe he’s only trying to lower the percentage of deaths attributed to Americans—the problem with that is that there might also be incentives to understate any particular faction’s contribution and attribute the deaths to “unknown”.

It’s a commonplace observation that sampling error is often the smallest source of error in a poll; It’s merely the easiest to quantify. Even in relatively peaceful countries like the US, it’s understood that poll results will often be warped by people being reluctant to give answers they think might offend the polster, which is why, for instance, contraversial ballot proposals often do suprisingly better on election day than the polling suggests they will.

Anyone care to guess the magnitude of that effect in areas where there are active insurgencies going around murdering whole families who offend them in some way?

Polling just isn’t reliable in war zones or countries with secret police, and there’s no point to pretending otherwise. You can do all the math you like concerning sample sizes and clustering, and it’s all beside the point if your samples’ chief concern is with figuring out what responses have the least risk of getting them murdered.

In any well designed survey you have to at a very minimum [long list of duties snipped]. The time in question isn’t just the time of “the survey”. The time in question is the time from the beginning of one survey to the beginning of the next survey. Except with ridiculously rushed work and amazingly brief questions, the time from knocking on the door to knocking on the door, introducting yourself, actually giving and recording the survey to knocking on the next door should easily be 15 or 20 minutes. And if it goes to 25 (and frankly 30 seems more reasonable) you get into the realm of nearly impossible given the number of interviews per day. I’m not suggesting that is indicative of fraud, I’m suggesting it is indicative of poor survey design

To put things in perspective, the 2004 ILCS questionnaire was, in its English translation, 60 pages long and median interview time was 84 minutes. In order to get a full cluster of 40 households done by one team of four interviewers in one day in the Burnham study, the total time per household had to be short. This is exactly the kind of situation where one would want to cut the number of questions down to the bare minimum. Anyway, go take a look at the ILCS questionnaire and imagine doing that in 84 minutes.

We literally do not know a single Iraqi family that has not seen the violent death of a first or second-degree relative these last three years. Abductions, militias, sectarian violence, revenge killings, assassinations, car-bombs, suicide bombers, American military strikes, Iraqi military raids, death squads, extremists, armed robberies, executions, detentions, secret prisons, torture, mysterious weapons—with so many different ways to die, is the number so far fetched?

But what weight can be given to that testimony, compared to the hand-washing bleatings of newly forged Republican statistical wizards vomiting up objection after objection to the data that asserts matter-of-factly that they are responsible for the deaths of 600 thousand human beings?

And the denialists above seem eager to back away from his fraud accusation, even though it’s the only coherent basis for challenging the results. Quibbles about cluster sampling and so on (all answered at tedious length last time around in any case) aren’t going to change the finding that the number of excess deaths is huge.