Is it me, or is The Economist getting much better? There’s nothing like as much out-and-out arrogance about its pronouncements as there used to be and they seem to be giving opposing views a much fairer treatment. I would say it’s about 40% less pompous than it was at the peak, which is bordering on readability. In the end, though, it is the market which will decide.[1]
Anyway, the rundown they give on the Iraqi elections is excellent and has certainly cleared my thoughts up substantially. (see here for what they looked like when they were unclear). I now think I know enough to make a few predictions about the elections, and if you say that with enough attitude on the word “think” then you’ll realize why The Economist is a dangerous drug that needs to be kept out of the hands of slightly tipsy businessmen on trains.
Update: Well what a bloody washout these predictions turned out to be!
Kieran talks a lot of sense below, but I like making specific predictions and then learning about the underlying process from analyzing how I went wrong[2]. So here goes. My big tip for the Iraqi elections is; bet on Allawi. Annoyingly, tradesports aren’t running a book on the Iraqi elections this time, but in any case, I think that people are assuming too much that the United Iraqi Alliance (= SCIRI + Dawa + Sadrists) will win it and underestimating the chances of Allawi being able to put together a broad, secular coalition of exactly the sort that we in the West would presumably like to see.
UpdateYou would have lost your shirt.
My reasoning is this. Anyone elected on a Sunni Arab ticket will end up blocking with Allawi because he is the “acceptable face of Ba’athism”, and the alternative will be rule by UIA. The Kurds will block with Allawi if they hold the balance of power for sure, because their interests are currently best served by keeping Iraq as secular as possible, and because the Kurdish parties are by and large clients of the US and will do what the US wants. Kurds plus Sunnis is 40% of the population and as a rough estimate, this will translate into 40% of the seats – the Sunnis are as far as I can tell slightly over-represented by the makeup of the local constituencies, but this will be cancelled out (or even a bit more than cancelled out) by the effects of a partial boycott in the Sunni areas on the allocation of the 45 seats determined by proportional representation.
Update: This doesn’t actually look too bad, except that the Sunnis did not vote for Allawi; they voted for sectarian Sunni parties. I had clearly underestimated the extent to which Allawi was tainted by his association with the coalition government.
So on my analysis, Allawi would need to break away maybe 10-15% of the seats from parties other than the core Kurd/Sunni block in order to have a reasonably workable coalition. My guess is that these will come, courtesy of our old pal Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress.
Update: Chalabi might be the “Mitterrand of the Tigris”, but even old Francois had long periods in the wilderness. He got annihilated; like me, he really misjudged the appeal of non-sectarian politics in Iraq, and probably also underestimated the extent to which his association with the Americans had tainted him.
Chalabi is the most extraordinary politician (he’s a secularist! He’s a Shi’ite! He’s a secularist!) and his credibility is, shall we say, tarnished in the West but in Iraq I think he retains some credibility. If you look at the ORI poll, his personal ratings are really still pretty high. I think that his departure from UIA might have weakened it more than people realize. And UIA itself is not in that good shape politically; if it was a Western party we’d be a lot quicker to notice the vultures flying around it.
Update: It wasn’t in particularly good shape, but as long as the Sadrists remain in the coalition, disaffection among Shia is going to be kept in check because the protest vote just hurts Dawa and benefits SCIRI and Sadr.
First, it is the incumbent government and therefore takes a lot of the blame for the dreadful economic situation; unemployment, high to begin with has risen on their watch. Second, it also takes a lot of the blame for the excesses and atrocities of the domestic security forces. Third, it is really too close to Iran for a lot of its nationalist supporters (some might say that “too close to Iran” is not exactly a reason to vote for Chalabi, but like I say, he’s quite a politician; the Mitterrand[5] of the Tigris). And fourth, its endorsement from Sistani is much, much weaker than it had last time. My guess is that in the privacy of the voting booth, INC will pick up enough votes from Shi’ite Iraqis who are tired of the mullahs and don’t like Iran, to give him quite a few seats in the proportional allocation and maybe even some constituencies.
Update This didn’t happen. I think I underestimated the appeal of theofascism when the alternative is lawlessness.
So in other words, there will be a secular liberal government in Iraq within the next few months. Hurray hurray victory achieved, boo to the naysayers and we can bring the troops home for the Job Will Have Been Done. Except …
Two big excepts here. One, Iraq is a federal country under its new constitution. That means that a liberal secular government in Baghdad will not exactly be passing any French-style anti-hijab laws in Basra. The local government in the Shia areas will be UIA (and within UIA it will be more SCIRI than Dawa) and that means burkhas, turning a blind eye to stonings and quite some difficulty finding a decent bottle of wine. The USA has encouraged Iraq to adopt a constitution based on its own, rather forgetting that this was a constitution that allowed Jim Crow to develop, and the federal Iraqi government is in no position to carry out a Kent State operation.
The second is that it is pretty clear from the ORI poll that Anbar governorate is bandit country. Whatever the result of the election, the Iraqi government will have considerably less control over the territory there than the government of the UK had over South Armagh in the 1980s, and our own ability to help them will be decidedly limited, not that our help has been all that much use so far. So Jihadi University is unlikely to be closing down any time soon; the big unknown is whether their graduates will be concentrating their attention on continuing to destablise the government after the troops have left, or whether they will be exporting. If it’s the first, then there is always the possibility of a military coup at some point, which would add to the overall disaster.
Update: Neither of these negative points is made any better by the election of a less palatable government, obviously.
So, my analysis of the situation from a geopolitical point of view is that in six months time we will be bringing the troops home, leaving between a third and half of the Iraqi population in something approaching a real democracy (good), leaving the causes of Iranian-style Islamism substantially better off than they were before (bad) and having created and marketed a training program for terrorists to replace the one we blew up in Afghanistan (bad). As a list of achievements to show for as many as 175,000 dead[3] civilians and a thin $250bn, I think this is pretty lousy. I’m sure there are plenty of people who will be happy to spin it as a triumph however; there were plenty of fans of Concorde[4].
Update: Of course, you didn’t hear much from Concorde fans after it crashed into that farmhouse.
[1] Satire.
[2] I also like promising I’m going to write up the results of that analysis as an article on CT and not doing it.
[3] The Lancet figure, scaled up because the 100k deaths referred to a fourteen month period after the war starting March 19th, thanks “soru” in comments below and it certainly looks like the death rate has not fallen dramatically over the last year.
[4] The difference being that even Concorde fans had the sense to realize that they weren’t going to be given another vast pile of public money to waste on a fantasy airliner for a while, which puts them one or two steps ahead of the Henry Jackson Society.
[5] thanks Chris, Chris and Jason for this spelling correction
{ 81 comments }
ajay 12.16.05 at 6:14 am
Well, the Concorde project worked, in the sense that at the end of it we had a supersonic airliner. Of course, you can argue that it wasn’t worth the money we spent to get to that point, but, you have to admit, there was an actual airliner that actually flew.
In Iraq, we haven’t even got partial democracy (ahem) off the ground yet, and it is far from certain that we ever will. So Concorde looks good by comparison.
soru 12.16.05 at 6:28 am
The Lancet figure, scaled up because the 100k deaths referred to a fourteen month period after the war
Quick point – it was not a 14 month period ‘after the war’, it started march 19th 2003, the first bombs dropped the next day, Bush gave his ‘Mission accomplished’ speech on May 1st.
So depending on how you look at it, either it covered ‘the war and the next 12 months’, or
‘the first 14 months of the war’.
Either way, you can’t scale it like that.
soru
Daniel 12.16.05 at 6:39 am
Good point Soru but yes I can scale it because they give a timeline of the deaths on page 5 of the survey and March/April were not actually particularly bad months. In fact if the entire fourteen month period had seen exactly the same death rate as the two months which included the war, the excess deaths figure would have been a lot lower.
abb1 12.16.05 at 6:43 am
Allawi is the “acceptable face of Ba’athism†– why, because he was a member 30 years ago and then the head of a political/terrorist anti-Ba’ath organization for the last 30 years?
All of this is satire, correct?
Daniel 12.16.05 at 6:56 am
Allawi has been the subject of a lot of negative campaigning from the UIA parties over his Ba’ath membership (and note that “30 years ago” in this context means “when Saddam was just getting going”). That’s the reference I was making.
Anthony 12.16.05 at 7:07 am
Daniel,
You appear to have made a massive breakthrough in epidemiological methodology. You should get a job spinning studies for big Pharma.
Daniel 12.16.05 at 7:17 am
Anthony: don’t be a tool. It is obvious from the context that this isn’t a serious estimate, just making the point that the 100,000 estimate referred to a specific time period and things have gone on without getting better for a long time.
Since your own speciality is darkly insinuating “methodological flaws” with the Lancet study then retreating to “some people are reading too much into it” when challenged, I think this particular boot is on the other foot.
Go on, now it’s your time to accuse me of “regarding the Lancet study as Gospel”. That’s what you usually do.
soru 12.16.05 at 7:53 am
March/April were not actually particularly bad months
Don’t you think it is rather revealing of the limitations of the sample size and selection techniques used if they were unable to detect a _war_?
I can’t actually judge his overall point on ‘multistage cluster sampling’, but this map explains why the survey missed this little fact:
http://www.seixon.com/blog/archives/2005/12/death_of_statis_1.html
_All_ of the semi-randomly selected provinces were in central Iraq, not the south where the actual war-fighting took place.
Excluding the areas inhabited by the people saddam didn’t like (most of the Kurdish provinces were excluded as well) may well explain why the pre-war mortality rates found were so much lower than UN estimates.
soru
Daniel 12.16.05 at 8:06 am
Don’t you think it is rather revealing of the limitations of the sample size and selection techniques used if they were unable to detect a war?
No, it reflects the fact that soliders were not part of households and thus excluded from the methodology, and that the coalition forces tried very hard to minimise civilian casualties during the war, in which they were largely successful. The war was actually fought very well as a military operation; it was the postwar that was the disaster.
All of the semi-randomly selected provinces were in central Iraq, not the south where the actual war-fighting took place.
Not true at all. Simply not true as the map on p4 of the study shows.
Excluding the areas inhabited by the people saddam didn’t like (most of the Kurdish provinces were excluded as well) may well explain why the pre-war mortality rates found were so much lower than UN estimates
No, the fact that the UN estimates were made before the start of the oil-for-food program and not updated for the substantial fall in malnutrition between 1999 and 2003 explains that.
Daniel 12.16.05 at 8:07 am
btw, despite my ill-tempered response to Anthony, this is actually a post about Iraqi democracy, not the Lancet study and it would be really nice of people to remember that.
H. 12.16.05 at 8:17 am
According to Seymour Hersh Blair sent a team of advisors to help Allawi’s campaign and no doubt the U.S. have done all they covertly can for him and Chalabi, so all that may have effect. It would be a pretty major coup for Bush/Blair if they could pull off a secular central government that included Sunnis.
soru 12.16.05 at 8:59 am
Not true at all. Simply not true as the map on p4 of the study shows.
Why misrepresent something so specific and easy to check?
http://www.zmag.org/lancet.pdf
The map in the link I gave before shows the same info as on p4 of the report, just colour coded to make it clear what is going on.
All of the unsampled provinces are in two contiguous blocks, one in the north covering the Kurdish regions, one in the south around Basra.
Now, that could be random chance, I’ll grant you, just seems a bit of a fluke that it comes up with the same pattern that would have would have been manually chosen in order to maximise the number produced.
substantial fall in malnutrition between 1999 and 2003
That would be an explanation, were it known to be true. In the abscence of better evidence, seems more of an ad hoc assumption.
soru
bza 12.16.05 at 9:09 am
the federal Iraqi government is in no position to carry out a Kent State operation.
I think you mean the University of Mississippi. (Kent State was where the national guard killed four college students.)
Ron F 12.16.05 at 9:17 am
Daniel –
Why on earth would secular Shia (or anyone else) want to see a government headed by a man whose previous administration, including ministers, are wanted for disappearing over 1 billion dollars? A penchant for kleptocracy perhaps?
We’ve seen the religious Shia response to Allawi in Najaf recently. They totally humiliated him by pelting him with stones and shoes while shouting “God curse Baathists”.
And why would Sunni want to align with a man who cheered on the destruction of Falluja by his U.S. backers, aided by Kurdish troops?
With all this in mind, I suspect that if you win your bet on Allawi it will be thanks to ballot stuffing or somesuch irregularities.
Your geopolitical analysis is also ill-informed. In six months time British troops won’t be coming home, as you claim. Rather they’ll be sent to Afghanistan, as has been known now for six months.
Redshift 12.16.05 at 9:35 am
According to Seymour Hersh Blair sent a team of advisors to help Allawi’s campaign and no doubt the U.S. have done all they covertly can for him and Chalabi, so all that may have effect. It would be a pretty major coup for Bush/Blair if they could pull off a secular central government that included Sunnis.
Coup, indeed, but not so much for democracy. I seem to recall there was another country in the region where the US used covert assistance to put the guy we wanted in power, and that worked out really well, didn’t it?
Riverbend writes of her impression of the leanings of secular Iraqis
“Hakim and Ja’affari and their minions have managed to botch things up so badly, Allawi is actually looking acceptable in the eyes of many. I still can’t stand him.”
but, quoting a proverb:
“He who sees death, is content with a fever. Allawi et al. seem to be the fever these days…”
Daniel 12.16.05 at 9:39 am
Soru, at 7:53 am, you said:
All of the semi-randomly selected provinces were in central Iraq (emphasis in original).
At 8:59, you said:
All of the unsampled provinces are in two contiguous blocks, one in the north covering the Kurdish regions, one in the south around Basra.
You’ve fallen into the “all-not fallacy” here. “All of the unsampled provinces are in the north or south” does not imply “All of the sampled provinces are not in the north or south”. In fact, Sulimaniya governorate is in the North and was sampled, Ninawa is in the north and was sampled and Dhi Qar and Missan are in the south and were sampled. You might have misread Seixon’s map; the governorates coloured light green were sampled as well as the ones coloured dark green. But in any case, I did not misrepresent the facts and would appreciate it if you would withdraw your accusation that I did.
That would be an explanation, were it known to be true.
It is known to be true; a UNICEF study of child malnutrition was carried out in 2002. (here). Infant malnutrition has risen very substantially since the invasion.
soru 12.16.05 at 10:17 am
I’ll withdraw ‘misrepresent’ if you withdraw ‘Not true at all. Simply not true’.
Surely you can’t look at either map and say there is no truth at all in the statement that all the sampled provinces are in the center of the country?
‘a UNICEF study of child malnutrition was carried out in 2002.’
From the survey:
‘Data was collected from 29 April to 3 May 2003.’
soru
roger 12.16.05 at 10:36 am
Daniel, I think you have pretty good reasons for saying that Allawi will be stronger in this election. In the last election, Allawi’s participation in, and avid support for, razing Fallujah occured just on the heels of the election, and (surprise, surprise) was not a winner.
On the other hand, your interpretation of secularism as a driver is too strong. The Kurdish war lords, in the past, had no problem with hooking up with Saddam himself when they felt it in their interest. The interest of the Kurds, I think, comes down to regionalism and the annexation of Kirkuk. On both of these issues, the better partners are the Shiites.
The election will tell us whether the ORI poll oversampled middle class Iraqis, which is my bet. And Chalabi is an unlikely person to collaborate with Allawi — in fact, his hatred for Allawi has pretty much motivated him to throw in his lot with Sadr and Jalafi, with whom he signed a pledge, last week, to: never get friendly with Israel, and to support a timetable for the withdrawal of occupation troops. Allawi, after all, blamed Chalabi for the revelations about the money stolen by the Defense minister during Allawi’s last, inglorious stint.
Still, stranger things have happened. Interesting post.
Hektor Bim 12.16.05 at 10:41 am
The Economist has many faces. The world coverage has improved, but the US coverage is becoming more and more transcriptions of the Republican party line. That trend has been present over the last ten years, and in the Economist I read recently (Canada’s election on the cover), it’s as bad as I have ever seen it. Don’t get me started on their Northern Ireland coverage – it is what caused me to cancel my subscription way back when.
I saw one glaring problem with your analysis. The Kurds are not clients of the US. In fact, of all the actors in Iraq, they retain the most independence and power. There are almost no US troops in Iraqi Kurdistan, and unlike the Sunni insurgents, they aren’t dependent on foreign suppliers and jihadi wackos for their financing. I think you are right that the Kurds will ally with the secularists, but they will do it to maintain their own power, not to please the US. There will also be problems with alliances with Baathists and national-greatness Iraqis. The Kurds don’t believe in a strong national state, and no one else can force them to be in it. It’s quite likely that any alliance they make will be like the alliances the Catalonian nationalist parties make with Spanish parties, they vote with them, but at every stage they demand more autonomy. Since the Kurds have more power even than the Catalonians do in Spain in Iraq, this will probably work well for them.
I have no idea how popular the UIA actually is in Iraq, but writing them off is foolish. If they aren’t in government, they will be major spoilers, and they will force a more federal and looser Iraq. So kicking the UIA out of government will mean a much more decentralized Iraq, which for those of not so enamoured of the British and French political systems, can only be counted a good thing.
Brendan 12.16.05 at 10:49 am
I think Daniel’s point is salient here (this is not a thread about the Lancet study but about the elections) buy may I suggest that anyone who really wants to embarass themselves by contesting the Lancet study figures do so where they can face the maximum possible public humiliation over at Tim Lambert’s Blog ? (Note: not only does the study match all the available data from other studies, and has not (to the best of my knowledge) been criticised by any serious statistician or mortality expert, there is one more interesting fact which is this. According to the Iraqi body count, the death rate has gone UP since the Lancet study, so that has to be taken into account when calculating the excess mortality rate. When this is taken into account it can be seen that Iraq is rapidly becoming the major humanitarian catastrophe of the early 21st century).
In any case Tim Lambert’s blog has a comments section incidentally so I suggest that further debate take place there.
Daniel 12.16.05 at 11:00 am
Soru: in my world, the word “all” means universal quantification over a domain, differing in this regard from “some” and “most”. Acute child malnutrition is unlikely to have got worse between 2002 and 2003 as there was not a war on at the time.
Hektor: I must say I never read the US coverage so maybe that’s why.
Ron F 12.16.05 at 11:11 am
Roger –
“The election will tell us whether the ORI poll oversampled middle class Iraqis, which is my bet.”
I’d tend to agree with you, with the caveat that many middle class Iraqis weren’t sampled because they have fled the country, apparently in droves. But the trouble is that the ORI poll put the “undecided” electorate at a whopping 37.4% so it will be very difficult to tell.
I can’t shake the feeling that such a large number of undecided voters leaves lots of wiggle room for ballot stuffers.
Also, it isn’t just the former Defence Minister who is wanted over the disappearance of Iraqi money, as you claim – 27 other members of Allawi’s regime are also implicated in what appears to have been one of the biggest frauds in history.
Tim Lambert 12.16.05 at 11:14 am
The UNICEF Nutrition status household survey 2002 was indeed carried out in 2002. Soru seems to have confused it with another survey carried out in 2003.
Hektor Bim 12.16.05 at 11:24 am
Brendan,
Unfortunately, Iraq is not the major humanitarian crisis of the 21st century. There are at least two places in Africa that are worse off: Darfur and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It’s important to retain a real global view of what is going on and not be too blinkered in one’s ideas.
BigMacAttack 12.16.05 at 11:31 am
Anything can happen. In the short run the Sunni and US interests are opposed. But given the new realities, in the long run the interests of secular Sunnis and the US might converge, and the interests of Kurds and the US might diverge.
But was just too be polite.
Ok. Lancet. 100,000+ dead. My reaction, duh!,of course. In a perverse way, I would hope so, or the US military didn’t do it’s job. And a natural consequence of the US military doing it’s job, would be a goodly number of civilian deaths amongst the 100,000+ dead.
Now Bush has confirmed that. Right? Didn’t he just acknowledge 30,000 civilian deaths? Now again perversely, this means the higher the ratio of combatant deaths to civilian deaths, something every patriotic American should wish was as high as possible, the closer you creep to 100,000 dead.
Right? 2-1 gives you 90,000 dead. (Daniel, ‘175,000 dead[3] civilians?’, I thought we had all agreed the Lancet figure was for all not just civilian deaths. It seems like people very easily segue from all to civilian with the Lancet numbers.)
Now as for Lancet, as they note going from reported deaths of 100,000, to actual deaths is bit tricky, maybe slightly uncertain.
In addition as I suspected and have just confirmed, 6 months was the base line. A pretty narrow baseline. In the 10 previous years, I thought 500,000 children had died due to sanctions. And that number comes from where? Well kinda but not really from Lancet.(So, if I wanna be a butt head, I say the increased deaths are well within the 10 year average, and within the normal death variance in Iraq. Which also makes your projections even more dubious.)
In other words please stop pretending Lancet is some kind of holy tome. Maybe start saying something like from Bush’s 30,000 just civilian deaths to Lancet’s 100,000 deaths we can all agree a lot of Iraqis have paid the ultimate price.
And maybe your comment threads will be less likely to be hijacked.
Or maybe not. Sorry.
(Also, when you invade to make things better, I think you have to include the combatant deaths of conscripted Iraqis, and Iraqis misguided by nationalism, in your moral calculus of did the war make things better. If nothing else, that is a lot widows and fatherless children.)
Or maybe the problem is we are all a bunch of sick utilitarians.
soru 12.16.05 at 11:47 am
The UNICEF Nutrition status household survey 2002 was indeed carried out in 2002. Soru seems to have confused it with another survey carried out in 2003.
This is the one that is linked on your blog as being ‘2002 4% (Nutrition survey 2002)’, where it is the only study identified as being from 2002.
http://www.unicef.org/emerg/iraq/emergencies_nutrsurvey.pdf
This study:
http://www.casi.org.uk/info/unicef/0211nutrition.pdf
is the one that actually supports your argument (that at least some of the discrepancy is due to UN programmes), but I couldn’t find a link to it on your site.
soru
Michael Mouse 12.16.05 at 11:50 am
Is it me, or is The Economist getting much better?
Daniel, you are on fine form as ever, but I don’t think this post counts as you getting much better. In the absence of evidence (I’ve not read it for a while) I think we must conclude that it is The Economist.
[Sorry for the frivolous off-topic-ness, but honestly, this has to be better than the Lancet study again.]
Clayton 12.16.05 at 12:01 pm
This is an attempt to unhijack the thread. Apologies, Daniel.
bigmacattack. Two questions. Where did Bush get the 30,000 figure from? Either his imagination or IBC. As we know that IBC doesn’t actually count deaths but counts counts, let’s hope it’s his imagination as otherwise, he’d be illiterate.
Suppose you grant the 175,000 estimate, I have to ask how many soldiers and insurgents you think could have been included in that number? I’ve yet to see an estimate that places the number of insurgents above 40,000. This number hasn’t remained constant but has grown from the beginning of the war so I doubt the number of dead insurgents we can include in that 175,000 number will be anything more than a drop in a bucket (Okay, maybe like two drops).
gary 12.16.05 at 12:08 pm
I think Chalabi is the Tallyrand of the Tigris. It’s more alliterative, too.
Brendan 12.16.05 at 12:08 pm
Hektor
with the Congo (taking the whole war in total) the death toll is clearly higher than in Iraq, although whether it is higher on a month by month basis (now) is another issue.
With Sudan I might be prepared to argue the toss. According to the US Department of State: ‘It is estimated that 98-181,000 people have died since March 2003 in the conflict-affected area of Darfur and eastern Chad. Excluding an expected “normal†base mortality total of 35,000 deaths for this population, 63-146,000 “excess†deaths can be attributed to violence, disease, and malnutrition because of the conflict.’
(Note: it adds: ‘ Wildly divergent death toll statistics, ranging from 70,000 to 400,000, result from applying partial data to larger, nonrepresentative populations over incompatible time periods.’).
Since the ‘excess’ death toll in Iraq is almost certainly higher than 146,000 now, it is fair to say that at the present moment Iraq is one of the ‘top five’ current humanitarian crises in the world and at least arguably is in the ‘top three’.
The two sides shouting past each other, and the fact that this is a criss seen almost exclusively (at least in the West) ‘through Western eyes’ shouldn’t mislead us into thinking that Iraq is therefore somehow insignificant, or a distraction from the ‘real issues’.
Iraq really is one of the great disasters of our time, in any continent.
gary 12.16.05 at 12:08 pm
Talleyrand
roger 12.16.05 at 12:17 pm
Ron, I was simply using the Defense minister as an example. But thanks for the amplification.
Reports about that scandal are, one reads, aspects of the Allawi-Chalabi feud — and contra Daniel’s analysis, I think a win, or a big increase, for Allawi would make Chalabi more valuable to the opposition to Allawi — the game being to have at least some ‘secular’ politician to mask the theocratic tendencies of the UIA.
As for Chalabi as the Mesopotamian Mitterand — I don’t think so. He’s more like the Mesopotamian Ponzi. While American newspapers adore him — when the NYT did a review of who Iraq’s leadership might be last Sunday, Chalabi’s face was the face they used to illustrate it on the Web, which is rather like using Kucinich’s face to illustrate the Democratic leadership — I don’t think he can hope to play a role as a popular politician. Rather, he is a quintessential go-to man.
Chris Brooke 12.16.05 at 12:26 pm
Talleyrand
“Mitterrand”, too, while we’re at it.
Hektor Bim 12.16.05 at 12:33 pm
Brendan,
The estimates for the Congo are something like 4 million, so it’s clearly more serious than Iraq, and will likely continue to be so, since fighting isn’t really over there. The UN says something like 1000 people are dying there every day. That’s a _lot_ worse than Iraq.
That means that your initial statement was wrong. You said is was “the major humanitarian crisis”, which it clearly is not.
I also think that the scale of the crisis in Darfur is far worse, simply because whole areas are being completely depopulated, which is not happening in Iraq.
We’re not even talking about Zimbabwe, where mass starvation is occurring, or the dirty war in Uganda, or the continuing toll of AIDS on Africa
Now, Iraq could get worse – we could see full-scale civil war. It certainly is a significant humanitarian crisis. But it is by no means the worst one out there, unfortunately.
Brendan 12.16.05 at 1:51 pm
I specifically said that Congo was worse over the time of the whole conflict . If people are dying at the rate of 1000 a day then that is indeed worse than Iraq, where people are only dying at the rate of somewhere between 200 and 250 a day.* Boy the Iraqis must feel lucky.
As I said, quoting US figures, the situation (currently) in Sudan is currently (to emphasise that word) not as bad as Iraq . If you have different figures I would be pleased to hear them.
I’m going to ignore your reference to AIDS, as it should have been clear from context that I was talking about deaths from ‘man-made’ situations (i.e. man mad famine, war etc.). Hell, why not just count all deaths from smoking/nicotine or point out that all these deaths pale into insignificance when compared to estimated deaths by global warming and be done with it?
Interested to hear your reference to Uganda and Zimbabwe. Apart from vague references to Gulags and mass starvation in the Daily Mail do you actually have figures to back up your statements?
The fact is (and it is a fact) that Iraq is a world scale humanitarian catastrophe: far far worse than the recent tsunami. And it’s not over yet. Assuming the death toll continues at its present rate (which it might not, of course) it is highly possible that the next Lancet style study in a year or two might well estimate excess mortality as being quarter of a million. Maybe more. Who knows?
And who is to say that the war will be over in two years?
And if not, the sky, as the say, is the limit.
*Please note: conservative estimate. The Lancet study estimated deaths of roughly 100,000 but also pointed out that the excessive fatalities might have been as high as 194,000 (although this ultra high figure is very unlikely).
BigMacAttack 12.16.05 at 2:01 pm
Continuing with the evil hijacking.
Two quick corrections, one that serves as an answer –
‘I would say 30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis,” Bush said. “We’ve lost about 2,140 of our own troops in Iraq.”
White House spokesman Scott McClellan later said Bush was basing his statement on media reports, “not an official government estimate.”‘
So I don’t know and that number may or may not refer to just civilian deaths.
Also I think the baseline was a year not 6 months. Still narrow.
In the years Saddam gassed villages, crushed uprisings, invaded other nations, punished Shites, etc., the numbers would be higher. The average over 10 years might be much higher and the variance might be high.
Again, I am sure the Lancet survey is a very educated guess, and good starting point. But not holy scripture.
Hektor Bim 12.16.05 at 2:07 pm
Brendan,
Are you willing to agree with me then that the war in Congo is “the major humanitarian crisis” at this time? That’s my only real point here. It is objectively worse than the situation in Iraq. You were wrong – at least be man enough to admit it.
The Lancet estimate is deaths caused by all sources, not just man-made. They then subtract off the the base rate to get an estimate of excess deaths. AIDS and famine are definitely “excess deaths”, so they definitely count relative to things like the Lancet study. Most of the deaths in Congo are basically excess deaths, not deaths due to gunfire. That’s also true of Iraq.
The numbers are disputable in Sudan, but there isn’t the same large-scale ethnic cleansing and destruction going on in Iraq. Here’s a different number: “While a recent British Parliamentary Report estimates that over 300,000 people have already died[2], the United Nations estimates that 180,000 have died in the 18 months of the conflict [3]. More than 1.8 million people had been displaced from their homes. 200,000 have fled to neighboring Chad.” from the wikipedia entry for Darfur conflict.
Note, I didn’t claim that Uganda was worse than Iraq, but here’s a link:
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/uganda/2005/0510pressure.htm
The war in Uganda has been going on for 19 years, 1/2 a million people have been killed, and 1.6 million have been driven from their homes. The number of “excess deaths” is unknown, but probably larger than 1/2 million.
Zimbabwe:
http://www.worldpress.org/Africa/790.cfm
“14 million affected by the food crisis”
In Zimbabwe, according to information from nongovernmental sources, about 2,000 people are dying of AIDS-related causes every week.
This was from 2002.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/04/30/wzim30.xml
Aid agencies say that about four million people – around a third of the population – will need food aid this year after the dire harvest.
If you are counting excess deaths, you have to count excess deaths, and dying of AIDS because you are hungry is just as much an excess death as dying in Iraq because your water is fouled.
I don’t deny that Iraq is a serious humanitarian conflict, but it gets a lot of press. The Congo doesn’t, and it is far worse.
John Lederer 12.16.05 at 2:44 pm
So you would disagree with Zarqawi in his letter to Al Qaeda last January?:
***
In what they call the Sunni triangle, the army and police are spreading out in these regions, putting in charge Sunnis from the same region. Therefore, the problem is you end up having an army and police connected by lineage, blood, and appearance to the people of the region. This region is our base of operations from where we depart and to where we return. When the Americans withdraw, and they have already started doing that, they get replaced by these agents who are intimately linked to the people of this region. What will happen to us, if we fight them, and we have to fight them, is one of only two choices:
1) If we fight them, that will be difficult because there will be a schism between us and the people of the region. How can we kill their cousins and sons and under what pretext, after the Americans start withdrawing? The Americans will continue to control from their bases, but the sons of this land will be the authority. This is the democracy, we will have no pretext.
2) We can pack up and leave and look for another land, just like it has happened in so many lands of jihad. Our enemy is growing stronger day after day, and its intelligence information increases. By god, this is suffocation! We will be on the roads again. People follow their leaders, their hearts may be with you, but their swords are with their kings.
***
Brendan 12.16.05 at 2:47 pm
Hektor
you’re right, i admit it. When I said ‘I specifically said that Congo was worse’ (i.e. than Iraq) what I should have said was ‘I specifically said that Congo was worse’. I am man enough to withdraw my first statement and replace it with the second. Phew my testosterone levels just zoomed up there.
I’m not denying the Wikipedia numbers, although I would point you in the direction of the US government (!) who, to repeat, again, said ‘Wildly divergent death toll statistics, ranging from 70,000 to 400,000, result from applying partial data to larger, nonrepresentative populations over incompatible time periods’. I will ignore the rest of your points as I have already dealt with them. For example: comparing Uganda (a war that has been going on for 19 years (!)) in terms of total mortality is absurd when compared to the Iraqi war which has been going on since 2003.
The fact is (and it is a fact) that as far as non-specific disease related death tolls PER WEEK, from non-natural causes (i.e. war) Iraq is one of the major humanitarian catastrophes of our time AT THE TIME OF WRITING. I have not denied (and would not deny) that other situations have been worse in the past (the second Congo war is generally agreed to have lasted between 1998 and 2002, although some fighting continues), nor that other situations have higher death tolls because they have been going on longer.
Incidentally you omit my most important point. To quote from Les Roberts, the author of the study:
‘“Finally, there are now at least 8 independent estimates of the number or rate of deaths induced by the invasion of Iraq. The source most favored by the war proponents (Iraqbodycount.org) is the lowest. Our estimate is the third from highest. Four of the estimates place the death toll above 100,000. The studies measure different things. Some are surveys, some are based on surveillance which is always incomplete in times of war. The three lowest estimates are surveillance based.’
And from Media Lens (from which the above was taken) ‘In fact the study not only accounted for this variability, it erred on the side of caution by excluding data from Fallujah where deaths were unusually high. Moreover, other violent hotspots – such as Ramadi, Tallafar and Najaf – were all passed over in the sample by random chance. This suggests that the actual total of deaths is likely to be higher than 100,000.‘ (note I have omitted the word ‘civilian’ from this passage, as Media Lens failed to understand that this was just a measure of extra mortality per se, not just civilian deaths).
So the number for this period is likely to be more than 100,000. Moreover, from Tim Lambert (Thu 15th Dec): ‘ the death rate seems to have increased since the (Lancet) survey was conducted.
Iraqi Body Count has actually found a higher rate per day after than before, and another surveillance system, which has since gone defunct for lack of funding, called the NGO Coordinating Committee in Iraq, found something similar, but as far as us following up on the ground, no, that hasn’t happened.’
So: the Lancet study indicated that AT LEAST 200 people were dying a day BUT PROBABLY MORE. Moreover this rate has gone up since then.
The fact is that no one knows any more how many people are dying in Iraq, but it may well be as much as 500 a day. To repeat: this puts it in the ‘top five’ of humanitarian catastrophes of our time, and possibly in the top three.
I have no idea how many people have been displaced and driven from their homes in Iraq because, of course, no one is counting.
John Lederer 12.16.05 at 3:04 pm
Bush did not say “30,000 civilian deaths”.
Read his words. I doubt that he has a substantially better line on the actual figure, but there is no sense in using a misrepresentation of what he said in a discussion.
***
“Q: Since the inception of the Iraqi war, I’d like to know the approximate total of Iraqis who have been killed. And by Iraqis I include civilians, military, police, insurgents, translators.â€
“Bush: How many Iraqi citizens have died in this war? I would say, 30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis. We’ve lost about 2,140 of our own troops.â€
Hektor Bim 12.16.05 at 3:08 pm
Brendan,
Thanks for admitting it. The Congo war is actually killing more people right now, and has killed a lot more people over a longer time.
You are right that no one knows how many people are dying every day in Iraq, from all causes. These numbers of 100,000+, I must reiterate, are not deaths from explosions and gunshot wounds, they are deaths from all causes that are in excess of the background deaths.
aretino 12.16.05 at 4:49 pm
The Kent State reference confuses me. It was the Ohio National Guard which did the shooting, not the Army. And I don’t think the feds ever made anyone face the music for that, either.
Brendan 12.16.05 at 5:47 pm
Hektor
I know i know I admit it. You beat it out of me. But at least give me credit for fighting the good fight. After all, the first time I mentioned the Congo I cunningly wrote: ‘with the Congo (taking the whole war in total) the death toll is clearly higher than in Iraq,‘ which is obviously a statement wholly opposed to your own view that the death toll in the Congo is clearly higher than in Iraq, so I stand completely corrected, having being forced to do an embarassing volte face.
I will ignore your mysterious point about the Lancet study being a record of ‘deaths from all causes that are in excess of the background deaths’ because of course the standard study of the Congo (recording 1.7 million excess deaths) ALSO deals with excess death (according to the authors of the report, probably ‘only’ 200,000 of these deaths were due to violence). The figure I gave for the Sudan was ALSO excess mortality, not actual deaths by violence.
Steve LaBonne 12.16.05 at 5:58 pm
I think Chalabi is the Tall[e]yrand of the Tigris.
The pile of shit I can see, but where are the silk stockings?
Hektor Bim 12.16.05 at 6:02 pm
Brendan,
“with the Congo (taking the whole war in total) the death toll is clearly higher than in Iraq, although whether it is higher on a month by month basis (now) is another issue.”
It is higher on a month-by-month basis, which is why I replied to you. You didn’t seem to believe that to be true in your original post.
As for excess deaths, we agree there.
Dan Kervick 12.16.05 at 8:08 pm
The Kurds will block with Allawi if they hold the balance of power for sure, because their interests are currently best served by keeping Iraq as secular as possible, and because the Kurdish parties are by and large clients of the US and will do what the US wants.
This seems quite off the mark to me.
I go on the assumption that what the Kurds want most is eventual independence, and that in the short term they will thus perceive their interests to lie in whatever is most conducive to further decentralization and regional autonomy in Iraq.
To pursue that end, the Kurds have partnered with Islamist, non-secular Shiites for some time now, because the two have a mutual interest in a weak central government, regional autonomy, and separating the Sunnis from Iraq’s oil wealth. They worked together to fashion the ‘federalist” constitution that is dividing Iraq and further weakening the Sunni Arabs. They Kurds have also been in fight with a variety of Sunni Arab insurgent groups in an effort to consolidate control over places like Kirkuk, Mosul and Tal Afar, and to reverse Saddam’s “Arabization” effort.
So I don’t see how the Kurds have an interest in now empowering the Sunnis by giving them a more effective role in a revived central government, or helping them build a coalition with either secular or Sadrist Shiites, who all aim to reverse the decentralization of Iraq, and block Kurdish moves to control the north and effectively secede from Iraq.
These issues of who is a “secularist” and who isn’t strike me as a Western preoccupation that is of great interest to only a small number of Iraqis. It matters not at all to the Kurds whether southern Iraq is ruled by mullahs, or “secular Shiites”, since they will never be ruled by these people themselves, and likely will not be part of a unified Iraq for long. Their motive is to empower those whose power interests happen to advance their own interests. Ideological or philosophical affinity is quite secondary.
Pat Stafford 12.16.05 at 9:23 pm
I know this is not really on-topic, but I’ve just stumbled across the LGF web site by accident (I was searching for stuff on Rickie Lee Jones) and am in a bit of a daze. Are there really that many hate-filled, paranoid people in the US?
Sorry… my “bleeding-heart liberal sensitivities” meant that I needed to post something somewhere sane as part of the catharsis…
PD 12.16.05 at 10:19 pm
All-time greatest thread for nearly-irrelevant nit-picking!
(And by “all” I do not mean the “universal quantification over a domain”. And by “greatest” I do not mean the ” ‘the major humanitarian crisis’ at this time”.)
Dick Durata 12.17.05 at 12:52 am
“Is it me, or is The Economist getting much better?”
Or is it those big glossy blog ads that can act subliminally, and even financially?
greg 12.17.05 at 3:25 am
How many people die every day in the UK?
soru 12.17.05 at 8:41 am
http://www.eu-cu.com/uk.htm
Death rate: 10.3 deaths/1,000 population (2002 est.)
Population: 59,778,002 (July 2002 est.)
makes ~1700 per day, for whatever that’s worth.
If any politician ever says ‘well, put things in perspective, the same amount of people I killed die every 30 days anyway’, then you can be pretty sure they have run out of better arguments.
But the same point works backwards – you can’t call a ‘net change in mortality’ figure like the Lancet one a ‘cost’ to be balanced out against a modest improvement in the situation in Iraq, because, if, as you suggest, the situation does improve at least somewhat, then that figure will be, more or less by definition, negative.
soru
Brendan 12.17.05 at 9:12 am
‘I know this is not really on-topic, but I’ve just stumbled across the LGF web site by accident (I was searching for stuff on Rickie Lee Jones) and am in a bit of a daze. Are there really that many hate-filled, paranoid people in the US?’
Interesting fact: Charles Johnson, before he adopted his new found position as ‘maniac in chief’ of the ultra-insane fringe of the extreme right, used to be a fusion jazz guitarist for the likes of Al Jarreau.
My only point is that this confirms the suspicions of a lot of us about what sort of people play fusion jazz, and what sort of people pretend to enjoy it. Bet he’s got a great collection of Hawaiian shirts though.
(And I note that the bio here was written by Eugene Chadbourne! Not….the Eugene Chadbourne surely…)
Brendan 12.17.05 at 9:51 am
Anyway…to get back on topic. I have no idea what the elections will hold, and I have no idea how well Allawi and the rest will do. But it’s worth noting that as the first results start to trickle in, Juan Cole extrapolates to suggest that The Economist’s guess is wrong.
‘AFP says that in Najaf, its sources say 80 percent of the vote went to the United Iraqi Alliance (religious Shiite coalition), and that the turnout was 85 percent. Some early returns suggest some seats going to tribal leaders in the Middle Euphrates. It doesn’t much matter, since they will certainly vote with the UIA on anything important– they are close to Grand Ayatollah Sistani. For all practical purposes, the UIA will be able to depend on all 8 parliamentarians elected from Najaf.
The same source says that early returns showed the UIA getting 70 percent of the votes in the mixed Babil province. (If this result holds, it is a sign that the UIA may do very well indeed, since it means that the Sunni vote in the mixed provinces was disproportionately small. If the UIA takes most seats in Babil, Diyala and Baghdad, all mixed, then it will certainly dominate parliament…One thing seems pretty clear at this point: Iyad Allawi is highly unlikely to be prime minister. His people were putting around rumors that a lot of Sunnis would vote for him, or that the Shiites of the south had turned against the fundamentalist Shiite UIA. The early returns aren’t showing either allegation to have been true. As for Ahmad Chalabi, his Iraqi National Accord seems to have sunk without a trace as far as early leaked returns are showing. These “secular” candidates with close ties to the US CIA and Pentagon just are not very popular in Iraq, except among a thin sliver of the urban middle classes to whom US officials and journalists are most likely to talk….AP reports that analysts familiar with the broad outlines of the voting in Iraq now believe that the Shiite religious coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, will be the biggest party in parliament.’
Cole also points out (implicitly) that the ‘received wisdom’ that because some of the insurgents used to be in the Ba’ath party this means that they are all ‘Saddamists’ who want the ‘return of Saddam’ is just a flat out lie. On the contrary, there was a three day ceasefire so that voting could take place (difficult to understand if the insurgents are ‘anti-democracy’). Instead, as everyone has pointed out, we can expect to see more and more political activity from the insurgents while the insurgency continues . The comparison of course is with Sinn Feinn and the Basque situation.
soru 12.17.05 at 10:47 am
The expected outcome is 4 blocs, the united Shi’a, Allawi’s secularists, the Kurds, and the ‘Sunni Sinn Fein’.
I don’t think the precise numbers will matter too much, as any 2 blocs including the Shi’a will have a majority, any 3 a supermajority.
The question is not so much ‘who wins’ as who, if anyone, gets left out of the government. One possibility is a government of national unity, on the lines of the Cairo conference:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5431131,00.html
soru
novakant 12.17.05 at 12:09 pm
fusion… – yuck!
Brendan 12.18.05 at 7:17 am
Latest news: and again, contra the Economist.
Allawi has left Iraq .
Speculation is growing that he has done extraordinarily badly. His supporters are claiming electoral fraud (considering the chaotic state of Iraq, of course, these accusations might have a grain of truth in them).
No news of Chalabi as of yet, but if he does manage to get a place in the new government it will almost certainly be in his new guise of ‘pro-Islamic friend of Iran’, rather than his old guise (‘old’ here meaning 6 months old) of ‘pro-secular friend of the West.’.
Remarkable man.
abb1 12.18.05 at 8:41 am
Lol. So much for the purple fingers.
abb1 12.18.05 at 8:51 am
I’m sure Mr. Allawi’s would’ve preferred cutting the finger off instead of this silly purple ink. Well, maybe next time around. When’s the next election – two months from now, as usual?
Matthew 12.18.05 at 11:06 am
Let’s just say that I remember Daniel’s predictions of the UK’s last parliamentary election.
No offense Dan but I’ll bet the other way… Reading the economist is great to soak in the received wisdom (received from whom?) but not the truth…
Daniel 12.18.05 at 12:40 pm
for what it’s worth, the Economist themselves were actually predicting a UIA landslide and at the moment it certainly looks like they read it better than I did.
Lee 12.18.05 at 1:22 pm
The Economist is the same as it ever was, perhaps you as you get older you are growing up a little?
Seixon 12.18.05 at 4:11 pm
Brendan: “Please note: conservative estimate. The Lancet study estimated deaths of roughly 100,000 but also pointed out that the excessive fatalities might have been as high as 194,000 (although this ultra high figure is very unlikely).”
Heh. Yeah, and it might have been 8,000. The Lancet study is completely worthless in determining anything. The Iraq Body Count numbers are at least documented deaths and not projections based upon less than 30 recorded deaths. I think it’s safe to say that the Iraq Body Count figure is where people should start from, and go upwards.
There are so many problems with the Lancet methodology that there is simply no reason to use their figure for anything other than shock value, which is exactly what it was used for.
Daniel 12.18.05 at 4:33 pm
Yeah, and it might have been 8,000
we can say with 97.5% confidence that it was more than 8,000.
Brendan 12.18.05 at 6:42 pm
Seixon
please go back to Tim Lambert’s blog where your ritual humiliation occurs on a regular basis.
Oh sorry I forgot….you’ve been banned for being a pain in the ass haven’t you? That’s awful. It would be a shame if you were banned from this blog too wouldn’t it?
Seixon 12.18.05 at 9:37 pm
Brendan and daniel,
Yes, and we are 97.5% confident that it was less than 194,000. I was just showing you how you only gave one side of the story, for obvious reasons.
And daniel, the only reason you believe I was humiliated over at Lambert’s blog is because Lambert kept arguing from authority instead of actually making any argument at all. Not only that, he started censoring all my comments on the Lancet study and forced me to post in a dead thread about it so no one would read it.
I debunked several myths that Lambert has peddled, and each time I did, he would censor and erase the comment.
I haven’t been banned, although I am strictly forbidden from saying anything about the Laneet study because Lambert can’t bear it.
I did make some mistakes initially, but those are all fixed now. I at least had the honesty to admit I made mistakes, something Lambert never does.
The points that I have now still stand, and Lambert has made no effort to refute them. Neither has anyone else on his blog. Neither has anyone commenting at my blog.
But hey, you’re not going to change your mind anyways. I just think it is quite telling that Lambert censors every comment of mine that uncovers his dishonesty about the Lancet study, or any other comment about the study at all.
If what I am saying is obviously false, why not let it stand and accept scrutiny and “humiliation”?
Lambert misrepresented my arguments from day one, and you will most likely keep going there to get your fix of dishonesty.
But if you feel I am wrong, how about commenting at my blog on the topic I linked to? Or do you need to go get Lambert to tell you what to think and say?
Brendan 12.19.05 at 3:21 am
Seixon
even on your last post you make an important mistake: it wasn’t daniel but me who mentioned Lambert. Since you can’t even get that right (when the facts are literally staring you in the face) this confirms my belief that there is no point in talking to you. In any case, I have no interest in debating with people who have doubts about the Lancet study (as a quick look at Lambert’s blog shows you do) any more than I have an interest in people who doubt global warming, or natural selection or quantum mechanics or heliocentrism.
Any further posts of yours on any of these topics by you (except possibly heliocentrism: at least that might be a bit of a laugh) will NOT be answered or replied to under any circumstances.
abb1 12.19.05 at 4:58 am
I remember almost nothing from my statistics class, but just from the general common sense judgement 100,000 excess deaths over 18 months does seem absurdly low.
Electricity production in population centers fell dramatically, quality/availability of drinking water fell too, plus the crime and bombings — and 100K out of 25M is less than 0.5%, one excess death for every 200 people.
Imagine your town with little or no electricity (and 110 all summer), no drinking water or sewage system, plus rampant crime and occasional explosion here and there – is this going to kill just 1 out 200 over 18 months? No way, man. It’ll be at least a dozen, probably more. So, I have to agree with Seixon here: the Lancet study is crap, not even close. We should be talking millions here.
soru 12.19.05 at 6:53 am
We should be talking millions here.
How do you reconcile that with the recent all-provinces survey that had a majority saying their lives were _better_ post-invasion?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/12_12_05_iraq_data.pdf
It would be interesting to take that survey, discard the data from the provinces that the Lancet study decided to skip, and see just how different the result was.
soru
abb1 12.19.05 at 7:07 am
Trolling works! Heh-heh.
Tim Lambert 12.19.05 at 11:36 am
Seixon is telling outright lies in comment 65 above. He has not been banned from commenting on the Lancet study and he knows it. He has posted hundreds of innumerate comments criticizing the Lancet study on my blog. All I have done is require him to post his comments in his own threads and not clutter up every other discussion on the Lancet with his nonsense.
He is well aware of this because I explained it to him again in email and I allowed his comment once he posted it to the correct thread.
Brendan 12.19.05 at 6:36 pm
I apologise for stating that Seixon has been banned from Tim Lambert’s blog, when the actual situation is as Lambert says above.
The rest of my statements stand.
Seixon's sockpuppet 12.21.05 at 10:07 am
[The below was posted by “Seixon” using a sockpuppet, and has hence been disemvowelled – the eds.]
LL. Tm, hw r y nt grng wth Sxn’s dpctn f yr cnsrs ntcs? Sxn: “[Lmbrt] strtd cnsrng ll m cmmnts n th Lnct std nd frcd m t pst n dd thrd bt t s n n wld rd t. . . . hvnt bn bnnd, lthgh m strctl frbddn frm syng nythng bt th Lnt std [n nw thrds bt th std] bcs Lmbrt cnt br t. Lmbrt: H hs nt bn bnnd frm cmmntng n th Lnct std nd h knws t. H hs pstd hndrds f nnmrt cmmnts crtczng th Lnct std n m blg. ll hv dn s rqr hm t pst hs cmmnts n hs wn thrds [.. dd thrds] nd nt clttr p vr thr dscssn n th Lnct wth hs nnsns. . . . H s wll wr f ths bcs xplnd t t hm gn n ml nd llwd hs cmmnt nc h pstd t t th crrct thrd. rn’t y jst syng wht Sxn s syng? Tm Lmbrt crd = nl. Shm.
oh dear 12.21.05 at 12:54 pm
Wow. Just wow. I posted that message. I do not know who Seixon is, nor am I a “sockpuppet” i.e. him pretending to be someone else. Check my IP. It’s from a legit UK ISP. Seixon, judging from his blog, is in Norway.
It’s sad that you have to maintain a consistent censorious regime in solidarity with Tim ‘no cred’ Lambert in order to avoid being taken to task by your critics. As it is, I did not express an opinion as to the state of the Lancet debate. I did however, come to the defence of someone who has been _unfairly_ maligned here, judging from _only_ the posts made here. And that conclusion is sound: Lambert is clearly dissembling by ostensibly agreeing with what Seixon wrote, and then ridiculously accusing him of “lying”.
Unless of course you knew all this already. In which case: shame.
oh dear 12.21.05 at 1:13 pm
Here’s an unredacted version:
LOL. Tim, how are you not agreeing wth Seixon’s depiction of your censorious antics?
Seixon: “[Lambert] started censoring all my comments on the Lancet study and forced me to post in a dead thread about it so no one would read it. . . . I haven’t been banned, although I am strictly forbidden from saying anything about the Laneet study [in new threads about the study] because Lambert can’t bear it.”
Lambert: “He has not been banned from commenting on the Lancet study [except in new threads and “every other discussion on the Lancet”] and he knows it. He has posted hundreds of innumerate comments criticizing the Lancet study in my blog. All I have done is require him to post his comments in his own threads [i.e. dead threads] and not clutter up every other discussion on the Lancet with his nonsense. . . . He is well aware of this because I explained it to him again in email and I allowed his comment once he posted it to the correct thread.
Seixon sez: you have not banned me outright.
Tim sez, ridiculously: he has not been banned so he is lying.
Seixon sez: he forces me to post in moribund threads only, and I can’t post in any other thread even when it discusses the Lancet study.
Tim sez: Well he is required to post in these threads and not others, so he lies.
In other words, Seixon’s comments aren’t allowed unless they are posted to so-called ‘dead’ threads.
So, isn’t Lambert just saying what Seixon is saying? So how is Seixon “lying” then?
Tim Lambert cred = nil.
Shame.
Seixon 12.21.05 at 5:38 pm
LOL.
I have been gone for two days and you guys are arguing as if I was here talking through sockpuppets. Seriously, you guys need to let go of the whole sockpuppet thing.
As my “sockpuppet” has pointed out, I never said I was banned. In fact, I said the direct opposite. I did write an e-mail to Lambert asking WTF was going on since none of my comments were being allowed on his blog, and I’m guessing he has some type of keyword block on me so that all comments that mention the Lancet are immediately sent to moderation or deleted. I don’t know, but I certainly haven’t said here that I am banned.
Lambert’s habit of ignoring simple details persists, you know, like actually reading what I said, and not what others were saying about me.
Tsk, tsk.
As for you brendan, why you are setting up strawmen about me not agreeing with heliocentrism and a bunch of other topics I have never even discussed on Lambert’s blog (or anywhere else – I’m not a science geek after all), I do not understand. Oh, other than to continue to try and marginalize me as a complete buffoon. Yes, I believe that the world is flat. Ya happy? LOL.
I know you aren’t interested in debating people who can show clear faults in the Lancet study, and neither is Lambert. He has invested around 50 posts in defending the damn thing, it’s not like he is going to turn around on that record.
Anyone who will describe the Lancet study methodology as “robust”, well, I’ve got some beach front property to sell them on the North Pole.
John Quiggin 12.21.05 at 7:03 pm
Seixon, rather than dragging this out, why don’t you settle it by sending your critique to the Lancet as a comment?
Publication would make it clear that you have, at least, a credible point to make rather than, as it appears to most of us, a basic lack of understanding of statistics. Or do you think the editors and referees of the Lancet are in on the conspiracy?
Tim Lambert 12.21.05 at 8:13 pm
Seixon wrote: “I just think it is quite telling that Lambert censors every comment of mine that uncovers his dishonesty about the Lancet study, or any other comment about the study at all.”
That statement is 1. untrue and 2. Seixon knows that is is untrue. Seixon lied.
As for marginalizing him as a buffoon. Look at the post. I just presented his own words.
oh dear 12.21.05 at 8:39 pm
Oh dear, more dissembling:
Seixon wrote: “I just think it is quite telling that Lambert censors every comment of mine that uncovers his dishonesty about the Lancet study, or any other comment about the study at all.â€
That statement is 1. untrue and 2. Seixon knows that is is untrue. Seixon lied.
But that wasn’t your initial argument was it? Your initial accusation was that he claimed he was banned when he wasn’t, hence he lied. Look at your entire post 70.
Now you change your tune, claiming – contrary to your previous assertion that you DID require him to shunt his comments into a moribund thread – that you do not, in fact, engage in that mode of censorship. Not only did you change your argument, in changing your argument, you contradict yourself. Which is it?
Seixon 12.21.05 at 10:22 pm
Lambert, if there’s anyone being dishonest here, it is you. What I said there is 100% true, you censor every comment about the study or where I talk about your dishonesty regarding that study, unless I post it in that one thread, which I already explained. That’s what censoring is, not allowing me to write freely on the comments like everyone else.
quiggin,
I already have a dialog going with Les Roberts himself, which I will finish after the holidays. Obviously the Lancet people would want to defend a study they have put their credibility behind in publishing, just like Lambert incessantly defends it with every ounce of effort in his body. Roberts told me himself that it had been reviewed by so and so. That’s great – I’ll never know what they said about it anyways. Their assumption that the governates they paired up were similar might have been taken unchallenged by the peer-reviewers.
If I don’t get anywhere with Roberts, then I might be persuaded to submit my critique to the Lancet, although I’d expect the same results as I have gotten on Lambert’s blog. When people have invested too much of their own credibility into something, they will never admit to being wrong in any way.
Which is also why Lambert censors my comments instead of letting the truth withstand the scrutiny it deserves.
John Quiggin 12.21.05 at 10:46 pm
Well if the Lancet is no good for you, why not another journal? This is a high-profile study, and a convincing refutation would be publishable anywhere I would think.
But, rereading a previous thread, I suggest you polish your definitions of terms like stratified sampling and cluster sampling before submitting (Hint: they are not related in any significant way, except that the population is divided into groups before the sample is drawn.) Stats journal referees tend to be biased against people who get this kind of thing wrong.
Seixon 12.21.05 at 11:00 pm
I know the difference between cluster and stratified sampling quite well. I’m not sure why you would think otherwise, well, except if you have been reading people ridiculing me for things I have not said over at Lambert’s blog… ;)
My main concern, my underlying point, is that the methodology they used would only have been acceptable if they could have established that their pairings were in fact similar. I now have two sets of data that indicate this not to be true for at least half of the pairs, if not five out of six.
Seeing as how they are different, this automatically spells out problems because any variance between the pairs would not make it into the study and the confidence interval – obviously since half of the pairs have not been sampled, and the sampled member of the pair being projected as the same rate for the other member.
The entire clustering of clusters procedure is one that I cannot find done anywhere else, and which seems to be at odds with the definitions of a random sample, and also at odds with the entire concept of sampling. That is unless you assume that the paired up governates had similar death rates…. which I think two sets of data now put to shame.
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