It makes me so angry, when newspapers publish online about "new studies," but provide absolutely zero links to said study, which surely must be online somewhere.
Does someone at the Mineshaft happen to have a link (in their back pocket, perhaps)?
http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/journals/lancet/s0140673606694919.pdf
If you'll recall, when Hitler aggressively invaded innocent countries, he killed 9 million in concentration camps -- and that's on top of all the troop casualties and collateral damage. By my estimate, Hitler's conduct in WWII is, on a quantitative basis, around 20 times worse than ours in Iraq. We still have the moral highground here, despite liberal hand-wringing.
If I'm reading this right, their 90% confidence interval starts at around 400,000. Even if you restrict your attention to the 80% of cases in which they verified death certificates, it looks like you can be very confident of an excess of 315,000 deaths.
Ok, obviously we've done a ton of harm in Iraq and I know nothing about statistics, but 600,000 deaths from violence just seems very hard to believe. We've been in Iraq for about three and a half years, right? Doesn't that come out to something like 500 deaths from violence every single day?
This is a terrible tragedy. I mean, it was a terrible tragedy before, when we thought the number of Iraqi dead was much smaller, but this makes it that much worse.
No one anywhere has been made more safe as a result of those Iraqi deaths. We are all less safe than we were before the war.
Those Iraqis died for nothing.
Well, if you take the figure of 315,000 -- with a higher confidence, etc -- that's 250 or so a day.
That's not that outrageous. There are reports of mass killings -- 20, 30, 40 people -- nearly every single day.
6: I not sure that "excess deaths" is exclusively "deaths from violence": 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred. (WP).
It's "excess mortality," ogged, which, if I understand it correctly, also takes into consideration deaths from other causes than violence--people who would otherwise have been able to get to a hospital, people who would have recovered in a functioning hospital, for example. Again, if I understand the method correctly.
Another figure that should probably be thrown into this debate is the number of Iraqis who've emigrated. Unfortunately, I can't find that figure right now.
If you look at the linked study, Timbot, they say that 601,000 of the 655,000 were due to violence.
"Of post-invasion deaths, 601 027 (426 369-793 663) were due to violence, the most common cause being gunfire."
9: I don't have the source at hand, but the report I heard this morning said that ~600K of that figure was violence, with the remaining ~55K from disease, etc.
There are reports of mass killings -- 20, 30, 40 people -- nearly every single day.
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking of too (and I'm really not trying to minimize the harm here, I mean, even if it's 100,000 since the invasion started, that's outrageous), but it's a huge leap from 50 to 250, nevermind 500.
Iraq Body Count are claiming figures of approx 50,000.
If the Lancet numbers are right, that means only somewhere between say 10% and 20% of violent deaths are being reported in the media. Which doesn't seem at all unlikely given the nature of the sectarian violence, kidnappings, murder and so on that are currently taking place.
Iraq Body Count was always going to be the barest of minimums. Now that the country is so divided against itself, now that claiming bodies at the morgue represents a death wish, now that journalists are so widely targeted, I wouldn't be at all surprised that it was off by a whole shitload.
I have to say that I'm in the somewhat the same boat as ogged: I suppose I find 315,000 to be fairly believeable (but I don't know about 95% believeable) but 600,000 is just mind-bogglingly huge. I have trouble believing anything close to it even though I don't think I can think of any reason not to (*).
Also, what I'm about to say might be tremendously dumb in some way but...how can the lower CI bound for deaths solely from violence be higher than that of deaths from all causes?
* I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict the standard wingnut response to this: "But the survey was conducted by Arabs! Of course they're lying!"
So how long before the right wing calls the authors of this study traitors and accuses the MSM of helping the terrorists by reporting this?
They won't have to. What makes you think this is going to get any coverage? And who reads the Lancet, anyway?
In his press conference this morning, Bush said something like, "the methodology used in these surveys has been pretty widely discredited," and repeated a couple of times that he did not find the numbers at all creditable. That's "all signals go" for the pushback.
What makes you think this is going to get any coverage? And who reads the Lancet, anyway?
CNN.com, at least, is covering it.
I don't understand why we are comparing IBC's figures with Lancet's. They appear to counting two entirely different things. IIRC, IBC counts the number of civilian deaths that can be directly attributed to conflicts in which our side was involved. Since not all intervention-related violence in Iraq is directed specifically at US or its allies, IBC's count is bound to be lower than Lancet's.
"appear to counting" s/b "appear to be counting"
I'm astonished by the number as well -- I'm taking it on the credibility of the authors, given that the attacks on the prior survey all appeared to be nonsense.
Wow, and GWB has been saying 30,000.
I suppose I'm the only one who rolled my mouse over the link in the last sentence of the post and thought, "Canada!? Jesus Christ, are they doing something threatening now too?"
(And yes, I actually clicked through the link to see what was up.)
28 -- what's an order of magnitude here or there?
The authors address the "someone would have noticed" objection:
Our estimate of excess deaths is far higher than those reported in Iraq through passive surveillance measures. This discrepancy is not unexpected. Data from passive surveillance are rarely complete, even in stable circumstances, and are even less complete during conflict, when access is restricted and fatal events could be intentionally hidden.
Aside from Bosnia, we can find no conflict situation where passive surveillance recorded more than 20% of the deaths measured by population-based methods. In several outbreaks, disease and death recorded by facility-based methods underestimated events by a factor of ten or more when compared with population-based estimates.
Also, the study is critically flawed because they are getting to excess deaths using pre-war Iraq as a baseline. They ought to be using as their baseline total nuclear/chemical warfare between the United States and Iraq, which was the projected outcome of our not invading, IIRC. I bet if you run those numbers, the Iraqis still come out ahead.
The fact that the projections were all wrong isn't really material, is it? I mean, 20/20 hindsight and all.
Juan Cole: There are about 90 major towns and cities in Iraq. If we subtract Baghdad, where about 100 a day die, that still leaves 89. If an average of 4 or so are killed in each of those 89, then the study's results are correct. Of course, 4 is an average. Cities in areas dominated by the guerrilla movement will have more than 4 killed daily, sleepy Kurdish towns will have no one killed.
I love the administration line that `these methods have been widely discredited', given that the methodology is pretty standard stuff. I know this administration is largely hostile to science, but really the media shouldn't give them a free ride on this. The administrations `rejection' of this sort of information largely seems to boil down to sticking its fingers in its ears and yelling `I can't hear you'.
Until and unless someone demonstrates a flaw in application of this sort of technique (i.e. the basic hypothesis don't hold) a study like has got to be treated as the best estimate we have. That doesn't mean it isn't weaker than we would like, but it is really hard to get good numbers out of a conflict area.
Numbers like IBC are only credible if they are careful and conservative in methodology, and thereby can only provide a lower bound. It's really, really hard to estimate how low this bound is.
Which is good to know, because that's a hell of a death toll for a humanitarian operation.
"Truly, even in the midst of a complete economic paralysis caused by the concentration of all major productive facilities on other-worldly armaments, and despite the anguished cries of those suffering from peculiar industrial injuries which our medical men were totally unequipped to handle, in the midst of all this mind-wracking disorganization, it was yet very exhilarating to realize that we had taken our lawful place in the future government of the galaxy and were even now helping to make the Universe Safe for Democracy."
William Tenn, "The Liberation of Earth."
Another key to understanding how these numbers got so large is that Western journalists don't get much outside of Baghdad, so there's a whole rest of the country's worth of violence going on that gets very little, if any, coverage.
really the media shouldn't give them a free ride on this
This is of course just one of many examples of the maddening once and future some-say-ism.
Another key to understanding how these numbers got so large is that Western journalists don't get much outside of Baghdad, so there's a whole rest of the country's worth of violence going on that gets very little, if any, coverage.
This makes sense.
29: You are not the only one.
My mind is boggled by the 650K number as well. I'm interested in the breakdown of violent deaths. I was going to be heartened by the fact that the study indicates that "only" 24% of the violent deaths are attributable to "coalition forces," but that 45% unknown figure isn't very reassuring.
What in the hell are we doing over there?
I don't know where or why I picked up the habit of using cite tags instead of i tags when I quote things, but I really need to lose it.
You should use <em> tags instead of <i> tags.
Next you're going to announce that we should just use "thru" and "nite", aren't you?
29: What in the hell are we doing over there?
Killing an awful lot of innocent people (and a much much smaller number of not-so-innocent people) in the name of maintaining economic and political interests in the region. Was there ever any doubt?
Hey--heads up!
Glenn Greenwald is asking for cash.
I just gave him $50.00
You should give him twice that much, because you have a real job and you don't have two starving children, like I do.
Greenwald has done some of the best, most effective work in the blogosphere; if the unfogged cooperative really gets its stuff together and picks a cause, it can hope, maybe, to be as strong a force for change a year from now as Greenwald already is.
Or you can be a force for change today by sending him some cash. Do it, so that the guy can write his brilliant stuff.
The value of em is mainly in its usefulness to screenreaders for the blind and that kind of thing, yeah?
Which would be ill served by using it to mark quotes.
Indeed. Because I am just that kind of nerd, I use <i> for my quotations here, and <em> when I want to emphasize something. I'd rather use <blockquote>, but italics seems to be the house style.
WaPo reported the story on A12, and it's not on the front page of the website. Below the fold (third "World" story) on nytimes.com. It's the second story on the BBC News site and was their lead story this morning when I was getting dressed for work; top story on the Guardian site as well. Liberal U.S. media, heh.
Recently a reporter said that 1) if a schoolchild is blown up by a bomb, it isn't news, and 2) many families bury their dead near their home because they don't dare have a funeral. So if you see 60 dead reported for one day, those are just the ones that the killers dumped because they wanted them to be visible (the kidnapees but not the drivebys.).
You should use tags instead of tags.
Any particular reason why?
19: Careful, confidence intervals can be difficult to interpret correctly.
"Classical confidence intervals often confuse people. They do not say “with high probability, for my observed sample, the bounds holds”. Instead, they tell you that if you reason according to the confidence interval in the future (and the constraints on D are satisfied), then you are not often wrong. Restated, they tell you something about what a safe procedure is in a stochastic world where d is the safety parameter."
53: Won't ever matter here (especially since we're not using them for actual emphases when quoting), but it's a good habit to get into if you use style sheets, so that style changes down the road are handled consistently.
mrh, blockquotes are supported in the comments. eb uses them pretty often.
Hmmm, 53 makes no sense. I forgot that you can't just cut and paste those brackety things. Glad you knew what I meant, apo, and thanks for answering. You sir, are the hero.
I think it says something bad about me that I don't have any idea what people are talking about in this thread, what with the em tags and smart tags and style sheets and whatnot. I know how to make things italicized or bold (or sometimes underlined, but this doesn't seem to work consistently). That's about all I know how to do.
mrh, blockquotes are supported in the comments. eb uses them pretty often.
He does, but—in accordance with house style—to quote text drawn from sources other than the preceding comments.
58:I want to how to draw the line thru words. That's cool.
These numbers don't surprise me at all, but that's predictable, huh. I expect, when it's over, if it's over, aw hell, 5 more Friedmans, we will have been complicit in the decimation of Iraq. Half of those exiles.
I want to how to draw the line thru words.
<strike></strike>
I think it says something bad about me
"bad" s/b "good"
At least Bush didn't respond the same way Rick Moran did. Rick interpreted the comment that "56% of all deaths are from gunshot wounds, 14% are from bombs or explosions, and 31% are due to coalition forces" to mean that the percentages of dead Iraqis sum to 101%.
He should've stuck to attacking the confidence interval. He'd be wrong, but sane.
Wait, what's stupid about that? They do sum to 101%. It's a trivial, hackish thing to point out as if it somehow discredited the study, since it's obviously just a rounding error in the summary numbers. So it's silly and it's a criticism that only increases noise, rather than actually contributing to the debate, and maybe that's all you meant. But I don't see how it's either stupid or insane.
Nevermind, I just now actually read the sentence, whereby I realized that they aren't mutually exclusive categories. Duh.
At the risk of seeming callous- life in Iraq sucked before the invasion, and now it sucks after the invasion and occupation. But without the invasion life would still suck in Iraq for the next 10, or 20, or 50 years. I don't think that post invasion the same can be said. I also have some problem with the baseline for the studies. The following is cut and paste, but still:
According to the CIA fact book
The average death rate for
Afghanistan is 20.34/1000(est)
Hungary is 13.31/1000(est)
The World is 8.67/1000 (est)
The EU is 10.10/1000 (est)
US is 8.26/1000 (est)
Pakistan 8.23/1000 (est)
But Iraq stood miraculously at 5.5/1000 (est).
It sucks to be a civilian in a war zone. And I have alot of problems with the way that the occupation has been handled. But the body count seems like the wrong metric to use to flay the Bush administration .
life in Iraq sucked before the invasion, and now it sucks after the invasion
"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this -- this [chuckle] is working very well for them."
For most Iraqis, it is entirely worse than it was before the invasion, TLL. The problem with your calculation is that Iraq was pretty plainly going to spiral into chaos whenever Saddam left the scene, regardless of the means of his departure. So you could say, "Well, this was coming down the road one way or the other."
Except we're the ones who set it off, and we managed to do it in such a way as to maximize the chaos and violence. Saying we haven't executed it well misses the point. We shouldn't have executed it at all, and there isn't any way to rationalize that away now.
So tyranny and order is better than chaos. I understand that logic. I don't know that I agree, but I understand.
This might account for TLS's miracle:
Iraq
Age structure:
0-14 years: 39.7% (male 5,398,645/female 5,231,760)
15-64 years: 57.3% (male 7,776,257/female 7,576,726)
65 years and over: 3% (male 376,700/female 423,295) (2006 est.)
United States
0-14 years: 20.4% (male 31,095,847/female 29,715,872)
15-64 years: 67.2% (male 100,022,845/female 100,413,484)
65 years and over: 12.5% (male 15,542,288/female 21,653,879) (2006 est.)
69 -- Yeah but what about tyranny and chaos?
You're going to die -- you know it, I know it, we all know it. It's only a matter of time. So why should some person who kills you suffer any guilt at all? Since you're going to die anyway? And if he does it in the course of making his own life better -- say by helping himself to whatever cash you might have in your pockets -- why isn't that just the peachiest outcome of all?
5.5/1000 is the pre-invasion baseline used in the Lancet Study. The rate climbed to 7.5 between March 03 and April 04, 10.9 in 04/05 and 19.8 in 05/06.
The death rate attributable to violence climbed from 3.2/1000 in March 03 to 12/1000 in June 2006.
Tyranny and order is better than tyranny and chaos.
But Iraq stood miraculously at 5.5/1000 (est).
These death rates aren't unusual for countries with young populations. Saudi Arabia's death rate is 2.62; Jordan's is 2.63; Libya's is 3.48; Algeria's is 4.6; Syria's is 4.88; Egypt's is 5.26. At 5.5/1000, Iraq already had a higher death rate than any other Arab country in the Middle East or Mediterranean Africa but Yemen, Lebanon, and Morocco.
If you're interested, I can post more in length about why the lowest death rates in the world can be found in a not particularly developed area.
So tyranny and order is better than chaos.
Living in an authoritarian state beats having your drill-holed body dumped without a head in the sewer, yes.
By the way, totally off-topic: I'd like to sign the petition to help the Iranian women who are to be stoned to death, but I'm afraid my name will be a liability. Should I sign it anyway? Should I sign with an alias?
71. I agree that neither the Baathist nor the Shiite militiaman has any remorse or guilt over those he murders. And for that matter US troops that murder have little or no remorse. But those troops who have mistakenly killed civilians, and many who have killed enemy troops have remorse and guilt their entire lives. I don't see how that equates to your robbery analogy.
74- or being put into the industrial shredder.
73- Thanks for the info. The younger population scews the curve.
78: I think most people prefer tyrrany and order to chaos. Chaos means a lack of security, and you have only to look at our own country to see what we're willing to give up in the face of trivial threats. Faced with life in Iraq today, we'd elect GWB dictator-for-life.
80- which is what the Iraqis were doing before the invasion. What did Sadaam get 99%? And who was the guy that got 1% and who voted for him?
80- which is what the Iraqis were doing before the invasion. What did Sadaam get 99%? And who was the guy that got 1% and who voted for him?
Agreed. And, if this nightmare in Iraq goes on for too long, a majority of them will happily welcome a new Hussein. (Which they will regret at length down the road.) Which, as I said, makes them no different from us.
77 -- I wasn't talking about the troops, I was talking about apologists for needless death.
Here's my serious Iraq question. (This seems to be an appropriate trhead to derail ever so slightly.)
I heard Jim Baker on NPR talking about his bipartisan Iraq commission. He said that there were other options on the table besides the White House's black and white options of "stay the course" and "cut and run."
Baker has loved the Bushes forever. He was convinced that George HW Bush should be president sicne the day he met him. My first thought was, "Is this a sign that Baker is abandoning W., because he has come to see what a colossal fuck-up this whole thing is. If so, that's really significant. Could it signal more defections?" But now I'm inclined to think taht Baker is just super crafty and that I don't understand his dark plan. The Washington Monthly seems to agree with my later view.
What say you all?
80. pffff. I'd totally seize my chance to become a warlord.
Is this a sign that Baker is abandoning W.
No, Baker is holding back his report so that it doesn't hurt the Rs during the elections. Maybe he can have some efficacy in persuading Bush to something, but I doubt he'll cross him.
84 -- While something short of 'peace is at hand' I think the point of Baker's various public statements is to get those members of the Republican coalition who have serious doubts about the war to stick with the party in the mid-terms. No need to ditch Republicans over their handling of the war, because there's a grown-up standing in the wings ready to step in and clean up the mess.
86 -- That's not to say that what I describe in 87 isn't a bait and switch. Can Baker trump Cheney? Stay tuned.
Thanks CC. That's the sort of thing I was wondering. I need to go to sleep now, but I'll check in later tomorrow.
My first thought was, "Is this a sign that Baker is abandoning W., because he has come to see what a colossal fuck-up this whole thing is. If so, that's really significant. Could it signal more defections?" But now I'm inclined to think taht Baker is just super crafty and that I don't understand his dark plan.
He's certainly not going to publically abandon W, but I'm sure he thinks the invasion was a mistake, that he always thought that. I'm sure he recognizes that Iraq is a massive fuckup. He'll get the best deal he can for US interests. I suspect that issues regarding oil are paramount. I just saw something that seemed to indicate that even W is getting clear on this.
Beyond that, who knows? I can't think of anyone the neocons must worry about more, though.
So tyranny and order is better than chaos.
It's not flowers and puppy dogs, but it's predictable. People managed to go to college and watch TV and go out for ice cream in pre-invasion Iraq. Very brutal regime, and life went on.
There are probably some parts where they manage a normal life now where they couldn't before. (Hiya, Kurdistan!) People are really damn adaptable. But predictable and brutal seems like it would be easier to deal with than uncertain and brutal.
If you're interested, I can post more in length about why the lowest death rates in the world can be found in a not particularly developed area.
Ooh, ooh. Lack of birth control?
Re tyranny and order v. tyranny and chaos: just think of the Iraqi death count as the ultimate proof that open source beats the shit out of centralized management structures. In this case, literally.
Tassled Loafered Leech, nobody ran in the election except Saddam. The Ba'ath Party's mock elections have just one candidate, who the voters can then vote "yes" or "no" on. I'm not sure what happens if there are more "no" than "yes" votes, but it's about as likely as the entire chain of succession to the Presidency of the United States dying.
Cala, it's not just lack of birth control. The entire third world lacks birth control, but its total death rate can be very high or very low.
Rather, what's different is that Arab states are fairly well-developed. Iraq had a burgeoning middle class; Saudi Arabia once had a GDP per capita on a par with the developed world; Qatar has a higher GDP per capita than Japan. With the exception of Jordan and Palestine, all Arab countries with a death rate less than 4.5 also have a 5-figure GDP per capita.
All the curable diseases that haunt Sub-Saharan Africa are either absent or barely present in the Middle East and Mediterranean Africa. It's not as if there's no health infrastructure in the Middle East, then. Kuwait doesn't have the same quality of health care as Japan, but it doesn't have the same quality as Afghanistan, either. Iraq and Yemen, both of which have high death rates by regional standards, also have very high infant mortality.
Here's where birth control comes in. The Middle East isn't the most misogynistic region of the world - some areas of South Asia are even worse - but it's misogynistic enough that women are kept barefoot and pregnant. Add that to oil-based elites that have no interest in keeping the population educated, and you get a population boom that creates a third-world age structure, without the endemic diseases that keep life expectancy dismally low in countries like Niger and Sierra Leone.
Hey, did y'all read Jane Arraf's post about life in Iraq?
It's the comments of Ms Charlotte Hess to that article that are really illuminating, at least to a foreigner. Here is a kindhearted, silly woman who hasn't the beginnning of an idea that there might be a world outside America. I think the sheer horror of what we (Anglo-Americans) have done in Iraq makes it much harder to admit.
women are kept barefoot and pregnant
What's wrong wit that?