"Is it true, or not, that the US has killed more innocent civilians in Iraq over the past 18 months than were killed in every act of foreign terrorism against the US since the 1776?"
It depends on what you consider accurate numbers........
Death by numbers
...... A recent claim that 100,000 Iraqis have died since the war in Iraq, mostly at the hands of Americans, is misleading, statistical junk.....
.... Their toll of the dead in post-Saddam Iraq was stunning – about five times higher than any credible survey or count had found.....
.... The editor of Lancet, Richard Horton, then grabbed this excuse for a political sermon: "Democratic imperialism has led to more deaths, not fewer." Iraq's liberation was "a failure".
The study's lead author, Les Roberts of Baltimore's John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, added: "I was opposed to the war and I still think that the war was a bad idea."....
.... But take a closer look at the Lancet survey and you'll find its claims are unbelievable. Junk. Preposterous.
How could its claim of 100,000 deaths so easily have become the new gospel?
Just ask yourself: Have more than 180 Iraqis, mainly women and children, really died every day, on average, for the past 18 months, usually at the hands of the Americans?....
If so, where are all the funerals? Where are the pictures? Where are the news reports from the Iraqi media, or pro-extremist outlets such as al-Jazeera and the BBC? And where are the American soldiers, reeling from the killing of so many children, to tell the TV cameras of their horror?
But few of the commentators who seized on the survey bothered to ask such basic questions, or even to heed Human Rights Watch, which warned: "The numbers seem to be inflated."....
.... Nor did they wonder if it was wise to put their faith in a survey whose authors were so unsure of their results that they had to admit they had 95 per cent confidence that the true death toll from the invasion was only somewhere between 8000 and 194,000.
That's right – the toll could in fact be as low as 8000. Or even lower.....
.... Its researchers interviewed 7868 Iraqis in 988 households in 33 neighbourhoods around Iraq, allegedly chosen randomly, and asked who in the house had died in the 14 months before the invasion and who in the 18 months after.
They then figured out the death rate before the invasion and the (allegedly higher) one after.
They then concluded there had been 100,000 extra Iraqi deaths since the invasion – by applying the difference in the two rates to all Iraq's 24 million people.
But this meant the researchers had to get two things right that they seem instead to have got wrong – the death rates both before and after the invasion.
Why are these figures important? Because a low death rate before the war, and a high one after, would allow the researchers to "prove" the war was costing many thousands of lives.
And bingo. According to the survey, Iraqis before the war were dying at the rate of just five in 1000 people each year. The death rate among infants was around the average for the region – about 29 in 1000.
But what evidence we have tells us these pre-war death rates were actually much higher. Dated United Nations figures suggest the overall death rate was well over seven in every 1000 – or close to, if not higher than, the present rate of 7.9 in every 1000 that the Lancet survey suggests.
But even more persuasive are 2002 figures from UNICEF, which in a much bigger survey of 24,000 households found the infant mortality rate in Iraq before the war was actually a tragic 108 deaths per 1000 infants.
This is more than three times higher than the Lancet survey claims was the case – and double what even the survey claims is the infant mortality rate today.
How could the anti-war activists forget? Remember, before the war, anti-American propagandists such as John Pilger denouncing this "genocide" of Iraqi children and blaming it on the United Nations sanctions demanded by those evil Americans?
We know now, in fact, that Saddam Hussein, with the help of corrupt officials in the UN, France, Russia and China, had stolen more than $US20 billion of oil money meant to feed his people and pay for their medicines, and malnutrition in his shattered economy was rife.
All that, thank God, has changed for the better since the liberation. The best figures – including statistics from the Iraqi Health Ministry – suggest many thousands of Iraq's children are in fact alive today who'd have died under Saddam.
The Lancet survey seems just as shaky in calculating Iraq's present death toll.
It interviewed some 240 people in Fallujah before the recent fighting there, and worked out that these 30 households had lost 52 dead due to violence, mostly women and children killed by the Americans.
The researchers did not ask for proof of the children's deaths and admit they were reluctant to ask for proof of all the adults' deaths, either, "because this might have implied that they did not believe the respondents, perhaps triggering violence". Were the Iraqis likewise scared to tell the truth?
So was that figure – of some 240 people losing 52 dead – credible as a sample of Fallujah's death rate?
Put it this way. Fallujah is a city of about 285,000 people.
If the Lancet survey of its residents is right and one in six people have been killed since the invasion, then nearly 50,000 residents died violently even before this month's fighting.
If we assume that the American casualty rates of seven wounded for one dead apply to civilians, too, then more people have been killed and wounded in Fallujah than actually live there.
So where are the mass graves? Why didn't Fallujah empty months ago, as the survivors fled the utter carnage? How is it that the Americans could kill a sixth of its people through aerial bombing, and wound the rest, yet leave most of the houses untouched?
Truly, these statistics are unbelievable. I suspect the study's authors thought so, too, which may be why they left the Fallujah figures out – calling them unrepresentative – when they calculated Iraq's death toll since the invasion.
But the survey techniques they used to give clearly wrong figures in Fallujah are the same ones they used in the other 32 clusters of households that they interviewed elsewhere in Iraq.
Did they give any better information?
In fact, the Iraqis in the remaining clusters came up with just 21 violent deaths between them – only two of women, and four of children. These deaths, if true, are the ones that the survey used to calculate a death rate that had them claiming at least 100,000 other Iraqis also died because of the war.
Note how terribly small this sample is and how easy to manipulate, accidentally or not, to produce wildly differing results.
Note that most of these dead are not women and children, nor necessarily civilians. The gloating headlines this survey has inspired of a massacre of the innocents in Iraq, with Americans to blame, are almost all wild guesses and almost all certainly wrong.
But saying all this won't make much difference. Too many commentators seem too desperate to believe the worst of the Americans and to belittle the liberation of Iraqis from a tyrant.
That desperation means even junk surveys such as this will find many eager believers, ready to hear the very worst. And to recklessly repeat it.
bolta@heraldsun.com.au
heraldsun.news.com.au
100,000 Dead—or 8,000
How many Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war?
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Friday, Oct. 29, 2004, at 3:49 PM PT
The authors of a peer-reviewed study, conducted by a survey team from Johns Hopkins University, claim that about 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war. Yet a close look at the actual study, published online today by the British medical journal the Lancet, reveals that this number is so loose as to be meaningless.....
slate.msn.com
Study on civilian deaths flawed
....The Lancet's study, led by a Johns Hopkins University team, utilized some controversial methods.... The so-called ''confidence interval'' indicates that anywhere from 8,000 to 194,000 Iraqi civilians died.
miami.com
Bogus Lancet Study
Via The Command Post comes this study published in Lancet (free reg) which purports that 100,000 Iraqi have died from violence, most of it caused by Coalition air strikes, since the invasion of Iraq. Needless to say, this study will become an article of faith in certain circles but the study is obviously bogus on its face.
First, even without reading the study, alarm bells should go off. The study purports to show civilian casualties 5 to 6 times higher than any other reputable source. Most other sources put total combined civilian and military deaths from all causes at between 15,000 to 20,000. The Lancet study is a degree of magnitude higher. Why the difference?
Moreover, just rough calculations should call the figure into doubt. 100,000 deaths over roughly a year and a half equates to 183 deaths per day. Seen anything like that on the news? With that many people dying from air strikes every day we would expect to have at least one or two incidents where several hundred or even thousands of people died. Heard of anything like that? In fact, heard of any air strikes at all where more than a couple of dozen people died total?
Where did this suspicious number come from? Bad methodology.
From the summary:
Mistake One:
"A cluster sample survey was undertaken throughout Iraq during September, 2004"
It is bad practice to use a cluster sample for a distribution known to be highly asymmetrical. Since all sources agree that violence in Iraq is highly geographically concentrated, this means a cluster sample has a very high chance of exaggerating the number of deaths. If one or two of your clusters just happen to fall in a contended area it will skew everything. In fact, the study inadvertently suggests that this happened when it points out later that:
"Violent deaths were widespread, reported in 15 of 33 clusters..."
In fact, this suggest that violent deaths were not "widespread" as 18 of the 33 clusters reported zero deaths. if 54% of the clusters had no deaths then all the other deaths occurred in 46% of the clusters. If the deaths in those clusters followed a standard distribution most of the deaths would have occurred in less than 15% of the total clusters.
And bingo we see that:
"Two-thirds of all violent deaths were reported in one cluster in the city of Falluja"
(They also used a secondary grouping system (page 2, paragraph 3) that would cause further skewing.)
Mistake Two:
"33 clusters of 30 households each were interviewed about household composition, births, and deaths since January, 2002."
Self-reporting in third-world countries is notoriously unreliable. In the guts of the paper (page 3, paragraph 2) they say they tried to get death certificates for at least two deaths for each cluster but they never say how many of the deaths, if any, they actually verified. It is probable that many of the deaths, especially the oddly high number of a deaths of children by violence, never actually occurred.
So we have a sampling method that fails for diverse distributions, at least one tremendously skewed cluster and unverified reports of deaths.
Looking at the raw data they provide doesn't inspire any confidence whatsoever. Table 2 (page 4) shows the actual number of deaths reported. The study recorded 142 post-invasion deaths total with with 73 (51%) due to violence. Of those 73 deaths from violence, 52 occurred in Falluja. That means that all the other 21 deaths occurred in one of the 14 clusters were somebody died, or 1.5 deaths per cluster. Given what we know of the actual combat I am betting that most of the deaths occurred in three or four clusters and the rest had 1 death each. Given the low numbers of samples, one or two fabricated reports of deaths could seriously warp the entire study.
At the very end of the paper (page 7, paragraph 1) they concede that:
"We suspect that a random sample of 33 Iraqi locations is likely to encounter one or a couple of particularly devastated areas. Nonetheless, since 52 of 73 (71%) violent deaths and 53 of 142 (37%) deaths during the conflict occurred in one cluster, it is possible that by extraordinary chance, the survey mortality estimate has been skewed upward."
Gee, you think? It's almost as if military violence is not randomly distributed across the population of Iraq but is instead intelligently directed at specific areas, rendering a statistical extrapolation of deaths totally useless.
In the next paragraph they admit:
"Removing half the increase in infant deaths and the Falluja data still produces a 37% increase in estimated mortality."
That puts their final numbers just above the high end of the range reported by other sources.
This "peer reviewed study" is a piece of polemical garbage. Everybody is supposed to take away the bumper sticker summary, "Coalition kills 100,000 Iraqi civilians, half of them children," without reading the details. It tries to use crude epidemiological models like those used to study disease and applies them to the conscious infliction of violence by human beings. The result is statistical static.
Posted by Shannon Love on October 29, 2004 05:14 PM | TrackBack
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