I'm writing a print piece about this so I'm afraid you'll have to wait for my opinion, but a few quick thoughts:
- The disparity between the Lancet figures and the new count is higher than people are assuming; the Lancet study is more than a year older than the NEJM one. Since the violence was trending upwards, if the new study is correct, the Lancet figures were wildly, wildly, wildly off.
- The new version is more likely to be correct;
it covers a longer time period, uses a bigger sample, and employs more than one method of counting - It is not that likely to be correct, in the sense of giving us a good, descriptive number. Iraq is a war zone, and it is very hard to collect good data. Beware of false precision, particularly if it validates your priors.
- One would obviously wish that the Iraqi government were not involved.
- Attempting to salvage the Lancet study by distinguishing between violent and non-violent deaths are silly. Virtually all the violent deaths in the Lancet study were excess, and virtually all the excess deaths were violent.
- 150,000 deaths is a figure that should make any supporter of the war swallow hard.
- There are good reasons to conduct public debates about these sorts of things with courtesy and humility.
The disparity between the Lancet figures and the new count is higher than people are assuming; the Lancet study is more than a year older than the NEJM one. Since the violence was trending upwards, if the new study is correct, the Lancet figures were wildly, wildly, wildly off.
I'm not sure that this part is valid. The new study's abstract states that it specifically only covers the first three years, and does not count deaths after June 2006.
Shouldn't 150,000 deaths make any proponent of any policy swallow hard? If it's that bad with the U.S. army there in force, how much worse could it be without them? The number of deaths in Cambodia sure didn't go down once the U.S. left.
"There are good reasons to conduct public debates about these sorts of things with courtesy and humility."
Not likely to happen.
Compare:
...if the new study is correct, the Lancet figures were wildly, wildly, wildly off.
with:
It is not that likely to be correct, in the sense of giving us a good, descriptive number. ... Beware of false precision, particularly if it validates your priors.
These points seem at odds and I'm curious how you you reconcile them.
In particular, let's assume the Lancet study was off by a factor of 3 or so. I suppose if you were doing reconstruction planning for postwar Iraq you might need better accuracy than that, but aren't most of us more interested in the qualitative conclusion here? To quote Daniel Davies, "Things have got worse, and they have got a lot worse, not a little bit worse." The Lancet study and the new study both seem like good evidence of that.
It may be a good number for determining whether or not we should have gone to war in the first place but it is not a good number for determining the value of our continued presence. In other words its a "sunk cost".
Any numbers on deaths caused by insurrectionists, terrorists, criminals, and civil war vs. direct deaths of innocent civilians caused by US troops?
The Lancet study was very broad, taking into account diseases and all violent deaths no matter the source, motive, or victims.
And this latest study, with its larger interviewee sample, concludes that at least 150,000 Iraqis have been violently killed from March 2003 through June 2006.
And for that, Megan is somewhat comforted and tells those of us who defended the Lancet study that we were seriously incorrect and/or misguided by our politics.
Good to know the upper west sider is feeling a little better about our crusade in Iraq.
I have always taken the diplomatic, UN approch, in stating that Iraqi deaths have been estimated anwhere from 100,000 to as high as 600,000. The fact that the US doesn't count any Iraqi dead is my basis for allowing such a wide range.
Shouldn't 150,000 deaths make any proponent of any policy swallow hard?
Before the invasion, our policy was sanctions. The U.N. estimated that the sanctions had killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children by the mid-to-late 1990s (and that's just children). We did later modify the sanctions policy to try and reduce their harmful effect, but they were still exacting a huge humanitarian toll on Iraq.
I've yet to see a convincing case that invading Iraq was not the least-bad alternative for dealing with Saddam.
"Yes, 'n' how many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died?"
I find this extremely silly; all deaths!=violent deaths. In fact, even far soldiers in war-time, the number one cause of death is not necessarily violence; in the American Civil War, the number one cause of death was disease. No, not infections from wounds, but good old-fashioned malaria, small-pox, dysentry, etc.
Yes, I know, that was over one hundred years ago. But I suspect the conditions in Iraq are more correctly approximated by that, rather than, say, Suburban Kansas City in terms of available medical care.
Here's something that's a real laff-riot: In the first week of December I was deathly ill with some combination of chest cold/flu. I didn't go in to be treated, in fact, I was able to get up for three hours a day to teach two sections, but that was about all I was up for. And by the middle of the next week I was more or less back to normal.
My question is: what would have been the odds of my surviving the same illness in Iraq? Someplace where I couldn't just curl up and sleep within fifty feet of a well-stocked kitchen and a clean bathroom?
Quite a bit lower, I suspect. And that gets counted as part of the death toll. Scary, isn't it? Not access to advanced medicine, not even access to some sort of basic free clinic, just not enough easy access to basic food and security is enough to kill. I don't think a lot of people really grasp that point.
I would also note that that a) the error bars on the first study dip down to 400K, and that b) a similar estimate (and it seems a somewhat shakier one) in this more recent study put the total death figure at 300K. I don't know the error bars, unfortunately.
So far from trying to talk this up as the first study being some sort of liberal propaganda attempt, I'd say these studies are pretty consistent with each other.
So far from trying to talk this up as the first study being some sort of liberal propaganda attempt, I'd say these studies are pretty consistent with each other.
Right. A mere factor-of-four difference in their estimates of violent deaths. Not inconsistent at all.
What mixner said. The sanctions were killing Iraqis at a faster rate than the war between our soldiers are their rebels/terrorists/etc. have been.
And the sanctions clearly were not working.
Yes, I know, that was over one hundred years ago. But I suspect the conditions in Iraq are more correctly approximated by that, rather than, say, Suburban Kansas City in terms of available medical care.
I suspect (so long as we're trading in pure speculation) that it depends very strongly on where in Iraq you are; some places are fairly peaceful and prosperous, others are violent and correspondingly deprived.
Actually, that sounds rather like the US, too.
"Before the invasion, our policy was sanctions. The U.N. estimated that the sanctions had killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children...
"I've yet to see a convincing case that invading Iraq was not the least-bad alternative for dealing with Saddam."
Yes, the sanctions were bad. They were pushed by US and UK to disarm and weaken Saddam. By the time of the invasion, Saddam was weak and had been completely contained, -- a containment that was costing very little when compared to today's debacle. So a better plan would have been NOT to invade. I am stunned that there are still people out there who have blinders on!
John Bartley,
By the time of the invasion, Saddam was weak and had been completely contained ...
Highly unlikely. Europe and Russia were starting to break the sanctions, and Saddam was amassing huge sums from the oil-for-food program to pay for illicit trading. Iraq desperately needed to import technology to repair and maintain its infrastructure, which had been falling apart for a decade thanks to the sanctions, but much of the needed technology was prohibited because of its "dual-use" potential for military purposes. Saddam had also continued to display defiance and aggression towards the UN and his middle-east neighbors throughout the sanctions.
I am stunned that there are still people out there who have blinders on!
I am stunned that there are still people out there who think there was a clearly superior alternative to invasion.
Mixner et al:
What part of "excess deaths" confuses you?
Either study clearly finds more people were killed in the post sanction years, by the war.
Megan writes: 150,000 deaths is a figure that should make any supporter of the war swallow hard.
If the U.S. military killed 150,000 Iraqis, then yes, I would swallow very hard. But there is a semi racist assumption here that the only moral actor is the U.S. In the San Francisco Zoo debacle, it is clear why no one blames the tiger for the death - no one blames the tiger. The tiger is not, in our eyes, a moral actor. The only moral actors to possibly be blamed are the victims (for possibly taunting) and the zoo officials (for not having a higher wall).
This kind of accounting essentially assumes that we are the only moral actors. Al-Quiada (sp?), the Shiites, and other non-Americans, who have actually done most of the killing and destroying of infrastructure which indirectly kills, are treated in our discussion like the tiger. Isn't that just what they do? Shouldn't we have anticipated it?
No deal. As Dan Quayle said (and, yes, I am quoting him approvingly) when asked who was to blame for the LA riots, answered "the rioters." The responsible parties for the deaths in Iraq are the killers.
What part of "excess deaths" confuses you? Either study clearly finds more people were killed in the post sanction years, by the war.
The studies compare a limited period from the time of the invasion with an even more limited period immediately prior to it. Whatever number of "excess deaths" occurred over this limited comparison, it doesn't tell us much about the effects of sanctions vs. invasion over the longer term. The sanctions had been in effect for over a decade and had already caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and destroyed much of the nation's vital infrastructure. We obviously don't know for sure what would have happened if we had continued the pre-invasion policy, but I see no indication that Saddam would have been overthrown from within, or that Iraqis would not have continued to die in huge numbers, year after year indefinitely into the future.
Mixner said:
I am stunned that there are still people out there who think there was a clearly superior alternative to invasion.
He ought to be stunned, because we're in the majority. His argument is indefensible, and that's why he's cutting and pasting old irrelevant news reports to "support" it.
He ought to be stunned, because we're in the majority.
I'm never stunned when the majority supports bad policy, because that happens often.
John Bartley wrote: He ought to be stunned, because we're in the majority.
Subtle point of distinction: Would that be a majority of persons who actually can illucidate that "clear alternative" cogently and respond to fair criticisms of it, or simply a majority of persons who were swayed in the most recent opinion polling merely because they saw Bad Stuff on TV last week?
"150,000 deaths is a figure that should make any supporter of the war swallow hard."
Should but won't. Such introspection requires the capacity for empathy and compassion, both of which are alien concepts to the people who support both this war and the psychopaths who unleashed it.
Don't forget the heart-rending scenes after the conquest of Iraq of women digging in the dirt with their bare hands to uncover their husbands and sons buried in mass graves, murdered by Saddam and his henchmen. The estimates are at least 400,000 men, women, and children dead by terror and dumped into the mass graves. Of the estimated 150,000 that have died during the US occupation, how many were by suicide bombers, car bombers, and militias loyal to the Baathists and Al Qaeda? Do you really think there wouldn't have been mass deaths in Iraq at the murderous hands of the old regime if we hadn't invaded? Do you really believe the rate of infants deaths reported by a regime of murdering thugs? Why did all of Iraq celebrate when Uday and Qusay died in a hail of bullets? What explains the gigantic two day drunken party when Saddam was captured? Which is worse, the war or an indefinite continuation of the Baathist regime?
You break it, you buy it. We probably shouldn't have invaded (or at least executed the occupation better after we "won"). But leaving too soon would be a bad decision.
the people who support both this war and the psychopaths who unleashed it.
Well, let's see: Hillary and Edwards both voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq, and Obama said it was a tough call and that he might have voted for it if he had had access to classified intelligence reports.
Just out of interest, which of these three "psychopaths" are you supporting for president? I assume you're not a Republican. Call it a hunch.
Does this study, or any other study, really have a meaning, other than to say that war sucks? Would it be different if it was only 20,000?
Does anyone remember what Al-Anfal is? In the late 80's, Hussein committed genocide against the Kurds of northern Iraq... to the tune of between 100,000 and 200,000 murdered. Of his own peoples. Story
How many died in the Iran-Iraq war? In the aftermath of Gulf1?
It is the ugliest thing I can think of.
Yet, is the sheer number what should keep us from "ever" repeating such a thing? Given that it hasn't necessarily been us going house to house and killing everyone in sight? They are very much killing their own, and this is reprehensible on their part. We are to blame because we took a peaceful muderous regime, and replaced it with warlike murderous difficulty? We are not forcing brothers to kill each other. We are not carrying out vendettas.
So at this point running numbers, regardless their size, accomplishes nothing. Save to make us prayerful [to whatever diety or fate you choose] and sober on the actual cost of war. It doesn't negate the why of the war. Some people think the reasons weren't there, some do... But like the snowstorm that passes you by, and then you complain that it didn't hit, what is it you are asking for? Would everyone have been happy to find a real nuke? LittleBoy sitting in a trailer? Never mind any other reason for doing what we have done. Reletively simple bottom line is that war is never good, but sometimes necessary. You have to know that people will always argue IF something is necessary, regardless if it is or not.
We will never know if it was truely necessary to go to war for this, because it's done. We are there. And most people agree a true genocide would happen if we left, plus the power vacuum Iran would love to fill. So carping about the numbers is stupid. If each of those lives is important of itself than there is no real difference 20,000 to 100,000 or a million, because they are all the saddest thing ever. No less sad than the Kurds.
If there are only less bad situations or worse ones, how will you judge?
Megan,
My last comment got held for review, perhaps because it contained a link to the WSJ's editorial on this yesterday. If you haven't read that editorial, I suggest you do. It deals with the possible political motivations of the authors and sponsor of the original Lancet study (the one released a few weeks before the '06 elections that estimated 600k+ Iraqi deaths since the war began).
The Wall Street Editorial Board making baseless accusations? Certainly not.
The guys at Crooked Timber, I think, provide a much more - reasonable analysis.
http://crookedtimber.org/2008/01/10/post-invasion-deaths-in-iraq
Ps from crooked timber:
The overall death rate rose from about 3.2 per 1000 person years to about 6, an increase of just over 2.8. Depending on whether you use the raw or adjusted estimated rate of violent death this would work out to an overall excess death total of just under 400,000 or just over 250,000. (But this is just a back-of-the-envelope calculation, as the overall death rate isn’t reported.)
Or, in other words, never trust Megan's lazy, unresearched truthiness.
I am stunned that there are still people out there who think there was a clearly superior alternative to invasion.
Well, let's review:
1. They lied about why we went in.
2. They let the country fall into chaos by ignoring informed military opinion about the number of troops that would be necessary to create a stable environment for democracy - despite the fact that none of them had any experience in war or invasion (Rums had been in the Navy but saw no combat).
3. They had no plan or planning for post-war Iraq.
I don't see how this was a superior choice based on the ridiculous propaganda and flat bungling of the war.
Here's an alternative - wait a bit, build a stronger case, put together a real plan, build a real coalition and _then_ you go. You know, like his father did.
Now we sit around and wait for the bombs to drop on Iran - I'm sure we can expect the same level of brilliant execution that we've come to expect from the Bush administration.
dmwr, like faking confrontations in the gulf?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,2239119,00.html
dmwr...
so the reasons you site are probably true... and yet? Are not alternatives to invasion. They are places where the invasion went wrong.
Yes, I got about 300,000, but I did it in my head. Nice to know that basic arithmetic still works. Does anybody here _not_ know how those total figures were arrived at? Does anyone here _not_ know how to work a basic proportionality to solve for an unkown?
Does anyone here _not_ understand that a figure of 400K rather than 600K (the middle of the confidence interval) is perfectly in accord with the original Lancet Study? Does anyone not understand that if the confidence intervals from these two studies overlap that there is no way to tell if they disagree with each other, that in fact, they could be in perfect agreement? Finally, does anyone _not_ understand that wide confidence intervals, large error bars, what have you, are most definitely _not_ your friend when trying to make precise statements?
Anyone?
Megan, I've got my eye on you. This is basic, basic statistics, not to mention basic arithmetic, and given your fancy education, something you should be perfectly well aware of this(Please, please, please don't tell me you're "not a math person".) By all means, if you're going after Hindraker's market share, pen a column, full of subdued, yet wry and caustic wit on the theme bad numbers in the service of an ideology, that this new study 'proves' that the old one was wildly off and was just so much liberuuul propaganda. If you want Mankiw's crowd to read your blog otoh, I suggest you might be better served writing a mea culpa where everyone can see it.
Then of course, we've got our share of readers who would claim that 3/2 != 96/64 if they thought that would be putting one in the eye of those despicable liberuuuls. But I don't think anyone takes them seriously.
We are to blame because we took a peaceful muderous regime, and replaced it with warlike murderous difficulty? - SwissArmyD
Yes.
One excellent point raised in the discussion at Crooked Timber is that the survey may not be adequately accounting for the fact that the 2 million refugees who have fled Iraq, and were thus not available to be surveyed for this report, may well have experienced higher rates of violent deaths in their families than those who stayed - that being one obvious reason for them to have fled. On the other hand, maybe they didn't, since they got out earlier and were thus not around to be killed (in Iraq, anyway; how many violent deaths they may have experienced in refugee situations is another question).
For me, the takeaway point is that any article that refers to the number of violent deaths caused by the invasion should use the phrase "hundreds of thousands", not "tens of thousands".
150,000 deaths is a figure that should make any supporter of the war swallow hard.
Those deaths can be divided into three groups, in order of decreasing size:
(1): Iraqis killed by other Iraqis, or by foreign terrorists. I don't see how we have any moral responsibility for those, especially considering that we're one of the only nations in the world with the balls to fight back against the people doing the killing.
(2): Insurgents and terrorists killed by us. These are good deaths, and the pity is that there aren't more of them.
(3): Innocent Iraqi civilians killed by us. This is the problem number for which we are responsible. But we do everything we can to keep that number low, and all indications are that it IS very low.
I would also say that it is unfair to talk of the "excess deaths" of the post-invasion period against a baseline of ordinary mortality, considering that Iraq averaged tens of thousands of government-caused "excess deaths" per year.
What are you smoking, Dan? Pre-invasion, the mortality rate X numbers of deaths per year. Post-invasion it goes to X+Y, where Y seems to be comparable to, or greater than X.
You're suggesting there's no causal connection?
Innocent Iraqi civilians killed by us. This is the problem number for which we are responsible.
This is a myopic point of view. While the tiger metaphor may be all well and good from legal perspective, in reality both the people we personally killed, *and* the people killed by groups that formed for the purpose of thwarting us in our post-invasion are all people that are unlikely to have died, had we not invaded, in that time period.
Split hairs while the day grows long, but our actions led to the deaths of more people than were personally killed by us. That's not hard to understand, and the same people who deny it tend to have no problem blaming deaths in Cambodia on a US troop withdrawal **without us being even in the country when they occurred**.
Fool yourselves, but not the crowd.
I hope you do a better job in print, Megan. The original study had confidence intervals: so does this one. The numerical gap isn't all that large - a two-digit percentile.
None of these estimates are more than that, but you seem to be angling the Lancet number as incompetence or malice: I find that wildly unconvincing.
One would obviously wish that the Iraqi government were not involved.
I assume you sail on to completely discount your own bullet point when you hold these numbers up as 'right' and use them to mark the Lancet as 'wrong'.
I suspect that a lot of what's going on here is basic innumeracy. For some people, that's par for the course, and they don't particularly care if they're innumerate, just so long as they can stick it to the liberals.
But others should know better. That Megan doesn't, and this after displaying some pride in her education at a good school, is just plain embarrassing.
Once again, for everyone who still doesn't get it, this is not a left/right issue, it's a numerate/innumerate issue. Anyone trying to make political hay of this will only end up diminishing themselves.
Plenty of mistakes here.
New study: 150,000 deaths in Iraq since the invasion
Wrong. 150k refers to violent deaths, not the total and not to excess deaths. 1-0 to "wrong".
10 Jan 2008 04:30 pm
I am presuming that this timestamp is accurate. 1-1.
I'm writing a print piece about this so I'm afraid you'll have to wait for my opinion, but a few quick thoughts:
No particular reason to doubt this. 1-2
The disparity between the Lancet figures and the new count is higher than people are assuming; the Lancet study is more than a year older than the NEJM one. Since the violence was trending upwards, if the new study is correct, the Lancet figures were wildly, wildly, wildly off.
Wrong. The two studies were not published at the same time, but they cover the same period, to June/July 2006. The wrongs have equalised! 2-2.
The new version is more likely to be correct; it covers a longer time period, uses a bigger sample, and employs more than one method of counting
Wrong, and the paper does not make this claim. It had 11% of its clusters "informatively censored" (ie, not sampled because too dangerous). It makes various attempts to correct for these problems but repeatedly notes that it may still have a large undercount. 3-2.
It is not that likely to be correct, in the sense of giving us a good, descriptive number. Iraq is a war zone, and it is very hard to collect good data. Beware of false precision, particularly if it validates your priors.
I don't think this makes any factual claims at all.
One would obviously wish that the Iraqi government were not involved.
I think this is bordering on wrong but will give the benefit of the doubt.
Attempting to salvage the Lancet study by distinguishing between violent and non-violent deaths are silly. Virtually all the violent deaths in the Lancet study were excess, and virtually all the excess deaths were violent.
Of course they're not silly; what's silly is the attempt to wish away the quite close agreement in the total death rate. The question of potential misclassification of deaths as violent or non-violent depending on who's asking has been discussed at length. Wrongs appear to be pulling away here, at 4-2.
150,000 deaths is a figure that should make any supporter of the war swallow hard.
There are good reasons to conduct public debates about these sorts of things with courtesy and humility.
Oh, courtesy and humility like calling people "silly" (see previous paragraph)? Well then, in all humility, with the greatest of respect, prithee the boon to speak, with a cherry on top, you're wrong.
Violent deaths and "excess" deaths are not substitutable numbers. There may be disagreement over whether a heart attack or a stroke killed your victim, but it is very hard to confuse a heart attack with a mortar explosion. That was one of the problems with the second Lancet study: its figures on excess deaths varied significantly from the earlier Burnham et al numbers, and rather improbably listed virtually no non-violent excess deaths in a war zone.
Surely, ScentofViolets and Daniel, they taught "don't compare apples to oranges" in your basic statistics class? Or was that only at Chicago?
it is very hard to confuse a heart attack with a mortar explosion.
For some reason the folks at Crooked Timber think this isn't true -- that researchers find with reported deaths some ways in the past there's considerable confusion about violent vs. non-violent deaths. I'm not sure why this would be though.
Oddly enough, at London Business School they taught us that an apple and an orange are both fruit, have roughly the same market price, weight and caloric value and are about the most comparable things there are. Did they not teach you "don't pick cherries" at Chicago? (I see, by the way, that "civility and humility" have now gone by the board, for which thanks; I am much more comfortable on home turf).
It is not easy to lie about someone being dead when they aren't, particularly if you are asked for a death certificate. It is very easy to lie about the reason for a family member's death for all sorts of reasons (like, for example, that family member having been murdered by a militia of which you are scared). Even without assuming dishonesty, if a family member goes out in the evening and never comes back (and if you are too scared to go to the morgue to identify the body), then you may never know what killed him. This is why the aggregate number of deaths is the most robust number.
The second Lancet study (which was the same as the "Burnham et al study"; Roberts was lead author on the first, not Burnham) did not "list virtually no non-violent excess deaths in a war zone", it found 54,000 of them. If you think that there was a problem of misclassification here, then it is hard to understand what your other point is.
Daniel, this is blatantly unconvincing handwaving. Violent deaths among military-aged males are not substitutes for death in childbirth, infant mortality, and old age, the three main categories of excess non-violent deaths after a conflict. There is a massive discrepancy between these two surveys. At least one of them is badly wrong.
Quite puzzled as to what Daniel Davies can mean by claiming that there is "quite close agreement in the total death rate." That's not what I get from reading the study [http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/NEJMsa0707782]:
* * *
Seems to me pretty clear that the new study says, outright, that the Lancet study's number for violent deaths in 2005-06 (for example) is about 9 times too high.Quibble all you want, but where on earth are you coming up with "quite close agreement"?
Apples and oranges are "about the most comparable things there are"? Thanks, dsquared! I know from experience that an apple pie tastes even better when I substitute pears or quinces for half the apples. Now you're telling me I should bake one with half apples and half oranges? If economic theory says so, what could possibly go wrong?
Juan Cole has an excellent article about this new WHO study. The gap between the WHO study and the Lancet study actually is not so great when you look at the WHO assumptions and methodology.
dmwr,
1. They lied about why we went in.
Do please present your proof that "they lied about why we went in." And who is "they," exactly? Does that include Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and all the other Democrats who voted to "go in?"
2. They let the country fall into chaos by ignoring informed military opinion about the number of troops that would be necessary to create a stable environment for democracy - despite the fact that none of them had any experience in war or invasion (Rums had been in the Navy but saw no combat).
3. They had no plan or planning for post-war Iraq.
I don't see how this was a superior choice based on the ridiculous propaganda and flat bungling of the war.
The issue of whether the war was mismanaged once we had invaded is separate from the issue of the merits of invading in the first place. The two questions are constantly confused and conflated by critics of the war.
Let's see:
150,000 Iraqi deaths;
Unknown Iraqi maimed
3000+ U.S. deaths
20,0000+ U.S. maimed
$1,500,000,000,000 estimated cost of war
More powerful and emboldened Iran
Increased recruiting tool for Al Qeada
Loss of advantage in Afghanistan
Lost opportunity to get Osama bin Laden
Loss of American Goodwill overseas
vs.
Contained Saddam with the future chance that sanctions may have been weakened
[Violent deaths among military-aged males are not substitutes for death in childbirth, infant mortality, and old age, the three main categories of excess non-violent deaths after a conflict.]
Have you (I ask ever so respectfully) read the study? It says:
"In southern and central Iraq, the adjusted rate of death per 1000 person-years increased significantly, from 3.19 (95% CI, 2.67 to 3.82) to 6.36 (95% CI, 5.78 to 7.02); the increases were seen in all age groups but were most prominent in men between the ages of 15 and 59 years"
15-59 year olds are ruled out of infant mortality by definition and men don't die in childbirth. There could have been a big spike in gerontological diseases in 59-year-olds, but the other possibility - that these are deaths from gunshot wounds or electric drills, misreported as nonviolent deaths by families who want to avoid trouble - seems more compelling.
dsquared,
Wrong. 150k refers to violent deaths, not the total and not to excess deaths.
Really? So the 150k number refers to violent deaths period, not just excess violent deaths? So the number of excess violent deaths is even lower than 150k?
Of course they're not silly; what's silly is the attempt to wish away the quite close agreement in the total death rate.
There is no close agreement between the two studies. The figures for excess deaths from violence differ by a factor of four (or even more, if you are correct that the new study's 150K number refers to all violent deaths, not just excess ones), and the new study does not provide an estimate of total excess deaths, so there's no basis for a comparison of that quantity between the two studies.
I've now seen at least three different numbers for total excess deaths attributed to the new study from bloggers desperate to salvage some credibility for the Lancet study. Kevin Drum says it's 393,000. Tim Lambert says it's 420,000. And Juan Cole says it's 302,000. None of them know what they're talking about. They're all doing crude, back-of-an-envelope calculations from other numbers taken from the new study without knowing the methodology the authors used to compute the estimates presented in the study.
Scent of Violets wrote:
"Yes, I know, that was over one hundred years ago. But I suspect the conditions in Iraq are more correctly approximated by that, rather than, say, Suburban Kansas City in terms of available medical care."
True, Iraq is at war. But I think many Americans often make wild assumptions about medical care in the non-Western world. I've been living in Egypt for nearly a decade, and receive medical care as good and in some respects better than I ever did in the USA. (Plenty of highly trained doctors and highly subsidized pharmaceuticals available everywhere for rock-bottom prices.)
Granted, the war must have been highly disruptive to the Iraqi medical system, but don't assume these people are just wallowing in the mud and mosquitoes, even now.
I really do hope the print piece Megan refers to is not for the Atlantic, because that really would be an all-time low for the publication. I say this because I am 100% Megan never read the original Lancet studies. If she has finally read them now, she certainly has no understanding of the methodology or statistical analysis involved.
Everyone here would be much better served reading the analysis at Crooked Timber. Those folks actually know what they are talking about.
Mixner especially should read the Crooked Timber piece. He/she is completely in the dark about the differences and similarities between the two studies.
And I have no axe to grind about the actual number. I just like people to actually read the material in question--and understand it--before they try to "refute" it. "Arguments" like this really do make 99% of the blogosphere look like drooling morons.
[So the 150k number refers to violent deaths period, not just excess violent deaths?]
Yes, although given the very low level of pre-invasion violent deaths the survey found, the excess deaths figure is going to be basically the same number. This is in the survey, by the way, you can look these things up for yourself if you like rather than relying on me.
[The figures for excess deaths from violence differ by a factor of four (or even more, if you are correct that the new study's 150K number refers to all violent deaths, not just excess ones), and the new study does not provide an estimate of total excess deaths, so there's no basis for a comparison of that quantity between the two studies.]
that's just daft. The survey provides a prewar and postwar death rate, so calculating the relative risk is hardly rocket science.
Really? So the 150k number refers to violent deaths period, not just excess violent deaths? So the number of excess violent deaths is even lower than 150k?
No. The 150k number is an estimate (derived from simulations) of excess violent deaths. Deaths due to violence rose from a very small 0.1 per 1000 person years in the pre-invasion period to about 1.1 per 1000 person years afterwards, or 1.67 adjusting for estimated underreporting.
By the by, Megan's headline "New study: 150,000 deaths in Iraq since the invasion" is quite wrong: the study estimates that there have been 150k excess violent deaths in Iraq since the invasion, and something of the order of 400k excess deaths altogether. You can see this from Table 3 in the paper.
Really? So the 150k number refers to violent deaths period, not just excess violent deaths? So the number of excess violent deaths is even lower than 150k?
Actually, you could also say that the answer to your first question is "Yes" just because the reported rate of violent death pre-invasion was very low -- 0.1 per 1kpy.
dsquared,
Yes, although given the very low level of pre-invasion violent deaths the survey found, the excess deaths figure is going to be basically the same number.
The excess number of violent deaths obviously cannot be greater than the total number of violent deaths, so as I said, the new study differs from the Lancet study by at least a factor of four on this number. That is obviously a huge inconsistency. In fact, if the 151,000 number refers to total violent deaths rather than excess ones, and we do the same crude calculation from the death rates in Table 3 that Lambert and Cole have tried to do to derive their "estimates" of total excess deaths, we get a number for excess violent deaths of only 137,000. The equivalent number from Lancet II is over 600,000.
that's just daft. The survey provides a prewar and postwar death rate, so calculating the relative risk is hardly rocket science.
To throw your own question to Megan back at you: Have you read the study? The authors state that they computed their figure of 151,000 "on the basis of the simulation that took into account the sampling errors and the uncertainty in factors for missing clusters, the level of underreporting, and the projected population numbers." Since you obviously don't know the details of this methodology, you're not in a position to calculate the equivalent number for total excess deaths.
Mixner-
Go read the post over at Crooked Timber, and stop wasting intelligent people's time.
Yes, it seems like there has been an unacknowledged retreat from "one study was wildly wrong" to "one study got the numbers of violent deaths wildly wrong."
Geeze, would it kill you guys to just admit you made a mistake?
As for the all deaths vs violent deaths, I don't really know, and don't have much of an opinion. That's a lot less statistics and a lot more notional. All I really care about is that the fact of death is non-equivocable and that the sampling methods are valid. I think this is true in both studies, for example, weren't death certificates available over 90% of the time when they were requested for verification(in both studies)? And does anyone _really_ question the validity of the sampling techniques?
If not, then where's the beef? What is the _specific_ objection?
The people who are objecting, have any of them had a formal class in statistics? I honestly, really can't see how they can continue to make these claims; it's literally as if they are insisting that 2+2!=4. Hmmmm . . . that's an idea. Suppose you have two research teams do a survey to determine the percentage of households who buy Quisp or Quake. One team surveys 4,000 households and comes back with the information that approximately 20 million households do, with a 'standard error' of plus or minus 10 million. The other team, using the same sort of sampling technique, surveys 40,000 households, and reports back that only 8 million households do, with a 'standard error' of plus or minus 4 million.
Question(s): which survey is more accurate, and by how much? (Caveat: I made this one up on the spot, so the standard deviations will almost certainly not match up. But that's OK, just assume a 95% confidence.) Do the two surveys contradict each other, (that is, is one wildly off), are they mostly in agreement, or is there any way to tell?
This is basic statistics, so I assume that people like Megan are quite capable of doing them, and unless you have an ideological slant on cereal preferences, I don't see how politics would enter into the question.
Is anyone else surprised to read people repeating that "the reported rate of violent death pre-invasion was very low" as if this were evidence? Can that even be true? I mean it may be true that the reported rate was very low, but how can the actual rate be low in a place like Saddam's Iraq? I suppose if your relative disappeared one day and was never seen again, you can't be certain that he was brutally tortured to death in one of Saddam's numerous torture chambers, but that's the way to bet. Does murder by government not count as violent death?
Scent,
Yes, it seems like there has been an unacknowledged retreat from "one study was wildly wrong" to "one study got the numbers of violent deaths wildly wrong."
No, either one study is wildly wrong, or both studies are wildly wrong.
I think this is true in both studies, for example, weren't death certificates available over 90% of the time when they were requested for verification(in both studies)?
I don't know. Were they? And how often were they requested? Do you know?
Oh, it's not the medical care available in a non-Western country that makes the difference, it's the wartime conditions. Bear in mind that these deaths are statistical flucuations; it's not, say, dying of a ruptured appendix because the only available hospital is a burned-out hulk that's the numbers driver. It's the accumulation of little things. Last summer, for example, we had two or three old folks die during a power outage in Boone county because they had no air conditioning. Excess deaths. And not because of a lack of availability of medical care.
rickm,
Go read the post over at Crooked Timber, and stop wasting intelligent people's time.
That obviously wouldn't include you.
By "the post over at Crooked Timber," do you mean the post where Kieran presents two wildly different estimates of total excess deaths (250,000 and 400,000) derived from the new study, admits that they are "just a back-of-the-envelope calculation," notes that both are dramatically lower than the equivalent figure from Lancet II (655,000), and admits that "a study like this gives us good reason to substantially revise our estimate of the total number of excess deaths downward?" That post?
[The authors state that they computed their figure of 151,000 "on the basis of the simulation that took into account the sampling errors and the uncertainty in factors for missing clusters, the level of underreporting, and the projected population numbers." Since you obviously don't know the details of this methodology, you're not in a position to calculate the equivalent number for total excess deaths. ]
Don't, as I say, be daft. I am certainly not in a position to calculate a confidence interval for any risk ratio or excess death number. But if the authors had used a methodology so odd that it gave a result totally different from simply subtracting one number from another (so that back-of-envelope estimates like Tim's were completely wrong), they would surely have said that they were doing so, and given reasons why that couldn't be done.
Least worst option? ok, let's look.
We started a war.
Saddam was no threat to us. He had no WMDs. He had no working ties to Al Qeada or 9/11.
This war has killed thousands of American troops.
This war has wounded tens of thousands of American troops.
This war is expected to cost 1-2 trillion dollars when all is said and done.
Monetary policy used to fund the war is partially responsible for the dollar tanking.
Oil is $100 a barrel.
This war has caused the violent death of Iraqi civilians at a faster clip than even Saddam managed.
Fewer than half of polled Iraqis say Iraq is better now than it was under Saddam.
Those are the costs.
And the benefits....?
You forgot this part:
"The two numbers aren’t directly comparable because excess deaths due to violence are only one component of all excess deaths"
dsquared,
Don't, as I say, be daft.
Physician, heal thyself.
I am certainly not in a position to calculate a confidence interval for any risk ratio or excess death number.
You're not in a position to attribute an estimate for total excess deaths to the second study at all, because you don't have the information necessary to compute it.
But if the authors had used a methodology so odd that it gave a result totally different from simply subtracting one number from another (so that back-of-envelope estimates like Tim's were completely wrong), they would surely have said that they were doing so, and given reasons why that couldn't be done.
You simply don't know how the estimate of 151,000 violent deaths is related to the crude death rates the authors present in Table 3. Therefore, you are not in a position to calculate an equivalent estimate for total excess deaths.
Of course they lied about why we went to war, as the record overwhelmingly clarifies. See, for example (and just for starters), the Downing Street Memo and the books by Paul O'Neil, Richard Clarke (two former members of the administration) and Ron Suskind. In sum, bush and cheney came into office looking for an excuse to invade Iraq, and they seized on their first opportunity: the events of 9/11. They deliberately misled the public into believing that Iraq was responsible for 9/11 (which many simple souls still believe). They deliberately overstated the inconclusive evidence to get people to believe that Iraq had WMD's and was an imminent threat to start a nuclear war. Along the way they bullied and/or ignored the CIA and international weapons inspectors as necessary. Since we arrived in Iraq, those who doubted bush's lies have been proved correct. We were lied into a war in which we are now debating how many hundreds of thousands have died.
Of course they lied about why we went to war, as the record overwhelmingly clarifies. See, for example (and just for starters), the Downing Street Memo and the books by Paul O'Neil, Richard Clarke (two former members of the administration) and Ron Suskind. In sum, bush and cheney came into office looking for an excuse to invade Iraq, and they seized on their first opportunity: the events of 9/11. They deliberately misled the public into believing that Iraq was responsible for 9/11 (which many simple souls still believe). They deliberately overstated the inconclusive evidence to get people to believe that Iraq had WMD's and was an imminent threat to start a nuclear war. Along the way they bullied and/or ignored the CIA and international weapons inspectors as necessary. Since we arrived in Iraq, those who doubted bush's lies have been proved correct. We were lied into a war in which we are now debating how many hundreds of thousands have died.
Sigh. Look at the damn table that Kieran linked to, which says that pre-invasion violent deaths was 0.1(per thousand person-years) and that post-invasion, it was 1.09. This is about a ten-fold increase (I said I did a BOTEC - and the envelope was in my head). So if post-invasion the numerical figure for violent deaths was 150,000, then pre-invasion, it must have been 15,000, modulo the number of years. Is everyone on the same page? Is this calculation too difficult for anyone to understand? No? Good.
Now look at the figure given for the number of total deaths, pre-invasion, which is about three. Three is 30 times 0.1, so the total number of pre-invasion deaths is 30x15,000=450,000 (again, modulo the same number of years.) Finally looking at the figure for the total number of post-invasion deaths, we get six, which is twice three, which mean that the increase in deaths must be around 450,000.
Did anyone, anyone at all have difficulty following this calculation? Except for Mixner, of course, but he doesn't count (pun intended.)
Admittedly, this is a very rough estimate, not taking into account the upper and lower ranges of the confidence intervals, the population pre- and post-invasion is obviously different, etc. But does anyone doubt that these numbers are fairly close to the real picture? Or that, yes, the upper estimate of total deaths in one study agrees well with the lower estimate in the other?
And was doing these simple proportions rocket science? Did anyone who is making noises about the 'wildly wrong' first study even look at the study, or the tables, or even attempt a calculation of their own before rushing into print?
Sigh. This is just _so_ like my backwards remedial math students.
[You simply don't know how the estimate of 151,000 violent deaths is related to the crude death rates the authors present in Table 3. Therefore, you are not in a position to calculate an equivalent estimate for total excess deaths. ]
You're confused. The estimate for total excess deaths wouldn't be put together by adding violent excess deaths plus nonviolent excess deaths. You'd calculate it directly (back of envelope stylee) from the crude mortality rates.
The unadjusted numbers are in table 3, giving (6.01 - 3.17) * 27,000 * (1/12) * 39 = 249,210, which is Kieran's first calculation.
The study then says, under "Adjustment for Reporting Bias" that the estimated underreporting of deaths was around 38% (equivalently the reporting rate was 62%). Grossing up the 250k figure gives the 400k calculation.
Further to the above, the adjustment for reporting bias is a complicated calculation which is not well summarised by a single multiplier like 62% (on the one hand, recall error gets worse as you go further back, on the other hand, the population was not stable). Which is why, quite correctly, the team did not calculate an overall excess deaths figure; they weren't confident in the statistical basis for doing so.
But gee, dsquared, you used parantheses, and you did subtraction and multiplication at the same time. Math is hard. And anyway, your calculation just shows your liberal bias.
Scent,
So if post-invasion the numerical figure for violent deaths was 150,000, then pre-invasion, it must have been 15,000, modulo the number of years. Is everyone on the same page? Is this calculation too difficult for anyone to understand? No? Good.
It's not difficult to understand, it's just nonsense. Your reference to the modulo of the number of years is especially laughable, as is your apparent belief that the pre and post-invasion populations of Iraq "must" be the same. Or perhaps you just don't know what "death rate" means.
dsquared,
You're confused. The estimate for total excess deaths wouldn't be put together by adding violent excess deaths plus nonviolent excess deaths. You'd calculate it directly (back of envelope stylee) from the crude mortality rates.
No, you're confused. I didn't say or suggest that the estimate for total excess deaths could be calculated in that way. I said that you're not in a position to calculate an estimate because you don't know the methodology the authors are using. As they write, that methodology includes adjustments for sampling errors, uncertainty in factors for missing clusters, underreporting, and projected population numbers.
What a pathetic tool Megan is. Does anybody consider her anything other than an administration sychophant? I mean, has she ever answered any question about whether she received walking-around money from Rove for chatting up the war in the early years? This woman has never answered that question so far as I am aware... neither has Andrew Sullivan, btw...
hankest,
What alternative policy to invasion do you believe would have been clearly superior, and why? Continuation of the sanctions?
Discontinuance of the sanctions would have been the most humane solution.
They only served to hurt the innocent and increase the power of Hussein over the suffering Iraqi's.
Is Megan going to correct the title of her post or let that wild inaccuracy stand?
Dan wrote: (2): Insurgents and terrorists killed by us. These are good deaths, and the pity is that there aren't more of them.
There is no such thing as a "good" death. There may well be a subset of necessary deaths, and another subset of unavoidable deaths, but do not confuse these with "good" and express "pity...that there aren't more of them." That's just revolting.
A better question would be to turn this on its head and ask why the "excess deaths" before the war were somehow acceptable, given that they were performed by a man who had been propped and supported by western powers valuing, at the time, "stability" more than human welfare. And "excess deaths" isn't the only metric: Saddam's barbaric torture methods are well-documented (up to and including brutal rape and sexual torture), slaughter of children, the rampant ecological destruction inflicted against both air and water resources in the name of harming people (the Marsh Arabs and the Kuwaitis in particular), and the ill maintenance of basic infrastructure services while enjoying marvelous palaces that had plenty of electricity and overflowed with displays of water.
The "stable" oil flows into world markets that consequently resulted, over time and by degrees, were then a primary enabling agent to produce the low-cost computing and information infrastructure that is right now, in this thread, allowing people to insult each other's numeracy and policy positions in regards to a war that finally removed the man from power and ended the reign of his barbarous agents.
Wow.
Do please present your proof that "they lied about why we went in." And who is "they," exactly? Does that include Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and all the other Democrats who voted to "go in?"
The administration - would we have gone to war if not the for Bush Administration putting it on the table? Of course not.
The issue of whether the war was mismanaged once we had invaded is separate from the issue of the merits of invading in the first place. The two questions are constantly confused and conflated by critics of the war.
The merits of invading should be balanced with the risk of doing it when so inadequately prepared.
Discontinuance of the sanctions would have been the most humane solution.
So we should have stopped the sanctions and just hoped, on a wing and a prayer, that Saddam would have abandoned his twenty-year record of mass murder and military aggression, a record that included invading two countries and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of his own people.
Yeah, that really sounds like a clearly superior alternative.
A better question would be to turn this on its head and ask why the "excess deaths" before the war were somehow acceptable, given that they were performed by a man who had been propped and supported by western powers valuing, at the time, "stability" more than human welfare.
What are you, a bleeding heart liberal? (I kid: Of course you're not) If you follow this argument and conclude that invasion is required to stop every "barbarous agent" from committing atrocities, then there are about twenty countries in Africa we could be invading this very moment.
Spare us the humanitarian streak. Arabs killing other Arabs killing Kurds killing Persians is not something worthy of rousing the American conscience. I slept fine knowing that Saddam and his sons were butchering their own people. I don't sleep so well now that Americans are dying over in that miserable little country.
So we should have stopped the sanctions and just hoped, on a wing and a prayer, that Saddam would have abandoned his twenty-year record of mass murder and military aggression, a record that included invading two countries and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of his own people.
Yeah, pretty much, because Saddam wasn't a threat to US.
I don't understand why conservatives keep bringing up Saddam's atrocities as justifications for our invasion of Iraq. You don't hear those same conservatives arguing that we should invade Sudan or Zimbabwe because of the atrocities committed in those nations.
Dan Robinson, that was a horrible comment to make. Note that I say that as someone who disagrees with her on several substantive issues.
For myself, Megan seems to be sincere, bright, well-educated, and not particularly potty-mouthed to the particulars in public (which, for me, counts for a lot, probably too much.) I also think that she comes by her views honestly and is not in the the habit of being a mouthpiece for anyone, and certainly not for personal gain[1].
If that weren't the case, I wouldn't post here.
[1]I don't mean to make out as if this is commendable; merely that expected standards of behaviour are being conformed to. You don't get get credit for letting older folks take your seat on the bus, but you do get opprobrium if you don't . . . that last may be a bad example, seeing as how more and more people seem to take me for that 'older person' :-(
Let's see:
150,000 Iraqi deaths;
Unknown Iraqi maimed
3000+ U.S. deaths
20,0000+ U.S. maimed
$1,500,000,000,000 estimated cost of war
More powerful and emboldened Iran
Increased recruiting tool for Al Qeada
Loss of advantage in Afghanistan
Lost opportunity to get Osama bin Laden
Loss of American Goodwill overseas
vs.
Contained Saddam with the future chance that sanctions may have been weakened
Yeah, pretty much, because Saddam wasn't a threat to US.
So the deaths of Iraqis don't matter now? Then these studies must be irrelevant to you. If it's only American interests that matter, then it's irrelevant whether the Iraqi death toll is 10 or 10 million. Somehow, I doubt you really believe that.
Anyway, your claim is clearly false even if you really do believe that the lives of Iraqis are not a legitimate consideration for U.S. policy. Saddam was a chronic source of aggression and instability in the middle east and a continuing threat to U.S. national interests in the region.
If anyone has an objection to how I arrived at this figure, I would ask that they make specific objections, that last to be heard as a dry tone. But I am responding to this nitwit to clear up a perhaps confusing point: modulo just means, 'the same number'. If we compare three years of post- invasion, we must compare it to three years of pre-invasion, not seven or two. Another way to look at this is as a units cancellation as most people have hopefully learned in jr. high chemistry. Let PoV be the number of violent deaths post-invasion, PoA be the number of all deaths post-invasion, PrV be the number of violent deaths pre-invasion, PrA be the number of all deaths pre-invasion. Now, we want the ratio of the number of all deaths post-invasion (or at least, in the three-year period under consideration) to the number of all deaths post-invasion, that is, PoA/PoV. So basic cancellation gives us the chain that I used earlier: PoV/PrV*PrV/PrA*PrA/PoA=PoV/PoA, and since we want the reciprical, we take: PrV/PoV*PrA/PrV*PoA/PrA=PoA/PoV. Plugging in the numbers from the table: 0.10/1.09*3.17/0.10*6.01/3.17=6.01/1.09~6.[1] So 6x150,000=900,000 for the total post-invasion over the given time period. Now, PrA/PoV=PrV/PoV*PrA/PrV, or as already given: 0.10/1.09*3.17/0.10=3.17/1.09~3. So 3x150,000=450,000 for the number of deaths pre-invasion for the same length of time. Finally, 900,000-450,000=450,000, the number of 'excess deaths'.
As I said, none of this seems to be terribly difficult, in fact, it's jr. high school arithmetic. Admittedly, some factors are not accounted for, such as the uncertainties in the estimation method, the confidence intervals, the change of size in the population pre- and post-invasion, etc. Yes. This is a BOTEC. But the purpose is not to derive figures that are within ten or twenty percent of the true figures, it's to show that one study gives a figure three times higher than the other. If anyone wants to argue the finer points that might lead to this, be my guest.
[1] Yes, I know, why not just take the ratios of all deaths post-invasion vs violent deaths post invasion to directly get a ratio of six? Well, first of all, I wanted to show how my first figures followed in an earlier, and from my teaching experience, the original reasoning seems clearer to most people (if not my exposition!). Secondly, there's still another calculation we have to do, so why not take it all in one bite?
dmwr,
The administration - would we have gone to war if not the for Bush Administration putting it on the table?
We don't know. Just as we don't know if we would have gone to war if 29 Democratic Senators, including Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, as well as 81 Democratic House members, had not voted to authorize the use of force.
But that wasn't the question. I asked you who lied. Who lied, what lies did they tell, and how do you know they were lying? Do the liars include Senators and House members, or just members of the Bush Administration?
From Juan Cole-
"There is also the question of how many Iraqis have sustained significant or crippling injuries from the same violence that has left so many dead. For US troops, the ratio is nearly 4,000 killed to nearly 10,000 severely wounded, or 2.5 times. If the same rate held true for Iraqi civilians in the war, and if it is true that 250,000 have by now been killed, it would equal 625,000 severely wounded.
One of the arguments warmongers gave for overthrowing Saddam Hussein was that his regime was responsible for the violent deaths of some 300,000 civilians between 1968 and 2003. That estimate now appears exaggerated, since the number of bodies in mass graves has not borne it out. But what is tragic is that in 4 1/2 short years, a foreign military occupation has unleashed killing on a scale achieved by the murderous Saddam Hussein regime only over decades."
Scent,
modulo just means, 'the same number'.
No, modulo is a mathematical operation that finds the remainder from an integer division. What you think this has to do with the estimates of excess deaths, I have no idea.
The rest of your post is similarly confused. Despite having had it explained to you repeatedly, you still don't seem to understand that the authors of the study did not derive their estimate of violent deaths simply from the death rates in Table 3. Therefore, you cannot calculate a corresponding estimate for total deaths from that data either.
So the deaths of Iraqis don't matter now? Then these studies must be irrelevant to you. If it's only American interests that matter, then it's irrelevant whether the Iraqi death toll is 10 or 10 million. Somehow, I doubt you really believe that.
You're dodging the question of whether atrocities alone justify military invasion, but I'll indulge your moral outrage and confirm that, yes, I really don't care how many Iraqis died as a result of Saddam's regime or as a result of the Bush administration's weirdly idealistic dream of forcing people to be free. I only take notice of the post-invasion death toll because it shows that people are dying in Iraq at rates not much different than before we decided to stick our hands in that den of vipers.
Saddam was a chronic source of aggression and instability in the middle east and a continuing threat to U.S. national interests in the region.
Source of aggression and instability? You mean, as opposed to the paragon of stability and non-aggression that is Iraq now?
We don't know. Just as we don't know if we would have gone to war if 29 Democratic Senators, including Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, as well as 81 Democratic House members, had not voted to authorize the use of force.
That's simply not true - the administration was pressing for the war. If they had not pushed it, it would not have happened. "We don't know" - who in the Congress or Senate would have pushed it? How would they have pushed it without the full support of the Administration? How would they have marshaled the resources necessary to build the case for war?
But that wasn't the question. I asked you who lied. Who lied, what lies did they tell, and how do you know they were lying? Do the liars include Senators and House members, or just members of the Bush Administration?
I love how you try and implicate the Senators and House members in the sad story of Iraq. They were guilty of incompetence and dereliction of duty but they were not the ones pushing for the war - that was the administration.
I don't have space to go into all the lies the administration told, but the lies started with Cheney/Rumsfeld and the Office of Special Plans, where the administration "shaped" the intelligence to support their cause while minimizing the CIA.
An example is the classic Niger uranium story - a piece of intelligence that had already been determined to be a total fraud, yet ended up in the President's state of the union. If you'd like more information, I suggest you review the interviews associated with the Frontline documentary "The Dark Side": http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/etc/synopsis.html
One of the arguments warmongers gave for overthrowing Saddam Hussein was that his regime was responsible for the violent deaths of some 300,000 civilians between 1968 and 2003.
Here is the Wikipedia entry on human rights abuses in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. The abuses include hundreds of thousands of murders from mass executions and chemical weapon attacks. In 1980, Saddam invaded Iraq, causing the Iran-Iraq war. Estimated casualties: 1 million to 1.5 million. In 1990, Saddam invaded Kuwait, causing the Gulf War. Estimated casualties: 100,000 to 200,000. That prompted sanctions, which the U.N. estimates to have killed around 500,000 Iraqi children (and countless additional adults) just through the mid-1990s. Saddam continued to display aggression throughout the sanctions period.
dmwr,
I love how you try and implicate the Senators and House members in the sad story of Iraq.
Yes, how silly of me to think that voting to authorize the use of force against Iraq implicates Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and numerous other Democrats in the sad story of Iraq. Not to mention the previous support of Senators and House members, as well as the Clinton Administration, for the sanctions against Iraq, which killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.
That's simply not true - the administration was pressing for the war.
Of course it's true. We might have gone to war whether the administration had pressed for it or not. We might have gone to war even if there had been no Bush administration.
And you're still evading my questions about these alleged lies. You made the accusation. Substantiate it. Who lied, what lies did they tell, and how do you know they were lying? Asserting that Bush made a false statement about uranium in a State of the Union address does not answer the questions.
Instead of arguing whether you are responsible for as many deaths as Pol Pot, or "only" as many as Saddam Hussein (whew! I can hear you say), why don't you Americans get the f* out of a country that (a) doesn't want you, (b) doesn't authorize you - at least not the Parliament which legally (but who cares, right?) decides these matters, and (c) where you are doing vastly more harm than good.
Or if you really want to stay, be honest about why ("helping Iraqis" is such a transparent lie, as is "fighting terrorists") and assume the consequences (no crying about why America is suddenly seen as a pariah state, more unpredictable and dangerous than Iran or North Korea or you name it). Honesty also means withdrawing from the treaties and conventions you signed but don't comply with, which prohibit occupying armies from bombing in civilian areas, from targeting civilians, from torture, from massive illicit and open-ended detentions and from plunder. And stop lying to yourselves about the "fantastic job" your boys are doing, and all the other misinformation campaigns which no one except yourselves believe any more.
Concerning the Lancet study, the Washington Post wrote: "The survey cost about $50,000 and was paid for by Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for International Studies."
That's how much you care. $50,000. A dime for every extinguished life.
Hans,
Who targets more civilians, Americans or the people the Americans are fighting against?
Yes, how silly of me to think that voting to authorize the use of force against Iraq implicates Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and numerous other Democrats in the sad story of Iraq. Not to mention the previous support of Senators and House members, as well as the Clinton Administration, for the sanctions against Iraq, which killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.
You can attempt to spin this anyway you want - feel free to implicate Jimmy Carter as well.
The difference, just to be clear, is that the Administration gave a false and cherry picked version of the intelligence on Iraq in order to drive us to war. I'm not letting the Dems off the hook here - they should have spent a lot more time looking at it. They should have asked a lot more questions. They should have resisted the administration's push of the timeline for war. But did they lie? Nope.
Of course it's true. We might have gone to war whether the administration had pressed for it or not. We might have gone to war even if there had been no Bush administration.
You're really smoking something if you think we'd be in the war if the administration wasn't pushing it. Talk about an absurd claim. Of course, that's not a claim that can be answered and that's why you keep pushing it.
And you're still evading my questions about these alleged lies. You made the accusation. Substantiate it. Who lied, what lies did they tell, and how do you know they were lying? Asserting that Bush made a false statement about uranium in a State of the Union address does not answer the questions.
I just invite you to review the link I sent earlier. It will be clear, from those interviews, that the Administration ignored anything that didn't agree with their contention that we needed to go to war with Iraq. That is lying. That is propaganda. That is the evidence that drove us to war.
Here's another link on the subject:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/04/21/60minutes/main1527749.shtml
Select quote:
-----------------------------
According to Drumheller (former top CIA official, Tyler Drumheller — a 26-year veteran of the agency), CIA Director George Tenet delivered the news about the Iraqi foreign minister at a high-level meeting at the White House, including the president, the vice president and Secretary of State Rice.
At that meeting, Drumheller says, "They were enthusiastic because they said, they were excited that we had a high-level penetration of Iraqis."
What did this high-level source tell him?
"He told us that they had no active weapons of mass destruction program," says Drumheller.
"So in the fall of 2002, before going to war, we had it on good authority from a source within Saddam's inner circle that he didn't have an active program for weapons of mass destruction?" Bradley asked.
"Yes," Drumheller replied. He says there was doubt in his mind at all.
"It directly contradicts, though, what the president and his staff were telling us," Bradley remarked.
"The policy was set," Drumheller says. "The war in Iraq was coming. And they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy."
Drumheller expected the White House to ask for more information from the Iraqi foreign minister.
But he says he was taken aback by what happened. "The group that was dealing with preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they're no longer interested," Drumheller recalls. "And we said, 'Well, what about the intel?' And they said, 'Well, this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change.'"
Chuckle. Mixner has got to be the most aggressively ignorant individual I've met in a long while. I realize that it's not a common usage among some sets, but:
http://www3.merriam-webster.com/opendictionary/newword_display_alpha.php?letter=Mo&last=20
So to repeat myself, you can compare post- and pre-invasion numbers, so long as you use the same number of years in your length of time.
Now, next time, could you at least make the attempt to educate yourself before showing your red, red hindquarters?
Oh, and as to the other part: no, no one has 'explained' anything to me on this thread, probably for the simple reason that I'm right and you are unable to comprehend simple sentences: I said that _if_ the excess violent death rate is 150K _and_ the figures in the table are correct, _then_ the total death rate must be in the neighborhood of 400K.[1] Iow, a conditional statement, nitwit. Not a derivation of the actual death rate.
[1]I'm surprised no one caught my simplification. It doesn't appreciably change the numbers, but it would have been a valid objection that would had to have been addressed.
Immmoralist wrote: What are you, a bleeding heart liberal? (I kid: Of course you're not) If you follow this argument and conclude that invasion is required to stop every "barbarous agent" from committing atrocities, then there are about twenty countries in Africa we could be invading this very moment.
Sure. Difference being, a very different set of moral actors are responsible for that. Some of it is post-collonialism relics from previous European intervention, some of it is from present European involvment (Ivory Coast), and much of it is being caused by largely internal creations (e.g. monsters such as Mugabe).
Saddam, however, was very much a western creation. The US supported Iraq under the Twin Pillars (and consequently Hussein when he came to power in 1979) on the theory that middle eastern "stability" was paramount and what he did on his own time was something we wouldn't look into too closely, as long as he didn't turn communist on us. The US also gave him low-key initial assistance, and later very open support including weapons, during the Iraq-Iran war on the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" theory. Saddam started the war in 1980, a year after taking power, and continued it through 1988, and the US was there to give him whatever he needed.
In addition to all that, his primary materiél suppliers were (in order): Russia, China, France, United States.
Now that the history and culpability lesson is over:
Immoralist wrote: Spare us the humanitarian streak.
Spare you, I believe you meant to say. Offer declined.
Imoralist wrote: Arabs killing other Arabs killing Kurds killing Persians is not something worthy of rousing the American conscience.
How about Americans killing Arabs and Persians by proxy for ten years in order to maintain unfettered access to a valuable commodity, and pretending they weren't accountable when the proxy no longer served their middle eastern policy goals?
Immoralist: I slept fine knowing that Saddam and his sons were butchering their own people. I don't sleep so well now that Americans are dying over in that miserable little country.
On account of the horrible, deafening clatter of the cognitive dissonance, I presume. Unless your name (which, I'm fairly certain, was intended to be amoralist) is mostly ironic.
[There is also the question of how many Iraqis have sustained significant or crippling injuries from the same violence that has left so many dead. For US troops, the ratio is nearly 4,000 killed to nearly 10,000 severely wounded, or 2.5 times. If the same rate held true for Iraqi civilians in the war, and if it is true that 250,000 have by now been killed, it would equal 625,000 severely wounded]
Juan Cole is admirable in so many ways, but I wish he'd stay out of these arithmetic debates - he's not very good at them. US troops have been killed in IED attacks, by snipers, and in open battle. Iraqis have in general been killed in execution-style slaying by death squads. As I rather tastelessly put it the last time these spurious killed/wounded ratios were bruited about, when someone is murdered with a Black & Decker electric drill, it is unusual for four bystanders to get nicked by the cross-drilling.
Nelson, who exactly are the Americans fighting against? Do you know? I don't. I know there is a myth about the US fighting sectarian militias, but I see little evidence of that, quite on the contrary, many of the US's allies on the ground are themselves sectarian militias (I would include many government ministries under that heading, and certainly the "concerned citizens" as well as the Badr Brigades). As for Al Qaeda in Iraq, its size and importance is much overblown by the US military as well as by local warlords who only have to utter the magic words "we're going to fight Al Qaeda" to obtain US help in getting rid of rivals.
The misinformation is stunning and so clumsily done. Every single countdown of an air strike's casualties is the same - so many women (civilians), so many children (civilians), so many men (Al Qaeda fighters). As though men can't be civilians and women can't be insurgents, and most especially, as though all insurgents are Al Qaeda (precisely as of the moment that Petraeus took over, by the way.) Note that the US never captures an Al Qaeda member, and never kills any male who is not an Al Qaeda member. And no one in the MSM ever wonders how on earth this could be possible.
In any case, whatever anyone else does, there is never any excuse for an occupying power to kill, harm or threaten civilians. When the Lancet report first came out, the US military's reaction, meant as an excuse not as an admission, was: "We don't count Iraqi deaths". Think about that. It's incredible. You occupy a country and don't count how many people die because of that occupation. You don't even count how many people you yourself kill. There can be only one reason for that: it's because you don't bloody care.
Among much other nonsense, Hans B alleges that "the US never captures an Al Qaeda member". Anyone who reads the Long War Journal knows that this is simply false. (And anyone who doesn't is not qualified to express an opinion on what's going on in Iraq, all the more so if he's never heard of it.) Here’s the third-to-last paragraph of a January 3rd story from LWJ (emphasis added):
Any number of further examples could be provided. Hans B needs to go away and do a little research before telling us all the things he thinks he knows about America and Iraq.
dmwr,
The difference, just to be clear, is that the Administration gave a false and cherry picked version of the intelligence on Iraq in order to drive us to war.
Well, make up your mind. Was the information merely false, or did they lie? You accused some unnamed person or persons of lying. I'm still waiting for you to name these persons, state the alleged lies, and explain how you know they were lying.
I'm not letting the Dems off the hook here
So now you agree that the Democrats are "implicated" in the War in Iraq? First, you criticize me for "implicating" the Democrats by pointing out that many of them voted to authorize military force against Iraq, including two of three leading Democratic presidential candidates, but now you claim you're not "letting them off the hook."
You're really smoking something if you think we'd be in the war if the administration wasn't pushing it. Talk about an absurd claim.
If it's "absurd" you should have no trouble proving that. Please do so. Please explain how you know we would not have gone to war with Iraq under a Democratic administration. Please explain how you know that we would not have gone to war if the Bush administration had not "pushed" it.
I just invite you to review the link I sent earlier.
I'm not interested in wading through links that may have nothing to do with whatever unidentified lies you're referring to. What are these alleged lies? State them. Who do you allege made these lies? Name them. And how do you know they were lying? Produce your proof. Stop trying to change the subject and back up your accusations.
Scent,
So to repeat myself, you can compare post- and pre-invasion numbers, so long as you use the same number of years in your length of time.
Nice try, but your use of modulo was neither "non-technical" nor "metaphorical." You applied it to a mathematical calculation. It's meaningless.
I said that _if_ the excess violent death rate is 150K _and_ the figures in the table are correct, _then_ the total death rate must be in the neighborhood of 400K.
You're just digging yourself even further into your hole. First the 150k figure is a number of deaths, not a "death rate." Do you understand the difference? Second, even if we charitably assume you meant "deaths" rather than "death rate," your statement above would be claiming to derive a death count from all causes using an excess violent death count, which is nonsensical. And third, as I have already explained to you repeatedly, you cannot compute a count of excess deaths from all causes by applying the ratio of death rates to the count of excess violent deaths. The authors of the study explicitly state that the excess violent death rate was calculated using a complex methodology that adjusted for underreporting, population changes, and other sources of bias. In order to calculate even a "neighborhood" value for equivalent total excess deaths, you would need to use that same complex methodology, and since you don't even know what it is, you can't do that.
dsquared,
Juan Cole is admirable in so many ways, but I wish he'd stay out of these arithmetic debates - he's not very good at them.
I think it's hilarious that Juan Cole, Tim Lambert, Kevin Drum, Kieran Healy and our own ScentOfViolets have all claimed to calculate a number for total excess deaths using the NEJM study, and none of those numbers are the same. Lambert's and Cole's aren't even close. And none of them are based on the methodology used by the study's authors to produce their estimate of 151,000 excess violent deaths. You're all making up numbers in order to try and distract attention from the fact that the NEJM authors estimated that the excess violent death count is only one-fourth the number reported in the Lancet study.
Leaving aside the other idiocies (though he's right about the typo: I _meant_ excess deaths, I _typed_ excess death rates), I'd like to point out yet another deficiency in the poor fellows mental equipment. He doesn't know what a ratio is, or how to calculate from it. We don't have to know _how_ the various rates were arrived at in order to use them. Here's a somewhat more 'accurate' count from another post:
Y'know, this isn't exactly rocket science. If I know two rates, and the numerical figure associated with one of them, I can calculate the numerical figure associated with the otherno matter how the rates themselves are derived, ex: Let's say one rate is 0.06/year of the population, and we know that this number is, say, 2,000. Then if the other rate is, say, 0.17 of the population, then all we have to do to get the related numerical figure is to form the ratio 0.17/0.06=X/2,000 and solve for X, which in this case is approximately 6,000.
Not hard to do. But, apparently, it completely baffles Mixner.
Scent,
You're still totally lost. You need to know how the authors calculated their estimate of deaths from violence of 151,000 using the crude death rate from violence of 1.09 in order to know how to calculate a corresponding estimate of deaths from all causes using the crude all-causes death rate of 6.01. Ditto for any estimates of "excess" violent deaths and "excess" all-causes deaths.
Since you don't have the foggiest idea of how the authors calculated their estimate of violent deaths of 151,000, your "estimate" of deaths from all causes of 400,000 is utterly meaningless.
Chuckle. Then why don't you come up with two different scenarios, two different ways of calculating those deaths to show how this would lead to different outcomes? Shouldn't be too difficult, right? Go to it.
Scent,
I don't need to "come up" with anything. YOU need to show how the authors calculated a violent death count of 151,000 using a crude violent death rate of 1.09 in order to support YOUR assertion that the all-causes death rate of 6.01 yields an all-causes death count of around 400,000. You can't do that because you don't know the methodology the authors used. As the authors clearly state, that methodology involves adjustments for sampling errors, underreporting and population changes that are not reflected in the crude death rates. Your 400,000 number is meaningless.
You've even screwed up your own calculation. Your denominator should be 1.09, not 1.09-0.10. The 151,000 number is total violent deaths, not excess violent deaths. But the calculation is meaningless anyway, for the reasons I have explained.
Anyway, I'm done explaining your errors to you. If you still don't understand them, never mind. You're not worth bothering with further.
I thought this would bear repeating: the ratio of all deaths to all violent deaths post-invasion is 6.01/1.09~6, according to table 3 in the report. I claim that this means that if, say, 10 people died on a given day, then on average, we can infer that approximately 60 people died of all causes.
Not hard to figure out, or to state. Mixner claims otherwise, so let's sit back and munch our popcorn and drink our lemonade while Mixner constructs a scenario where the ratio is the same, but the method of getting the rates differs and leads to different figures for the averages.
This is going to be good.
Er, no. Add to Mixner's lack of knowledge the definition of a conditional. But fine, let's go with just total deaths then and adjust the denominator accordingly. You still get on the order of 400,000 excess deaths. Doesn't change the conclusion that the two studies are in substantial agreement.
So 6.01/1.09 is approximately 6? When I do the division, I get 5.51, which is just slightly closer to 6 than to 5, if you must round off to the nearest integer. But no one is forcing you to do that, and it would be far more accurate and honest to call it 5 1/2 than 6.
But what do I know? There's only one person commenting here who understands statistics or arithmetic, and that person has already demonstrated (at least to his own satisfaction) on numerous previous threads that he is always right.
I notice that no one has answered my question as to whether violent deaths under Saddam's rule could really have been all that low.
Mixner is the Godfather of trolls, the hardest-workin man in the troll business. He's a real motherfucker. I am in awe!
Several comments have mentioned the very low level of pre invasion violent deaths.
Do the pre invasion death rate / count include the civilian and military deaths (Iranian, Iraqi, Kuwaiti , and Coalition)caused by
1. His invasion of Iran
2. His invasion of Kuwait
??
These deaths would not have occurred absent saddam's decision to invade.
If these deaths are not included the pre invasion death rate and number of deaths are highly under counted.
Which means the pre and post invasion death rates do not accurately reflect how the invasion impacted overall death rates.
There's one more quote I can't find where Bush talks about how Iraq will be able to convert nuclear material into a bomb in less than year - but I can't find the quote...
But here's a long list of the lies, distortions and misrepresentations of the Bush Administration:
"The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program ... Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons." -- President Bush, Oct. 7, 2002, in Cincinnati.
Department of Energy officials, who monitor nuclear plants, say the tubes could not be used for enriching uranium. One intelligence analyst, who was part of the tubes investigation, angrily told The New Republic: "You had senior American officials like Condoleezza Rice saying the only use of this aluminum really is uranium centrifuges. She said that on television. And that's just a lie."
----------------------------
"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." -- President Bush, Jan.28, 2003, in the State of the Union address.
This lie was based on a document that the White House already knew to be a forgery thanks to the CIA. Sold to Italian intelligence by some hustler, the document carried the signature of an official who had been out of office for 10 years and referenced a constitution that was no longer in effect. The ex-ambassador who the CIA sent to check out the story is pissed: "They knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie," he told the New Republic, anonymously. "They [the White House] were unpersuasive about aluminum tubes and added this to make their case more strongly."
----------------------------
"We believe [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." -- Vice President Cheney on March 16, 2003 on "Meet the Press."
No evidence ever presented. CIA reports up through 2002 showed no evidence of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program.
Contrary evidence: http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Statements/2003/ebsp2003n006.shtml
Key quotes from this March 7, 2003 report:
* There is no indication of resumed nuclear activities in those buildings that were identified through the use of satellite imagery as being reconstructed or newly erected since 1998, nor any indication of nuclear-related prohibited activities at any inspected sites.
* There is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import uranium since 1990.
* There is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import aluminium tubes for use in centrifuge enrichment. Moreover, even had Iraq pursued such a plan, it would have encountered practical difficulties in manufacturing centrifuges out of the aluminium tubes in question.
* Although we are still reviewing issues related to magnets and magnet production, there is no indication to date that Iraq imported magnets for use in a centrifuge enrichment programme.
----------------------------
"[The CIA possesses] solid reporting of senior-level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade." -- CIA Director George Tenet in a written statement released Oct. 7, 2002 and echoed in that evening's speech by President Bush.
Intelligence agencies knew of tentative contacts between Saddam and al-Qaeda in the early '90s, but found no proof of a continuing relationship.
"You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror," President Bush said on September 25, 2002.
The next day, Rumsfeld said, "We have what we consider to be credible evidence that Al Qaeda leaders have sought contacts with Iraq who could help them acquire ... weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities."
The most explosive of allegations came from Cheney, who said that September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, the pilot of the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center, had met in Prague, in the Czech Republic, with a senior Iraqi intelligence agent, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, five months before the attacks. On December 9, 2001, Cheney said on NBC's Meet the Press: "[I]t's pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in [the Czech Republic] last April, several months before the attack."
Cheney continued to make the charge, even after he was briefed, according to government records and officials, that both the CIA and the FBI discounted the possibility of such a meeting.
----------------------------
"We've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases ... Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints." -- President Bush, Oct. 7.
No evidence of this has ever been produced. Colin Powell told the U.N. this alleged training took place in a camp in northern Iraq. To his great embarrassment, the area he indicated was later revealed to be outside Iraq's control and patrolled by Allied war planes.
----------------------------
"We have also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We are concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] for missions targeting the United States." -- President Bush, Oct. 7.
Drones can't fly more than 300 miles, and Iraq is 6,000 miles from the U.S. coastline.
----------------------------
"Yes, we found a biological laboratory in Iraq which the UN prohibited." -- President Bush in remarks in Poland, published internationally June 1, 2003.
This was reference to the discovery of two modified truck trailers that the CIA claimed were potential mobile biological weapons lab. But British and American experts -- including the State Department's intelligence wing in a report released this week -- have since declared this to be untrue. According to the British, and much to Prime Minister Tony Blair's embarrassment, the trailers are actually exactly what Iraq said they were; facilities to fill weather balloons, sold to them by the British themselves.
Dr Weevil, I followed your link to the LWJ and to be honest, I'm surprised that anyone could believe any of that propaganda. I do agree that the US sometimes captures Al Qaeda in Iraq members, though, but I stand by the gist of my initial post which is that Al Qaeda is more a label pinned on dead bodies or unclaimed attacks than it is an important force.
The LWJ calls literally everybody who is not in either US or Iraqi uniform, "Al Qaeda", when even the US military estimates Al Qaeda at between 8 and 15 percent of the Iraqi insurgency. And even that estimate is considered exaggerated by independent experts who say that AQI is minuscule.
A good, nonpartisan article about Al Qaeda is here: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2007/0710.tilghman.html. One of the worthy comments worth quoting from that article: ""Once people look at everything through that lens, al-Qaeda is all they see," said Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer who also worked at the U.S. State Department's Office of Counterterrorism. "It sort of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.""
And: "Alex Rossmiller, who worked in Iraq as an intelligence officer for the Department of Defense, says that real uncertainties exist in assigning responsibility for attacks. "It was kind of a running joke in our office," he recalls. "We would sarcastically refer to everybody as al-Qaeda.""
Once again, Hans B makes stuff up. Here is the Long War Journal's detailed account of operations in Iraq over the last few months. There are indeed dozens of references to killed or captured al Qaeda, but there are also many references to just plain "insurgents" and to "Special Groups", the Iranian-backed Shi'ite insurgents associated with the Mahdi Army and completely separate from Al Qaeda. The accusation that Long War Journal is "propaganda" is contemptible, and the belief that Larry Johnson is an authoritative source is ridiculous.
Dr Weevil, did you read the article I linked to, which quotes people from the AEI and from the military whom you should feel close to as well as many other sources? I did have the courtesy of reading the one you linked to, in its entirety. And your latest link confirms what I thought: the LWJ calls any Sunni insurgent, or even any Sunni male killed by US forces, Al Qaeda. Of course even the LWJ can't call Shi'ites Al Qaeda, that would stretch it a bit wouldn't it.
You notably did not write: "300,000 deaths is a figure that should make any supporter of the war swallow hard". Why do you omit entirely the 150-200k excess but "non-violent" deaths implied by the doubling of the death rate found by this study? They're still 150-200k people who would not have died had the death rate remained what it was prior to 2003.
I look forward to detailed scrutiny of the methodology of this study, similar to that you offered of the Lancet study. Presumably you will have lots to say about the research group's previous documented record of obtaining under-reporting of deaths; the difficulty of classifying non-violent and violent deaths; the exclusion of Anbar from the sample; the difficulty of relying on an estimate by one side in a conflict; etc.
Great compilation dmwr! When you have a minute, can you also provide some authority for the proposition that the earth is round? mixner is still not convinced.
Two more great quotes that I forgot:
Colin Powell – Feb 2001: “He has not developed any significant capability, with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors.”
Condi Rice – July 2001: “We are able to keep from, on him, his military forces have not been rebuilt.”
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