I should clarify what I meant by saying the IBC critique is dead on. I do not mean that Iraq Body Count has proved its case, or disproved the Lancet study. What I do mean is that they have shown some of the things the Lancet authors or others have to explain in order to make such an estimate appear credible.
The response has of course been predictable in the analysis of both the lancet study and the IBC response. The response of war partisans on the right has been more understandable. The lancet study defies everything we read and hear about the actual death rates. In addition both hard core partisans and those less so have pointed out why the number of over 600,000 from war related violence seems likely to be false. I’ll quote something many of you have already read, but from Jane Galt we get why the initial numbers have to be viewed with skepticism (actually studies should generally be treated with skepticism, especially ones where they have not been independently tested or confirmed):
Germany, with a prewar population of just about 80 million, suffered 1.8 million civilian deaths during six years of invasion, concentrated aerial bombing of civilian targets, and occupying forces that in the case of the English and Americans, frankly didn’t give a [expletive deleted] what happened to the Krauts, and in the case of the Russians, took great pleasure in terrorizing, raping and killing the local populace in revenge for their own dead. How likely is it that Iraq has lost a higher percentage of its civilian population in three years–especially given the vast advances in medical care, field treatment for water supply issues and famine, and GDP? With my admittedly limited knowledge of World War II, I find it very difficult to believe that the insurgents are worse than the Russians were, not to mention the Allied Air Command.
The Netherlands lost 30,000 people out of a population of roughly 9 million during six months of famine, during which the average calorie consumption dropped well below 1,000 per day. There was also a total famine of medical and other supplies, which could not pass through the battle lines. How likely is it that there is a larger humanitarian crisis in Iraq than there was in a country getting no food or supplies whatsoever?
Or to compare it to another civil war, this is more deaths than America’s civilian and military deaths combined (union and confederate) during 4 years of brutal civil war with no medical care worth having, Sherman’s march to the sea, and the tragic mistake of using massed formations against repeating rifles and modern artillery.
The average report is of about 30 civilian casualties a day–a horrifying number that should sting the consciences of those who advocated war. I’m sure that there are more whose deaths go unreported. But assuming that violence is the major cause of death, how likely is it that the newspapers are all consistently underestimating the number of violent civilian deaths by a factor of five or more? Okay, maybe they’re all happening outside of Baghdad. Except outside of Baghdad includes the Kurdish north, where 10% of the population is mostly not getting shot by insurgents. And a lot of Iraq’s other towns outside of Baghdad aren’t that big. Bayji, a major oil centre, has 60,000 inhabitants. As anyone from a town that size can tell you, it wouldn’t go unnoticed if it was losing 1,600 people a year to murder.
The Lancet study is arguing that in the space of 3 years, Iraq has lost 2.5% of its population in extra deaths. That doesn’t sound like much, but it’s an enormous figure, as these things go. It’s even more enormous if you exclude the Kurdish areas, which are pretty stable, and have about 2.5 million people in them; the various stable places in the Shiite south, and the roughly 5% of the population that, according to the Atlantic Monthly, has fled the country. That suggests that Iraq is losing more than 1% of its remaining population a year to violence–as if 3 million Americans a year were getting shot in the streets.
I find it unlikely–not impossible, but unlikely. Certainly, in a country like Iraq, which as war zones go is pretty well organized and supplied (don’t look at me like that, anti-war people: read some history, for heaven’s sake. Or go check out the Congo) it’s much bigger than we should expect, even with horrible sectarian violence.
Update: One of Mr Healy’s commenters points out something that makes the figure even more unlikely:
One point on the 470 per day explanation proferred by Cole.
The original study published in October 2004 went with 100,000 excess deaths as the confidence interval mid-point. This was for the period Mar 2003 – Sep 2004. The new study has revised upwards the figure for this period to 112,000. This means that for the 22 month period Oct 2004 to Jul 2006, the study finds 543,000 excess deaths (655,000 – 112,000). This breaks down to an average of 822 excess deaths every day for the 670 or so days between Oct 2004 and July 2006. Given we’re talking an average of 822, this means that >1,000 daily excess deaths must be commonplace.
As medpundit points out in the update to the post the public health community is not exactly the most reliable source for hard data. The same design that is used here has been shown over and over again to be problematic in various areas of inquiry. That doesn’t make it an illegitimate tool, and I have seen nothing in the study to show that from a design standpoint it is flawed, but the issues in this kind of survey are real, and in a case like this the design or type of study is not the biggest issue. The implementation is. Steve Sailer walks through his thoughts on the study and discusses some possible implementation issues here:
Getting a representative sample for this study is obviously hugely difficult. It could be that the researchers gravitated to the most shot up neighborhoods, or that those families having suffered losses were most likely to talk to the researchers. On the other hand, it’s equally easy to theorize that the opposite biases would be true — researchers would stick to the least violent neighborhoods out of self-preservation urges and families whose menfolk were involved in this war of all against all would be least likely to speak to strangers, who might be connected to an opposing group. (Think of the scene in “The Departed” where the cops try to get the mother of a thief murdered by the Boston Irish mob to talk to them, but she won’t.)
A reader points toward the this line in the report:
“In 16 (0·9%) dwellings, residents were absent; 15 (0·8%) households refused to participate.”
Out of 1849 households surveyed, those seem dubiously low nobody-at-home and refusal rates. So, maybe they are just making up the data. Who knows …
What’s going on here is that the interviewers were supposed to go to 47 neighborhoods around the country and start interviewing until they tallied 40 households, which equals 1880 households. But they ended up with only 1849, which is 31 (16 not-at-homes plus 15 refusals) short of 1880. So, the question is whether the 31 households mentioned above comprise all the not-at-homes and refusals, which seems implausible, or are they just a subset? For instance, perhaps the interviewers finished up a day thinking they had 40 households but when they got home they found they’d miscounted and did only 39, so they marked one down as refused. Once again, who knows, but the study sponsors should provide an explanation.
Maybe what happened is that the interviewers didn’t actually go much door-to-door at random, but instead arrived in a neighborhood, put the word out, and then either had people who wanted to talk to them come see them or were invited to the homes of people who wanted to see them. That might account for the very high % of people with death certificates available.
Or it could be that the interviewers got in contact ahead of time with neighborhood leaders to see if their presence would be welcome to reduce their chances of being killed. (That’s not good random surveying hygiene, but are you going to blame them?) Then, in a neighborhood where the local big shot wanted their presence, he might have passed the word around to aggrieved families to get ready to tell their stories to the interviewers when they showed up. This could cause a bias upward in the number of deaths reported.
The more I think about the mechanics of carrying out the survey on the street without getting killed, the more I suspect that the Iraqi interviewers didn’t actually implement the purely random survey design that the American professors from MIT and Johns Hopkins dreamed up for them. It would be nuts to to let luck determine which streets you’d choose, as the report claims they did. You’d want to only go where you knew you’d be safe. Then you’d tell the Americans you did exactly what they told you to do.
How that would bias the result, I don’t know.
The overall point, however, is that nobody else appears to be doing this kind of study because it is so hideously dangerous, which ought to tell us something.
I would suggest reading the whole thing, but he feels the numbers are not highly implausible in working through the possibilities in his mind, but he wouldn’t put much confidence in them either. I find them less plausible for some of the reasons Jane lists above, but I can find ways to imagine the number could be true as well. Once again, my point is that such studies are inherently problematic and have been shown to be wrong many times before.
The more thoughtful defenses of the study are disappointing because they are in essence mounting the plausibility defense. You can read John Quiggins defense of the number of deaths due to air strikes here. I find it unconvincing because while his numbers may be plausible, they are not necessarily true. He is showing that the numbers can be true if certain assumptions are maintained, and even then he only gets to the low side of the Lancet’s estimates. There are two problems with this.
First of all the reported figure is the mid-range of the estimates, so if you have to make some pretty steep assumptions to justify the lower estimate, one must question whether the entire survey is flawed. The upper bounds according to his own analysis is pretty hard to find plausible at all.
Second, he himself argues that it is likely the survey information is wrong to justify his figures as in line with the study. He is pointing out that the answers are unlikely to be true. If so, then one must allow for the possibility that other data has been similarly falsely reported.
It should also be pointed out that the first Lancet study and the second have vastly different results on the breakdown of whether the deaths were from violence or other causes for the period covered in the first study. That raises severe questions about the appropriateness of taking either survey at face value. It does not help for statisticians to come up with explanations showing the statistics are inherently variable, no kidding! That is the point and the swing is huge. One cannot reasonably argue that we must accept an extrapolated survey as the best guide and then argue that all anomalies, no matter how huge are just due to the variability of the parts of the data. I know that subsets are not as accurate as the whole, but on the other hand if the subsets are actually unreliable then the whole will be as well. Are the subsets reliable? We don’t know. That the statistical design is reliable in no way means the data itself is reliable.
One area which interested me on this specific area is that one of the reasons the authors come up with not just an increase in the violent death rate for the period of the earlier study, but bizarrely an actual decrease in not just the excess non violence related deaths, but a decrease relative to before the invasion. The baseline is 5.4 deaths per thousand, in the year after that it is 4.5 per thousand and in the second year 5.0 per thousand. Maybe that is true, but if so it would be very surprising.
There is a mostly thoughtful debate (and if you have time the comments include some very interesting debate) over at Scienceblogs. Tim Lambert gives a round up of supporters here and here. Mike Dunford points out some areas of concern and then addresses the comments on that post quite well here. Mike is obviously trying to be fair and I appreciate it. We also get a link to this post over at Lenin’s Tomb about the IBC response. I am sure that the people at IBC are bewildered that the attack from their fellow leftists is as vehement and derogatory as it is, but I am not. This is Lenin’s summation:
And this is it. The whole thing is an enormous and misleading exercise in circularity, a massive raise of the eyebrow, a titanic exercise in obfuscation. They cannot touch the study for methodology, they cannot find anything in it that is badly done: not a single cluster wrongly placed, not a single false extrapolation, not a particle of evidence of any fraudulence or fecklessness. They hazily refer to possible bias, but on the basis of nothing more solid than that this would explain away the uncomfortable implications that they draw. As Daniel Davies points out, the chances of the Lancet authors obtaining the sample they did, if the facts were much closer to what the IBC records, are so low that it would have to be fraud. The IBC cannot and do not make this accusation, because they are not prepared to test their flimsy insinuations and doubts in a court of law. For a proffered rebuttal entitled ‘Reality Checks’, the IBC’s intervention is breathtakingly short on either rebuttal or reality.
Why do I find most of these defenses and thoughtful, if sympathetic criticism, unsatisfying? Because it really boils down to Lenin’s defense. If you can’t prove right now, right here that this study is wrong even pointing out the incongruity of the numbers with actual evidence is suspect. Plausibility becomes enough for the studies defenders.
There are problems with the design, but they only alter the report at the margins from what I can see so far. Maybe the issues are more substantial, but even if they are not, the very fact that IBC can point out all kinds of reasons not to believe it means we should ask ourselves what about the implementation? Sailer gives a number of reasons why the implementation is likely to be wrong and they should be taken seriously in light of the obvious issues that the IBC brings up. Does that mean the IBC is right? No. But it is not they who are publishing the study. Ad hoc explanations for why the number is reasonable don’t cut it. The authors and their defenders need to spend time trying to falsify their conclusion, not find reasons why it could be right and then saying therefore it is.
All of our experience in war tells us that if Iraq had suffered the numbers killed by violence that the study suggests it would be obvious to everyone what the likely range of death would be. Similar slaughters have been far more visible. Possibly the death squads and other groups are killing in massive numbers and hiding the bodies. Maybe there are factors in this war that can explain the discrepancies, but if so it is the authors who owe us an explanation, not those who are incredulous at the numbers.
I think the defenders and some of the attackers are missing a huge point about the scientific method and statistics. I’ll go back to something I said when the first study came out with a range that went as low as 8000 and a most likely estimate of about 100,000. Imagine a simple game of two dice where we bet on what the roll will be. We know what the probability is, so everyone would guess a seven. If we had everyone guess any three numbers we could assume that everyone would pick the same three numbers. A study showing the correct roll was most likely a seven would not tell us the actual roll, we would still need to look at the dice to figure out who was right! In Iraq such sampling is useful as a starting point to examine whether the reports from morgues and other sources are right and why or why not. In the end though the researcher needs to look at the dice. That is the real number rolled, not any probability. The same is true in Iraq where the variability is so much wider and cloudier and we have no concrete knowledge of how many sides are on the dice or even that we can even know that the rolls we are using to sample for the study are accurate. The actual reports are the closest we can come to uncovering the dice. They might not be accurate, in fact they surely are not, but they are real data and any discrepancy between that and the sample has to be rigorously explained, not simply asserted to be inaccurate. Actual evidence needs to be found.
The problem of course is that the Lancet studies own sample showed no large discrepancy between the actual deaths they found and official documents, so we know that the government at some level is aware of almost all the deaths, at least the discrepancy is no larger than already expected. So, if the official documents they found are to be believed (and they should have gotten copies of each one, a major error) and their contention is that the vast majority of these documents have not been included in the numbers that have been reported as an explanation of the discrepancy, then that should have been tested. How? I would think making a good faith effort to see if they had been recorded officially would be a good place to start. If we had copies of each one, that could even be independently verified by other researchers. That wouldn’t be enough for me, but it would be a good start. They could then check to see how many had been included in the IBC data, and if not find out why or why not. That is real science. Hiding behind the statistical validity of your methods is not. The fact is scientists are often surprised by factors which work their way into studies which were not anticipated.
So what should we take from the study? Actually a lot. For one thing I suspect the numbers of dead in Iraq are far higher than the IBC has been able to verify. Despite my suspicions, and I believe well founded ones, the study may be right about the deaths being north of 300,000. They are not that implausible. One thing supporters of the war need to ask themselves is does it matter? I think it does, and if the death toll is any where near what this study says I have to adjust my thinking accordingly. Granted, I assumed an outcome like this was possible, and I assumed the war would be rife with mismanagement (study every war, by every country or other party in this century and tell me why that isn’t a safe assumption) but it doesn’t change my disappointment. War supporters are going to have to come to grips with the possibility that for the short term the invasion has made the lives of Iraqi’s much worse. The death toll is high (I also should say that I find using 2002 as the base year is misleading in estimating excess deaths since Saddam’s massacres were not a steady stream, but punctuated by massive spikes) and the atmosphere the Iraqi people live in is chaotic. There have been improvements, but they do not offset the carnage and uncertainty. Just denying the study and its implications is not good enough either.
Those Hawks who supported the war and now oppose it need to get a grip as well. If you chose to support this adventure you don’t get to blame it all on Bush or Rumsfeld. When you go to war you have to factor in the fact that things will go wrong, often catastrophically. If you didn’t factor in that likelihood with some idea of what to do if it did then you were irresponsible, far more so than those who have continued to support the effort despite its failures. The next time you want to go make the world a better place, whether you justify it on “realist” grounds or any other I suggest you take into account the inevitable screw ups, mismanagement, humanitarian outrages and other things you are going to end up screaming about into the calculation. Go ahead and criticize, but I don’t want to hear any faux surprise or how you were misled or that you had no idea that our leadership would be so bad at times. That should be a given before you start. One can hope things go better, but people’s lives depend on you knowing the likely downside to begin with. Proclaiming yourself the violated naif doesn’t earn you any points with me and I doubt those who are dying in Iraq either.
[tags] Iraq, Lancet, Realist, deaths, casualties [/tags]
On balance, I find this to be a pretty responsible and thoughtful criticism. Balanced, even. As a vigorous defender of the study, I’m willing to admit that I don’t know how many people have been killed either, and that the authors of this study don’t know.
I haven’t been defending the study as total certainty that 650,000 people have been killed. I’ve mostly been defending it because the MSM , until this study, has almost completely failed to question the prima facie absurd IBC number.
Now, I’m not suggesting sinister motives behind IBC. Good people doing an important job. But counting deaths reported in the media is in no way the same thing as taking estimates and *never* has been. It’s been, from my perspective as someone disgusted with the breeziness with which some pro-war supporters blow off the death in Iraq (“birth pangs” – not that Condolezza is a prime offender – I’m talking about pundits), inexplicable that no one before now has even tried to estimate the real number of deaths. If you wanted to, you could call it massive evidence of right-wing bias. I don’t think that’s what it is, but it’s hard to explain in a manner unrelated from political comfort, isn’t it?
I mean, you’ve never seen a generalized conflict that didn’t use esimtates before. Esimtates determined Kosovo, Bosnia and Rwanda. Estimates were used with Israel’s war against Lebanon. Darfur’s 400K is absolutely an estimate – if you relied on media counts of incidents, you’d be in the single-digit thousands. The lack of anyone prior to Lancet even *trying* to estimate the real number in Iraq has led to President Bush’s being able to lowball IBC (30K?), and have it taken as reasonable, instead of a joke – because 50K, way too low, is the highest number *anyone’s* heard of. And a false consensus has been built up.
Now, I beleive that it’s possible that the number could be lower than 600K. It could even be lower than 400K. But I’ve been personally offended by the way some people have completely blown the number off, assuming that because the creators hold anti-war believes, that the study is “junk science”.
Example:
http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2006/10/new-liberal-death-count-claims-770.html
Another example I won’t bother to link is Dean Esmay. Boy, that made me angry.
The irresponsibility and convenient dismissal with which some have treated this study is a compounding of the same attitudes towards this war in the first place. It’s possible that the study’s conclusions are off by some margin, but it’s important to say that the methodology was a standard choice, competently performed, and not an obvious political hack job in any way.
It’s the only serious attempt on the books yet. I would be willing to listen to a serious similar study which returned a lower number, but I won’t listen to people blow this off.
I enjoyed the contrasting and substantive perspectives you provided here, criticisms included.
Quibble:
All of our experience in war tells us that if Iraq had suffered the numbers killed by violence that the study suggests it would be obvious to everyone what the likely range of death would be. Similar slaughters have been far more visible. Possibly the death squads and other groups are killing in massive numbers and hiding the bodies.
This isn’t neccesarily true. I want to give you an example of why underreporting is a constant trend. The current outburst in Balad – reporters have been using 81 dead as a number. Where’d they get it? A telephone call. The battle is raging – does the guy making the telephone call know about every dead body? Of course not. The same article quotes the guy describing bodies “lying in the streets” – obviously they’re not being counted systematically. And both sides will undoubtedly hide, the deaths of their own fighters, and probably the civilian deaths. Do you see Shiite gangs bringing Sunni bodies to the morgue?
The point is that it’s much easier to see “general evidence of mass slaughter” in something like a one-sided ethnic cleansing campaign then it is in a civil war. Everyone’s looking for that one-sided mass slaughter, but that’s just an associative fallacy. A civil war is not less deadly than an ethnic cleansing.
Reporters are all but penned up to Baghdad and the Kurdish north. What you hear in media are relatively unusual events. You don’t hear the daily backdrop.
Regarding the certificates, the Iraqi government – acting not as a whole but as the total of a bunch of fiefdoms and ministries – is almost certainly systematically underreporting deaths. In everything else they’ve done, they’ve been corrupt and incompetent in vast swathes. Their death counts are not only not likely to be the standout, they’re the least likely. Neither the street gang nor the death squad mentality takes kindly to the reporting of anyone’s deaths. These people run the death reporting ministries.
I for one do not care if it is 50,000 or 650,000. It should not matter. But to the people who do think it matters and find one number acceptable and the other intolerable I’d only ask where the inflection point is. At what point does it become enough? As an American voter I couldn’t care less(yes, that’s right). I’ll accept whatever the Iraqi voters decide. Even if that means an ayatollah as a head of state.
The main problem I’ve had with this study and all attempts to gin up opposition to the Iraq war is the credulity shown by the stoppers(particularly of the British sort such as the Lancet crew). Everything down the pike from the recruiting shortfalls, to the Italian white phosphorous “documentary”, to the a priori assumption of systemic causes for every single crime committed by coalition forces, to gleefully watching every body count milestone as it approaches…every single thing that detracts from the war effort has been championed for political effect. And can anyone believe for a nanosecond that those crying today about Iraqi deaths would support in any way an inflated body count among coalition forces if more troops or policing were committed? The anti- crowd certainly hasn’t given me any reason to believe they care about anything other than politics.
As for statistics, the last lengthy study I read was circa 1990. It was about the impact on the pitching mound height change in the ’60s on ERAs and batting averages. It was a delightful read IIRC. Probably because no one’s life depended on the math.
Yes, glasnost, and is it also conceivable that those quasi-indepdent fiefdoms are hanging out death certificates willy-nilly to anyone who asks? There are two sides of that coin you like to pull out.
Anyone else recall the 500,000 dead Iraqi children during the ’90s and Albright’s blase attitude towards it?
And that was children for the love of Pete.
/sarcasm
glasnost,
I don’t have any problem in theory with your statements. I will say however that while the deaths are most likely underreported, the scale of the discrepancy is not to be dismissed any more lightly than the study itself. That goes for the media as well.
Thus one would expect the media to be more on top of the situation in Baghdad and one would also suspect the authorities to be closer as well. My back of the envelope calculation is that the deaths in Baghdad alone are off by a factor of around 10. That is extraordinary in the kind of circumstances we see in Iraq which are much better than normal for this kind of tracking.
The problem that that presents is that if the Lancet study is correct what the media is reporting is not the unusual. In fact they are reporting smaller events and ignoring the usual much more violent events and most of the truly extraordinary events. Literally hundreds of people are being killed, a huge number of them by coalition forces, in Baghdad alone, on a daily basis and less than 10% of them are being reported on in the media or found in government records. I think the IBC criticism on that count is pretty telling. Throw in the lack of evidence of the huge number of injured in the many types of attacks covered that are not in evidence at this point and we have a pretty hard to explain data set.
I am not dismissing the study, though unless we have our own secret death squads I am pretty close to dismissing the claim of how many are killed by us. I do find the scale of unreported deaths unlikely. I am not considering this as an ethnic cleansing. I am comparing it to other civil wars, and when death tolls of that size were occurring the bodies were stacking up like cord wood everywhere. It was obvious. Maybe not the exact number, but when a city the size of Baghdad has over 1000 excess deaths (so total deaths were higher still) on a regular basis it normally cannot be disguised without state sponsorship. Typically that means sweeps in the middle of the night and people carted off and executed away from the city and they disappear into mass graves. That is precisely not what the Lancet is reporting. These people are dying and family members are going to the authorities and getting death certicates. How is that hidden? Can you imagine what the hospitals, morgues and authorities look like if that was the case on a weekly basis in addition to daily counts in the low hundreds? It beggars belief. I think a key point is that according to the Lancet these people went to the authorities and got death certificates. These are not hidden deaths. They occurred right on the streets of Baghdad.
Of course, sometimes such things are true, but extreme skepticism is warranted. Some reporter would get the goods on a situation such as that in my opinion. IBC is checking the obituaries and anything they can find. They would most likely notice as well.
All that being said, I agree, the dismissal of the study is not warranted. It needs to be explained, and not merely from conjecture on either side of the issue (which is a stupid, but unfortunately true way to put it) but by actual tests of the assumptions. I do believe our government should be making sure it happens and I am quite sure this administration will not do so.
Oh, by the way, thanks for the kind words.
My back of the envelope calculation is that the deaths in Baghdad alone are off by a factor of around 10.
Are you getting this from study’s detail? Did they break their estimates down by geographic region? Or is it just an assumption? I think Baghdad is the one place where estimates are more likely to be with a factor of, oh two or three. It’s the rest of the country where we get into the ten-factor.
The problem that that presents is that if the Lancet study is correct what the media is reporting is not the unusual. In fact they are reporting smaller events and ignoring the usual much more violent events and most of the truly extraordinary events. Literally hundreds of people are being killed, a huge number of them by coalition forces, in Baghdad alone, on a daily basis and less than 10% of them are being reported on in the media or found in government records.
No. Not neccesarily, anyway. What the media is reporting is essentially random, but prone towards the big events. In Baghdad. However, what they’re doing is undercounting the big events – not deliberately, but because they’re relying on incomplete data -
and completely omitting many of the smaller events. *Lots* of the smaller events. For example, 65% of the deaths are gunfire according to the study, but I’d bet cold hard cash that the IBC’s totals have a higher % of *their* total to car bombs.
As for the literally hundreds in Baghdad alone- nah. My back of the envelope for the lower bound was 350 a day for the whole country. Since Baghdad is about 25%, then that’s less than 100 a day. Average. Sure, differing violence levels factor in, but assume it cancels out to an extent. I bet the average number of Baghdad fatalities reported by the media in 06, per day, has been 30-50. See, now we’re off-by multiple of 2 or 3 range. In Baghdad.
Can you imagine what the hospitals, morgues and authorities look like if that was the case on a weekly basis in addition to daily counts in the low hundreds? It beggars belief. I think a key point is that according to the Lancet these people went to the authorities and got death certificates. These are not hidden deaths. They occurred right on the streets of Baghdad.
Two things: equating getting a death certificate with dropping a body off at the morgue, and equating Baghdad with the rest of the country. It’s not at all hard to imagine political pressure fudging morgue counts in Baghdad down by a percentage. We *know* there’s pressure, major stories have been done about it. But the pressure only extends to the official count, because that’s all they’ve bothered to control. So the number of certificates they issue and bodies they collect varies widely from the counts they annouce. Why should they care? No one was counting. Until now. And they only care about hiding their personal militia’s own actions that week, not the total overall.
And there’s no way to assume you need to drop a body off at a morgue to get a death certificate in Iraq. Car bombs and air strikes don’t even leave bodies in all cases. There’s not enough left of you to bury.
Second, it’s possible that some of these death certificates are faked. Then the numbers would indeed be too high. But I doubt it’s a huge number of fakes. You have to hide the actual live person. Maybe some of the deaths are emigration, maybe they’re in hiding. Possible. I’d think 10%, not much more.
Thirdly, remember, it’s not mass graves. People aren’t being killed 1000 at a time in any one place. Too much anarchy. They’re being killed in twos and threes. Given the low level of Western presence in non-Baghdad areas, I don’t think the bodies really have to be hidden. You just need someone to lie about the totals.
according to the Lancet study in the first six months the number killed was in excess of 1000 a day in Iraq. That means 250/day in Baghdad. That means many days approaching and exceeding 1000 and hundreds on a daily basis. Further the violence is not evenly distributed as the Lancet study makes clear, you can pretty much exclude kurdistan for example. That is where I get approx. 350 -400/day from. You of course use the lower bound, but they claim that is very unlikely, and you are using the period as a whole. I am saying that if in recent months what the Lancet was claiming was happening it would be extremely hard to hide.
I am not assuming they took the body to the morgue. I am saying they did go to the autrhorities. The bodies and masses of wounded are harder to hide. A city can easily absorb hundreds of dead every once in a while, not on a steady basis. Burial plots, hospitals (since a significant number of people are dying after the fact) transportation, short term storage, all are going to be stressed. I have been studying these kind of conflicts and mass killings for a long time, and they just don’t look like this, especially in a heavily urbanized environment.
Could you be right? Of course, stranger things have have ended up being true, but plausible is not likely. Given what we have seen I would be very surprised if by June it was more than 200,000. That is horrific enough, but it fits the evidence outside of the Lancet study.
I should also note that the IBC numbers may not be that far off either. We have no evidence at this point, outside of the Lancet, to discount their estimates (not their count, their estimates) as well.
There are a couple of problems with the study not directly linked to the methodology.
One is the start number, the pre-invasion death rate. The study used a number of 5.5 per thousand of population per year. That’s the low end. WHO shows 8.9, and others up to about 12. Each change in the start rate changes the difference between it and the end point–whether the latter is accurate or not–by about 27,000. So using WHO’s rate drops the putative number by about 118000.
One issue affecting the death rate is the age of the population. Hungary, for example, currently really short of kids, has a rate of 13, with the elderly shuffling off quite briskly. Some Latin American countries, not invaded by the US, have death rates in the 5-6 range, because they have so many youngsters. Ours is just short of 10.
The problem with Iraq’s number is that assertion by the left that the sanctions took half a million kids off. If true, these kids’ deaths would have raised the death rate prior to the invasion, and, not being available to lower it afterwards, raised it simply by not being there to not die.
I would suggest that the study ruins the accusations about the sanctions, or the sanctions story makes the story doubtful. I don’t see that they can both be true.
Keep in mind that the number is excess deaths, which means all causes, not simply violence. That being the case, issues like poor nutrition and poor health care and lousy sanitation would have been affecting the most vulnerable and adding them to the death list disproportionately. Yet the study shows men of military age are disproportionately represented.
I don’t have much to say about the appropriateness of the statistical validity and confidence, having forgotten what little I ever knew about squaring chis. However, the idea of Iraq surveyors doing things right while looking over their shoulders for sudden death and not taking any shortcuts fails to jell.
I’ll be putting up another post on this pretty soon. I agree that the pre-invasion death rate is odd. Especially because according to the Lancet the non-violence death rate actually went down after the invasion. Very odd.
I understand the excess deaths versus violence, but the Lancet is saying over 600,000 deaths (for their mid range number) came from violence, not other causes.
Your point about the sanctions effect is also very valid, and especially considering that it was the Lancet which gave us the sanctions death toll number. It is possible that by choosing the 2002 date to set the baseline that that avoided the sanctions issue to some extent, however, that begs the question of whether 2002 was the most representative year to set as the baseline. I don’t think so on that score either.