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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Reporters are all but penned up to Baghdad and the Kurdish north.

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.

What you hear in media are relatively unusual events. You don’t hear the daily backdrop.

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.

And that was children for the love of Pete.

/sarcasm

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.

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.

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.