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-- The Lancet: Iraq Death Toll Hits 600,000
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Originally posted by _Ocean_Drive_ And it's a nice stable democracy too. Thank goodness Bush liberated them.

Yes, let the people remain living in shakles, fear and despotism.
That's MUCH better...

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Originally posted by Fir3start3r Yes, let the people remain living in shakles, fear and despotism. That's MUCH better...

What do you think Iraq is like now? A becaon of happiness? Or were you referring to Guantanemo?

Look dude, without wishing to start a slanging match, here are my 'uninformed, biased and ignorant' views.

Bush and Blair went to war in Iraq due to a perceived and maintained idea that Iraq had links to 9/11. When this didn't quite pan out, it turned to "Iraq has WMDs". This has well been documented - that this was the reason we went into Iraq. When it was realised that Iraq (strangely enough) didn't have WMD's, it turned to "we're liberating them" ha, ha.

After which, daddy's friend's got their grubby mits on lucrative contracts, and it was oh so convenient that Iraq happened to be filled with wells of a certain a black substance.

Now, as for Iraq prior to 9/11, it was more stable on all levels (except morally). I do not condone what went on under the SH regime (I support Amnesty International), but it was a regime that was crumbling from the inside, a bit like the USSR was in the late 1980's. You can bring down regime's without invasion (Spain and EU pressure?).

I believe this is simply a case of America bullying a little country because it can. After 9/11, the bully had been hurt and caught off guard, and needed to fight back to show it hadn't lost its toughness. Who better to direct it at than an old foe? Bush had (most of) the entire world offering their sympathy and support and he threw it all away. He should have gone to the Saudis and demanded that they cooperate, but did he heck? Instead we have the never-ending disgrace that is Iraq.

Now what gets me most about this war is that it was illegal - no two ways about it. It by-passed Congress (which hasn't ratified a war since World War II) it went against the UN, and it was unjustified.

The first Gulf War - that was ok because Iraq had invaded another country. It was legal that the US and UN etc had gone in (I think we should have sent snipers in to finish SH off then but we didn't).

It's disgusting that these troops have been sent out there now, for NO reason, and now they're in a never-ending quagmire, c. 650,000 deaths and more being frittered away every day, and an unstable political / social situation. Iraq hadn't invaded anyone to warrant an invasion. America never seems to learn from Vietnam, and here we have a repeat. For America to bestow its bastion of 'democracey' on the rest of the world disgusts me.

assuming the 650,000 is even accurate to begin with.
This is the same Left wing crazed moonbat that had his '100,000 Death Toll' all shot to shit and hey look, it's RIGHT BEFORE AN ELECTION.
Agenda much?
I can't wait until the actual truth comes out with this supposed report...

...and thanks for the history lesson bub but I think everyone knows what happened...

quote:

Originally posted by Fir3start3r assuming the 650,000 is even accurate to begin with. This is the same Left wing crazed moonbat that had his '100,000 Death Toll' all shot to shit and hey look, it's RIGHT BEFORE AN ELECTION. Agenda much? I can't wait until the actual truth comes out with this supposed report...

Couple-o-points. Several independant newspapers over here reported that figure - doesn't mean it's TRUE, just means it's not some left wing nutjob.

quote:

Originally posted by Fir3start3r ...and thanks for the history lesson bub but I think everyone knows what happened...

Wasn't a history lesson. I'm sure you know what happened, I just wanted your opinion on what I said.

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Originally posted by _Ocean_Drive_ Couple-o-points. Several independant newspapers over here reported that figure - doesn't mean it's TRUE, just means it's not some left wing nutjob.

Scoll way up and play the video I posted of Dr Richard Horton and just listen to him.
All the left-wing talking points are mentioned in his 'speech'.
It's quite obvious.

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Wasn't a history lesson. I'm sure you know what happened, I just wanted your opinion on what I said.

That's fine, but I've read it all before and there's nothing new in your opinion.

As for the report, there's already rebuttals coming in now that the report has been shared with the rest of the world...

This one is particularly good as it agrees that the numbers are exaggerated, but more importantly, they explain why.
http://acepilots.com/mt/2006/10/12/...w-lancet-study/

This Iraqi though, is pretty pissed...

quote:

Among the things I cannot accept is exploiting the suffering of people to make gains that are not the least related to easing the suffering of those people. I�m talking here about those researchers who used the transparency and open doors of the new Iraq to come and count the drops of blood we shed. Human flesh is abundant and all they have to do is call this hospital or that office to get the count of casualties, even more they can knock on doors and ask us one by one and we would answer because we�ve got nothing to be ashamed of. We believe in what we�re struggling for and we are proud of our sacrifices. I wonder if that research team was willing to go to North Korea or Libya and I think they wouldn�t have the guts to dare ask Saddam to let them in and investigate deaths under his regime. No, they would�ve shit their pants the moment they set foot in Iraq and they would find themselves surrounded by the Mukhabarat men counting their breaths. However, maybe they would have the chance to receive a gift from the tyrant in exchange for painting a rosy picture about his rule. They shamelessly made an auction of our blood, and it didn�t make a difference if the blood was shed by a bomb or a bullet or a heart attack because the bigger the count the more useful it becomes to attack this or that policy in a political race and the more useful it becomes in cheerleading for murderous tyrannical regimes. When the statistics announced by hospitals and military here, or even by the UN, did not satisfy their lust for more deaths, they resorted to mathematics to get a fake number that satisfies their sadistic urges. When I read the report I can only feel apathy and inhumanity from those who did the count towards the victims and towards our suffering as a whole. I can tell they were so pleased when the equations their twisted minds designed led to those numbers and nothing can convince me that they did their so called research out of compassion or care. To me their motives are clear, all they want is to prove that our struggle for freedom was the wrong thing to do. And they shamelessly use lies to do this�when they did not find the death they wanted to see on the ground, they faked it on paper! They disgust me� This fake research is an insult to every man, woman and child who lost their lives. Behind every drop of blood is a noble story of sacrifice for a just cause that is struggling for living safe in freedom and prosperity. Let those fools know that nothing will stop us from walking this road and nothing will stop our friends and allies from helping us reach safe shores. There�s simply no going back even if it cost us more and their fake statistics will not frighten us�our sacrifices, like I said, make us proud because our bloods are not digits in those ugly papers. Our sacrifices are paving the way for future generations to live the better life we couldn�t live.

>>Source<<

In conclusion, there is no democracy in Iraq, no freedom of speech (tell it to the journalists there who get jailed for critising Americans), military and government is corrupt, criminals on the loose, country in ruins.

It was pretty bad under Hussein, and its still bad ... now under American supervision.

It doesnt matter what the extremists say about the situation in Iraq - without them its quite obvious.

Remember a year ago there was a huge scandal in Iraq about British soldiers shooting at passing cars, and videotaping that, driving around the countryside? What can Iraqis do to pprotect themselves against the oppression and unlawfulness of the invaders? What about the rapes and mass murders of families by American troops, that has been documented? Did the Iraqis get the justice?

Bush said only 30,000 Iraqis died since the invasion. These journalists say 650,000. Now I learn last month 15,000 Iraqis died. Definitely Bush is trying to lower the actual numbers, its a big difference between 650,000 and 30,000.

hmmm...

Interesting.

The study sounds suspect, unless this guy is full of shit.

quote:

655,000 War Dead? By STEVEN E. MOORE October 18, 2006; Page A20 After doing survey research in Iraq for nearly two years, I was surprised to read that a study by a group from Johns Hopkins University claims that 655,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the war. Don't get me wrong, there have been far too many deaths in Iraq by anyone's measure; some of them have been friends of mine. But the Johns Hopkins tally is wildly at odds with any numbers I have seen in that country. Survey results frequently have a margin of error of plus or minus 3% or 5% -- not 1200%. The group -- associated with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health -- employed cluster sampling for in-person interviews, which is the methodology that I and most researchers use in developing countries. Here, in the U.S., opinion surveys often use telephone polls, selecting individuals at random. But for a country lacking in telephone penetration, door-to-door interviews are required: Neighborhoods are selected at random, and then individuals are selected at random in "clusters" within each neighborhood for door-to-door interviews. Without cluster sampling, the expense and time associated with travel would make in-person interviewing virtually impossible. [War Deaths] However, the key to the validity of cluster sampling is to use enough cluster points. In their 2006 report, "Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional sample survey," the Johns Hopkins team says it used 47 cluster points for their sample of 1,849 interviews. This is astonishing: I wouldn't survey a junior high school, no less an entire country, using only 47 cluster points. Neither would anyone else. For its 2004 survey of Iraq, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) used 2,200 cluster points of 10 interviews each for a total sample of 21,688. True, interviews are expensive and not everyone has the U.N.'s bank account. However, even for a similarly sized sample, that is an extraordinarily small number of cluster points. A 2005 survey conducted by ABC News, Time magazine, the BBC, NHK and Der Spiegel used 135 cluster points with a sample size of 1,711 -- almost three times that of the Johns Hopkins team for 93% of the sample size. What happens when you don't use enough cluster points in a survey? You get crazy results when compared to a known quantity, or a survey with more cluster points. There was a perfect example of this two years ago. The UNDP's survey, in April and May 2004, estimated between 18,000 and 29,000 Iraqi civilian deaths due to the war. This survey was conducted four months prior to another, earlier study by the Johns Hopkins team, which used 33 cluster points and estimated between 69,000 and 155,000 civilian deaths -- four to five times as high as the UNDP survey, which used 66 times the cluster points. The 2004 survey by the Johns Hopkins group was itself methodologically suspect -- and the one they just published even more so. Curious about the kind of people who would have the chutzpah to claim to a national audience that this kind of research was methodologically sound, I contacted Johns Hopkins University and was referred to Les Roberts, one of the primary authors of the study. Dr. Roberts defended his 47 cluster points, saying that this was standard. I'm not sure whose standards these are. Appendix A of the Johns Hopkins survey, for example, cites several other studies of mortality in war zones, and uses the citations to validate the group's use of cluster sampling. One study is by the International Rescue Committee in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which used 750 cluster points. Harvard's School of Public Health, in a 1992 survey of Iraq, used 271 cluster points. Another study in Kosovo cites the use of 50 cluster points, but this was for a population of just 1.6 million, compared to Iraq's 27 million. When I pointed out these numbers to Dr. Roberts, he said that the appendices were written by a student and should be ignored. Which led me to wonder what other sections of the survey should be ignored. With so few cluster points, it is highly unlikely the Johns Hopkins survey is representative of the population in Iraq. However, there is a definitive method of establishing if it is. Recording the gender, age, education and other demographic characteristics of the respondents allows a researcher to compare his survey results to a known demographic instrument, such as a census. Dr. Roberts said that his team's surveyors did not ask demographic questions. I was so surprised to hear this that I emailed him later in the day to ask a second time if his team asked demographic questions and compared the results to the 1997 Iraqi census. Dr. Roberts replied that he had not even looked at the Iraqi census. And so, while the gender and the age of the deceased were recorded in the 2006 Johns Hopkins study, nobody, according to Dr. Roberts, recorded demographic information for the living survey respondents. This would be the first survey I have looked at in my 15 years of looking that did not ask demographic questions of its respondents. But don't take my word for it -- try using Google to find a survey that does not ask demographic questions. Without demographic information to assure a representative sample, there is no way anyone can prove -- or disprove -- that the Johns Hopkins estimate of Iraqi civilian deaths is accurate. Public-policy decisions based on this survey will impact millions of Iraqis and hundreds of thousands of Americans. It's important that voters and policy makers have accurate information. When the question matters this much, it is worth taking the time to get the answer right. Mr. Moore, a political consultant with Gorton Moore International, trained Iraqi researchers for the International Republican Institute from 2003 to 2004 and conducted survey research for the Coalition Forces from 2005 to 2006.

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It argues that absolute numbers of dead, like morgue figures, could not give a full picture of the �burden of conflict on an entire population,� because they were often incomplete.

I can't help but laugh at this. Indeed, why use real, substantial data while we can instead rely on wild extrapolations upon data collected with dubious motivation and methodology.

Maybe our financial institutions should follow a similar methodology. Instead of going to the trouble of painstakingly keeping track of every single transaction, they can just estimate what your income and spending were based on an analysis of an arbitrary sample of individuals and adjust your account balance accordingly.

No, I suppose that wouldn't do at all. When we're talking about human life, the integrity of our data isn't important at all. Currency, on the other hand, is serious business.

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Originally posted by Arbiter I can't help but laugh at this. Indeed, why use real, substantial data while we can instead rely on wild extrapolations upon data collected with dubious motivation and methodology.

Because the "real, substantial data" doesn't actually exist. This is the same method of statistical inference used to calculate death tolls in other regions of the world (Rwanda, Congo etc.) so I'd be surprised if you can find serious fault with the methods of inference used in this study.

If, on the other hand, as Shakka's article says, the sampling was faulty to begin with, then it stands to reason that the conclusions will necessarily be faulty as well. This, however, is a sampling problem rather than a problem with the method of statistical extrapolation employed, for whatever that's worth...

(Good to see you posting here again btw.)

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Originally posted by Renegade Because the "real, substantial data" doesn't actually exist. This is the same method of statistical inference used to calculate death tolls in other regions of the world (Rwanda, Congo etc.) so I'd be surprised if you can find serious fault with the methods of inference used in this study. If, on the other hand, as Shakka's article says, the sampling was faulty to begin with, then it stands to reason that the conclusions will necessarily be faulty as well. This, however, is a sampling problem rather than a problem with the method of statistical extrapolation employed, for whatever that's worth... (Good to see you posting here again btw.)

There is real data - morgue figures. The complaint is that they are incomplete, however, the question is how incomplete are they.

The only way to confirm that deaths reported in the interviews used to collect data for the study indeed took place is if the interviewee produces a death certificate. However, if they actually had a death certificate, then the deceased was registered and would be included in the morgue figures. But, even the study itself found that when they, apparently randomly, chose to ask (I guess they rolled a die?) 90% of the reported deaths had a death certificate to back them up. If that's true, however, we can conclude that the morgue figures aren't too incomplete after all (encompassing 90% or more of reported deaths, possibly even a higher percentage of actual deaths). Otherwise else a much lower proportion of interviewees would have been able to produce the relevant paperwork.

This raises an interesting question. If the study's own methodology and sampling was used to determine how many death certificates had been issued, then we would expect a minimum of 512865 based on 90% of the the 87% the figure of 655000 deaths where certificates had been requested. However, morgue figures do not reflect a figure in excess of half a million. Therefore, the logical conclusion is that there is a problem with either the sampling, or the mathematics used to extrapoloate upon the collected data. In either case, ironically, it appears that the real, substantial figures we had to begin with were much more accurate than this study, incomplete though they might be.

A follow up op/ed piece from today, though yesterday's was a much better critique of the study. This one puts things into perspective a bit.

quote:

The 655,000 Fraud October 19, 2006; Page A18 "Ateam of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred." So read a story in last week's Washington Post on the new John Hopkins-led study -- published in the British medical journal Lancet -- purporting to document "excess deaths" in Iraq. "We have no reason to question the findings," the Post quoted a Human Rights Watch official as saying. The article was fairly typical of reporting on the Lancet study, which has also been all over television and radio, as well as Internet sites such as Google and Yahoo! news. All of which leaves us wondering if reporters and editors have enough sense anymore to ask basic questions about such enormous numbers, or whether they are simply too biased against the Bush Administration and its Iraq policy to do so. The 655,000 figure is more than 10 times higher than previous estimates of violent deaths in Iraq since the U.S. invasion, and it is larger than the number of Germans killed by allied bombing during all of World War II and larger than the number of Americans who died during our own Civil War. While it's obvious that Iraq has a terrible problem with sectarian violence at the moment, we find it hard to believe killing on the scale of Antietam or Gettysburg has been going on without anybody having noticed until the statistical wizards from Johns Hopkins showed up. The 655,000 figure turns out to be an extrapolation based on a very inadequate sampling process. Pollster Steven E. Moore, who has worked extensively in Iraq, pointed out in an op-ed on this page yesterday that the Lancet study is based on information from a mere 47 "cluster points" around Iraq and 1,849 total interviews. By contrast, a 2004 U.N. survey of Iraq used 2,200 cluster points for more than 21,000 interviews. The Johns Hopkins researchers also appear to have collected no demographic data on their subjects, so the group cannot be compared to census data to check if it is representative. "I wouldn't survey a junior high school, no less an entire country, using only 47 cluster points," Mr. Moore wrote. Iraq Body Count -- a nonpartisan outfit that keeps track of Iraqi mortality figures -- has also issued a devastating critique of the Lancet/Johns Hopkins survey. It points out that the study implies that a thousand Iraqis died violently every day in the first half of 2006, with fewer than a tenth of them being noticed by "public surveillance mechanisms" and the press, as well as "incompetence and/or fraud on a truly massive scale by Iraqi officials in hospitals and ministries." It adds that death totals of the Lancet magnitude "are unnecessary to brand the invasion and occupation of Iraq a human and strategic tragedy." Of course, the latter is precisely the agenda of the majority of those trumpeting the Lancet findings. Their goal isn't merely to nail the Bush Administration for incompetence in failing to achieve a sustainable victory in Iraq. They also, and perversely, want to discredit the war as a moral enterprise by suggesting there's no difference between Saddam Hussein's now well documented mass murders and the violence taking place today. Omar Fadil, who with his brother writes from troubled Baghdad at IraqTheModel.com, has no doubt that the Lancet figure is a gross exaggeration. "All they want is to prove that our struggle for freedom was the wrong thing to do," he writes. "This fake research is an insult to every man, woman and child who lost their lives."

source

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