The Lancet Iraqi Study - Utter Garbage?

These people think so

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/press/pr14.php

 

Yeah, well, they make a good point till they get to here:

That stuff isn't all that hard to believe. Knowhutimean?

 

Excess deaths?

That's a fine turn of a phrase.

War is death. The decimation of Iraq is similar to the decimation of Europe in World I and II. Comparing percentage of population, it well exceeds the excess of either Stalin and Hitler on their own — and conquered — people. Likely because the Third Riech was never given time to fully implement its policies, and the Soviet Union was so massive in area that entire ethnic populations could be sent to Siberia and disappear.

What should we draw from these extrapolations from Lancet?

Are we collectively and individually responsible for the deaths of Iraqi civilians?

Yes, unequivocally in my opinion.

Was and is it justified? That requires a rigorous analysis of the "just war" theory.

So can the slogans. This requires more than a bumper-sticker mentality. Any mainline Christian, Jew or Muslim who can sleep easy at night has yet to wrestle with their own morality.

Combat vets never sleep easy, no matter how many years have passed.

 

wonder how these 100+ people feel, Chris.

Oh, sorry, they can't feel anymore:


http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&u=/ap/20061016/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_061016170353

 

Spnited, what's the point in bringing freedom to Iraq if you can't torture a few Iraqis along the way? We're doing God's work, and if you can't see that, you're pro-terror.

 

44 a day? That's a lot less than the 500 plus per day the Lancet would have you believe.

Do you think a war can be won without bloodshed?

 

You make it sound as if everything is just peachy in Iraq...after all it's war...and unjust, unnnecessary war, but war nonetheless, right.
And you're right, 44 dead per day is nothing

 

Forget it, folks.
The IBC people, whom the pro-war people laughed at until very recently, depend on media reports, and not epidemiological sampling techniques to arrive at the casualty figures.
As I've said, again and again, how many dead Iraqis is too many before killng them, or creating a condition of anarchy in which they are killed, becomes counter-productive to our aim of whatever it is that's our aim over there this week? 100K? 200K/?
300K.
The latter is the figure if the Lancet study's off by 50 percent.

 

And even the 300K figure is laughable. That's approximately 250 a day every day for 3 1/2 years. To put that into perspective, it's about a 9/11 every week. But you think you can make Bush look bad, so you'll latch onto a ridiculous number and not let go no matter how ludicrous it is. It makes you look ... well, I won't say it, but it begins with an S ends with a D and has TUPI in the middle. Wear it with pride.

 

The same technique has been used all over the world to great effect. (The most notable example is the Congolese civil war, where the exact same method of counting civilian dead prompted swift UN action and was generally considered an important factor in ending the violence.) It has been widely praised and generally very useful. Unfortunately, it has a bad effect on the hearts-and-flowers-and-candy crowd, most of whom didn't get the war they wanted, or the war they were promised by the chickenhawk think-tank crowd.
The IBC counts only based on news reports, and doesn't count non-combatant deaths.

 

The UN estimated before the war that the sanctions against Iraq were causing the death of 150,000 Iraqi's per year (including 60,000 children under the age of 5 per year according to a UNICEF study). So 150,000 x 3-years = 450,000 Iraqi's.

Using UN numbers the US invasion has actually saved about 150,000 if we use the 300,000 number you seem comfortable with.

Also the UN numbers didn't include naturally occuring deaths or the deaths caused by Saddam Hussein's brutality.

 

And to keep things moving along nicely, mostly for Tony's edification because all he can come up with is, "I don't believe the numbers".

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/daniel_davies/2006/10/how_to_not_lie_with_statistics.html

The results speak for themselves. There was a sample of 12,801 individuals in 1,849 households, in 47 geographical locations. That is a big sample, not a small one. The opinion polls from Mori and such which measure political support use a sample size of about 2,000 individuals, and they have a margin of error of +/- 3%. If Margaret Beckett looks at the Labour party's rating in the polls, she presumably considers this to be reasonably reliable, so she should not contribute to public ignorance by allowing her department to disparage "small samples extrapolated to the whole country". The Iraq Body Count website and the Iraqi government statistics are not better measures than the survey results, because one of the things we know about war zones is that casualties are under-reported, usually by a factor of more than five.

And the results were shocking. In the 18 months before the invasion, the sample reported 82 deaths, two of them from violence. In the 39 months since the invasion, the sample households had seen 547 deaths, 300 of them from violence. The death rate expressed as deaths per 1,000 per year had gone up from 5.5 to 13.3.