655,000 estimated Iraqi's dead in new study

[Sonny]

Stupid liberal media strikes again! There have been no deaths in Iraq! We are in Iran now. Don't you remember "Mission Accomplished?" The war in Iraq is over people.

Next time don't even post real sentences, just write "This in place of a sarcastic radical-left comment"

I've been looking at this board 2 weeks and already have you pegged as a wacko mindless liberal with a perchant for weak irony.

YOU'RE NOT FUNNY

I suggest you re-read the message board rules. # 1 applies here:
http://forums.uslia.com/viewtopic.php?t=27

Don't make things personal, OK?

[sohotrightnow]

Next time don't even post real sentences, just write "This in place of a sarcastic radical-left comment"

I've been looking at this board 2 weeks and already have you pegged as a wacko mindless liberal with a perchant for weak irony.

YOU'RE NOT FUNNY

That's odd. Your first post was in April...pretty long 2 weeks. I make one VERY SARCASTIC comment and you go ballistic. Lighten up Francis.

[Hackalicious]

I'm skeptical about the Lancet report. Interview families and asking how many people they know who have been killed isn't very accurate.

A Pentagon report from early September stated that the Baghdad coroner's is finding 1,600-1,800 civilian bodies per month, 90% of whom have been executed. That's 20,000 civilian casualties a year just due to sectarian violence. Note that that does not include "collateral damage" or Iraqi defense force deaths, and Baghdad is only 25% of the population.

You can extrapolate it nationwide over the past three and a half years, add in "collateral damage", and deaths due to the initial invasion, then come to your own conclusions.

But, don't worry about it. It's probably just a liberal, partisan ploy by the Pentagon.

http://graphics.nytimes.com/packages/pd ... report.pdf

[mholtz]

I'm skeptical about the Lancet report. Interview families and asking how many people they know who have been killed isn't very accurate.

A Pentagon report from early September stated that the Baghdad coroner's is finding 1,600-1,800 civilian bodies per month, 90% of whom have been executed. That's 20,000 civilian casualties a year just due to sectarian violence. Note that that does not include "collateral damage" or Iraqi defense force deaths, and Baghdad is only 25% of the population.

You can extrapolate it nationwide over the past three and a half years, add in "collateral damage", and deaths due to the initial invasion, then come to your own conclusions.

But, don't worry about it. It's probably just a liberal, partisan ploy by the Pentagon.

http://graphics.nytimes.com/packages/pd ... report.pdf

The majority of the deaths that were reported were backed up by death certificates.

Also, the lancet is a peer reviewed Journal. This is not "Newsweek" or "US News and World Report". It's a journal, not a magazine.

Now, that doesn't make it immune from partisanship. I also noted that most people haven't read the report at all or they would have noticed that it said there was a margin of error. The margin of error makes the possible death toll range from 400,000 to 900,000. the 650,000 was the middle of the road.

This is a statistical analysis. It's the same system used to calculate estimated deaths in natural disasters like the Tsumnami a few years back. Of course there is a margin of error, but there is also no way that they could possibly talk to every person in the entire country to ask "are you dead?".

The Pentagon reports are exactly as you stated them, body counts for a coroner. This is not CSI. The police don't show up at every death. Not all bodies make it to the coroners office.

I actually doubt that the 650,000 is right, but I don't doubt that the 400,000 is right.

Either way, more people have died in Iraq since we invaded than were killed by Saddam in his entire 24 years of tyranny, 296,000. (source - Human Rights Watch).

Are the Iraqi people better off? I don't think you can say that.

Are Americans better off? Time will tell, but my money's on "no".[/quote]

[laxfan25]

Just like all the polls that showed Kerry winning the last Presidential election?

Yes, which seemed to reflect the rather close outcome of the actual election. Similar to the polls, and actual national tallies, that showed Mr. Gore winning the popular vote in '00.

Interviewing less then 2000 people and extropolating 2/3 of a million deaths doesn't seem quite right any way you slice it. Your mileage may vary.

Well, as I thought, the number of people surveyed is very much in line with national polls here in the US, which they use to extrapolate to a country of about 300 million.

ABC News/Washinton Post - The poll is performed by telephone, calling roughly 1,200 “randomly selected adults nationwide”, from which self-identified registered voters are polled for the report’s information. ABC/WP says their Margin of Error is +/- 3 points

AP/Ipsos - The poll is a telephone poll of randomly selected numbers, with a sample of roughly 1,500 adults nationwide, produced between 1,200 and 1,300 registered voters...Ipsos’ reported Margin of Error is +/- 2.5 points for adults, +/- 2.7 points for registered voters.

CBS/New York Times - CBS/NYT generally calls about 1,000 adults in each survey, with around 78-80% as registered voters. Their cited Margin of Error is +/- 3 points

CNN/USA Today/Gallup: This poll uses random telephone interviews, with around 1,000 adults on average, around 76-80% registered voters responding. Announced Margin of Error is +/- 4 points.

Fox News/Opinion Dynamics : Opinion Dynamics Corporation conducts a national telephone poll 1,000 self-described ‘likely voters’ from random contacts. Their website says “Generally, Fox News poll results are not weighted. The national probability sample, if conducted properly, should accurately reflect national attitudes.

Gallup: The gold standard of opinion polling. Gallup polls are random telephone interviews, with around 1,000 adults on average, around 76-80% registered voters responding. Announced Margin of Error is +/- 4 points.

Harris: The Harris Poll is one of the oldest polls in the nation, after Gallup. The Harris Poll is a random telephone poll, as most of the polls are, interviewing roughly 1,000 adults nationwide in each poll, and producing around 80% registered voters from that pool. Harris cites a +/- 3 point Margin of Error.

Definitely seeing a pattern here on the number of subjects needed to provide fairly reliable results - the biggest margin of error is +/- 4%.

ABC News discusses their exit polling strategy -

Exit polls are based on much larger samples than tracking polls — at least 13,000 voters in each election since 1992 — with correspondingly low margins of sampling error, less than one percentage point.

So a sampling of 1,500 households from multiple areas of Iraq would seem to have some credibility. One may certainly question the motives of actions taken shortly before an election, such as the release of this study, or the charging of Azzam the American with treason. Of course they're all just "playing politics".

[Sonny]

Reality checks: some responses to the latest Lancet estimates
Hamit Dardagan, John Sloboda, and Josh Dougherty
Summary

A new study has been released by the Lancet medical journal estimating over 650,000 excess deaths in Iraq. The Iraqi mortality estimates published in the Lancet in October 2006 imply, among other things, that:

1. On average, a thousand Iraqis have been violently killed every single day in the first half of 2006, with less than a tenth of them being noticed by any public surveillance mechanisms;
2. Some 800,000 or more Iraqis suffered blast wounds and other serious conflict-related injuries in the past two years, but less than a tenth of them received any kind of hospital treatment;
3. Over 7% of the entire adult male population of Iraq has already been killed in violence, with no less than 10% in the worst affected areas covering most of central Iraq;
4. Half a million death certificates were received by families which were never officially recorded as having been issued;
5. The Coalition has killed far more Iraqis in the last year than in earlier years containing the initial massive "Shock and Awe" invasion and the major assaults on Falluja.

If these assertions are true, they further imply:

* incompetence and/or fraud on a truly massive scale by Iraqi officials in hospitals and ministries, on a local, regional and national level, perfectly coordinated from the moment the occupation began;
* bizarre and self-destructive behaviour on the part of all but a small minority of 800,000 injured, mostly non-combatant, Iraqis;
* the utter failure of local or external agencies to notice and respond to a decimation of the adult male population in key urban areas;
* an abject failure of the media, Iraqi as well as international, to observe that Coalition-caused events of the scale they reported during the three-week invasion in 2003 have been occurring every month for over a year.

In the light of such extreme and improbable implications, a rational alternative conclusion to be considered is that the authors have drawn conclusions from unrepresentative data. In addition, totals of the magnitude generated by this study are unnecessary to brand the invasion and occupation of Iraq a human and strategic tragedy.

From the anti-war IraqBodyCount.org web site:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/press/pr14.php

[StrykerFSU]

I found this perspective in today's TMQ column by Gregg Easterbrook to be interesting:

Warning, Serious Item: Of the many moral questions regarding the Iraq War, the one the American political and media systems are not dealing with in any way, shape or form is the number of Iraqi deaths. A few months ago President Bush said the estimate he has been given by military intelligence is 30,000 Iraqi deaths caused either directly by our military or set in motion by our invasion. American forces have been trying to avoid killing the innocent. But no matter how carefully our armed forces have behaved, why is the American conscience not shocked by so many innocent people killed owing to our unilateral decision to seize another nation? Why did the media shrug when Bush used this shocking figure?

Had some other country or group done something that caused 30,000 deaths here, we would claim an unlimited right of self-defense and retaliation. Yet the death the United States has brought to the innocent of Iraq isn't even being discussed here. Some of the Iraqis who have died because they have been hit by our bombs, or in the sectarian violence our destruction of the Iraqi government set loose, would have died by now regardless; perhaps some of them would have been killed by Saddam Hussein, had he remained in power. But by invading Iraq we made ourselves responsible for what happened next, and what has happened next is killing of the innocent. When 3,000 were villainously slain here, we called it a crime against humanity. Since then we have caused or played a role in the deaths of perhaps 10 times as many in Iraq, and this is spoken of here as if it were some mere unfortunate side effect of policy. History may judge America harshly for acting as though Iraqi lives have no value.

I suspect one reason the Iraq death toll elicits so little concern is that exaggerated estimates exist. Americans can say of the exaggerated estimates, "Oh, that's way too high" and skip over thinking about the more probable numbers. The latest silly estimate comes from a new study in the British medical journal Lancet, which absurdly estimates that since March 2003 exactly 654,965 Iraqis have died as a consequence of American action. The study uses extremely loose methods of estimation, including attributing about half its total to "unknown causes." The study also commits the logical offense of multiplying a series of estimates, then treating the result as precise. White House officials have dismissed the Lancet study, and they should. It's gibberish.

But gibberish that diverts attention from the real numbers. Let's assume the estimate given to George W. Bush is correct, and 30,000 Iraqis have died because of the American invasion. Let's assume half were members of Iraqi military engaged in combat and thus fair targets under the laws of war, setting aside whether the fighting, initiated by us, was morally justified. That still leaves 15,000 innocent dead on our hands. But not on our consciences, since no one is talking about this.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=easterbrook/061024