Stop attacking people and Nations

Stop causing wars

blah blah

Thanks to the blog admin for deleting the rest of my boneheaded anti-American rant and saving me additional embarrassment! ChicagoBoyz rock!

regards,
Peter from Europe

If anything, given recent past events, this figure will look conservatively small. Just look at how many American troops alone have been killed since this debate raged a month an a half ago.

One sure thing you can observe. Karl Rove attended to the propaganda needs of his Government every bit as diligently as Herr Gobbels did to his.

Fallujah is Iraq’s murder capital — or more precisely, the outlaw town used as a staging area for murder committed by Iraq’s secular and religious reactionaries.

And “reactionary” is a much more apt description for these thugs than “insurgent.” Words matter, and insistently describing the murderers in Iraq as insurgents distorts the aims and true nature of these enemies. Saddam’s old cronies (the secular reactionaries) and Musab al-Zarqawi’s suicide bombers (the religious reactionaries) don’t hold elections, they don’t dig sewers, and they don’t build hospitals. The secular reactionaries want to return Iraq to a Sunni-dominated dictatorship — the corrupt, murderous hellhole Iraq was in March 2003. The religious reactionaries have a grander target, with their “golden age” a bit deeper in time. They want to run the entire world along the lines of an 11th or 12th century Muslim caliphate.

You keep trying to frame this argument as being about “the numbers.” It is not, or not principally. It is about the plausibility of the theory by which the numbers were established. There are too many possible reasons, including the “lying Iraqis” one that you acknowledge, for why the data may be unreliable. Since less than 80 reported civilian war deaths in 900 families were used to infer total deaths in a 25m population, almost any systematic errors in measuring war deaths, in attributing such deaths to civilians or in determining pre-war death rates would skew the results significantly. And because this research hasn’t been done before in this particular society under similar conditions, there are many conceivable reasons why the reporting might be inaccurate. That’s what it comes down to. One can’t prove that it’s accurate via analysis. One can only attempt to replicate the study so as to get more data and more experience with local conditions and peculiarities. The fact that doing that might be dangerous is not an argument against the necessity to do it if one wants to gain an accurate understanding of what is going on.

WRT biases, I have never hidden mine. OTOH, you seem to have some issues. And so, I think, do the authors of this report. My impression is that their agenda is at least partly political — else why ask to be published before the election? They were not necessarily pulling for a particular candidate, but clearly they saw publication as an engaged act. And The Lancet went along with it. I am puzzled that you don’t find this behavior inappropriate, or at least suggestive of a need for more scrutiny. No study has such important results, or is so dangerous to conduct, as to be beyond the ordinary requirements of independent confirmation.

Jonathan, I am close to losing my temper with you. You have no substantive arguments with the study (or rather, you have attempted to raise several and failed every time), but rather than apologise for impugning the integrity of good scientists and starting an intelligent discussion about the numbers, you are retreating to vague and unprovable innuendoes about bias, using an argument (trying to pretend that the IBC number is a comparable one to the Lancet number) which you must know to be fallacious, and now, to top it all, trying to sneer at the researchers for not taking even longer and exposing themselves to even more risk of death in doing the US Army’s job (as required by the Geneva Conventions, startlingly) for them. Have a word with yourself. Your own political bias is the issue here, not the Lancet’s.

Freedom is anything but free Joe…

“Couldn’t have said it better myself Joe. You really summed up the study with that line.”

Thank you, but you need to focus better on the target. Your target SHOULD BE the critics of the paper published in Lancet.

The author’s best estimate of Iraqi mortality due to the war is around 100,000 with the upper limit approaching 200,000 and they attributed most of it to air strikes from US Forces. That is the long and the short of it.

Americans are killing a lot of Iraqi for their oil.

The pychotic aspect of American Foreign Policy in Iraq is that Americans actually expect the Iraqi people to “love them” for all this loss of life.

As Gordon Lightfoot once wrote “Freedoms just another word for nothing more to lose”. “Freedom ain’t worth nothin but its free”.

The authors did a much needed job of putting realism into Emperor George II’s war in Iraq and paint it with a human face and in stark terms. To put this into perspective, America’s bombing campaign in Iraq has now claimed the lives of between 12 and 24 times as many people as have perished with Saddam’s chemical weapons attack on the Kurds.

You conveniently forget that the states rights issue and secession were driven by the slavery issue. You choose to believe this is about oil. Just like you choose to believe the Civil War was about everything except what it was about.

Desro wrote: The best we could hope for is free elections in which radical Islamists are elected as the leaders of the country…

That’s the best we can hope for? Why do you suddenly abandon all knowledge of the research and polling showing wide support for a secular, democratic government in Iraq? Because it doesn’t support your doomsday scenario?

We all know the reason the numbers are being skewed is to make an antiwar political statement. If you’re a pacifist and opposed to war, fine. However, you shouldn’t need to hide behind poor statistical analysis to make your point. It’s that simple.

BTW, who is “THE SHEIK OF IRAN”??

I don’t feel this is about my agenda, or anyones. I know, as the study says, that this would need to be verified by a much larger independent sampling, which is something that will never happen, as not many are willing to risk their lives in conducting such a broad, large scale inquiry in a war zone. Your answer would be then, I suppose, not to accept the figures, and really, not to even worry about those deaths, because you are not being killed, nor is your neighbor, or anyone on your block. Maybe interest in this topic has lessened since the election because people realize whether we like it or not, we are in for at LEAST 4 more years of fighting a conflict that is unwinnable. So my question in end to you is, do we continue to try and make the best guesses we can about civilian casualties, using methods which are open to skewing and have large margins for error, or do we not not care at all? I guess we can’t accurately find the number of civilian casualties, so we may as well not try at all. As George is so fond of ignotantly and hatefully saying: “We’re fighting them over there, so we don’t have to fight them over here”. Beatiful. Now THAT’s humanity. I’ll bet most Iraqis love that.

I am calling these air strikes indiscriminate based on the fact that you can’t use air power in an urban firefight vs. these type of insurgents. You will inevitably end up bombing civilian targets, such as peoples’ houses in insurgent controlled areas, the “10%” of civilians our military reports have not fled the city. Is it realistic to expect an entire city to “flee” somewhere so that the big boys with guns can solve the problems? Has anyone looked at any pictures of the reality on the ground, heard any interviews with angry Iraqis about how their houses are being destroyed, their families killed, and most of this all by air strikes? I know I can be accused of being a flaming liberal, etc, but i don’t see any possibility for “victory” in Iraq. When you hear “militants”, or “insurgents”, say things such as “without fear, you cannot die”, what does that show you about the mentality of these people? Does anyone remember when Ho Chi Minh said that if ONE American dies for every TEN Viet Cong, his strategy was successful? The best we could hope for is free elections in which radical Islamists are elected as the leaders of the country, in a style much similar to Iran. You can debate the specifics of civilian casualties, humanity in military targeting all you want, but you ignore the basic humanity involved in the situation. When one family is accidentally killed by a coalition airstrike, even if totally unintended, how are all the other families living within miles of there going to be affected? They are going to hate the Americans that much more, and probably cooperate with us that much less, while possibly aiding insurgents. It is strikingly similar to Israeli military tactics in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, those tactics being “there are terrorists in here somewhere, so lets just bust down every door and scare the daylights outta every family on the block, while destroying half their house and putting giant holes in the walls everywhere”. This will find the terrorists, will kill the terrorists, and it will also result in public opinion of the people on that block going 90+% against us, guaranteed. The only way to really win in the end is to win the popular support of Iraqis for what we are doing, which the Bush Administration has miserably failed at doing. What message does it send when we allow the country’s historic and culturally significant sites to be looted and ransacked while Marines guard the Oil Ministry building? As long as we keep fighting, even if we feel the fight to be a noble one, civilian casualties WILL occur, and in urban fighting, will occur at a substantial level. I can only see Iraqi public sentiment turning further against us, and our battle against “terror” there may as well be, in the end, a battle against the Iraqi people, who have little hope left as unemployment there reaches all-time highs, while at the same time Kellogg Brown & Root workers are paid the salaries we should be giving Iraqis to rebuild the country, and most importantly, the oil infrastructure. I am just very sad in the end, because i see no reason for the reality of the situation there to be publicized, broadcast on TV, etc. The best way to validate claims of civilian housing being destroyed is to find Iraqis who are now homeless because of this, and who are screaming foul. They could be found, but who will find them in Fallujah, Sadr City, Samarrah? Our reporters wouldn’t walk the streets in a full metal jacket in places like that. No one but our military will, so I guess we’ll just have to take their word that civilian casualties are very minimal.

Which ones, precisely? At present, my assessment is that the only really tenable critique is the “Lying Iraqis” theory. I might be open to very persuasive arguments that the sample was nonrandom in such a way as to systematically overestimate casualties, but I must say I can’t see any weaknesses in the construction, and Fred Kaplan’s caviling doesn’t convince.

I am more puzzled by thoughtful commenters like dsquared, who continue to insist that it’s reasonable to make strong inferences from such limited and uncertain data as the investigators had in this case.
Because I understand the underlying sampling theory. If the underlying death rate hadn’t risen, it would be very difficult to get a sample in which the sampled death rate had risen so markedly. It is the data which is supporting strong conclusions, not me.

This is the fundamental point of our disagreement. I think there are too many plausible uncertainties about the data, dsquared disagrees. Perhaps someone will eventually try to replicate the study using less-controversial survey techniques. Until then, it looks to me that there’s enough reasonable doubt about the result to remove it from serious consideration as a policy tool.