Falluja is included in the conclusions of the study. Both a mortality risk figure and a confidence interval cum-falluja are reported as findings. I don’t know why Tim is not making this point, since it certainly seemed rather important a month or two ago, when the “at least 100,000″ characterization was being defended by Tim and dsquared, along with 30k dead from bombing.

The use of the term findings is awkward for me. The findings section performs analysis and interperatation of the data that I don’t think are sound. The descriptions of the sample data is written in way that infers conclusions on the entire population that simply can’t be made, some of which, if I recall correctly, made their way into the conclusion. It blurs the definition.

Just to be clear: Are you arguing that it is plausible that something like 180,000 people where killed by helicopter airstrikes sometime between May 24th and early Sept of 2004?

If so, do you realize that is roughly 1,800 people per day? Do you realize that 80% of all the fighting in that period happened within a 100 klick radius of a point half-way between Baghdad and Falluja? Is it really plausible that that many people died without leaving the entire area in rubble and producing a vast exodus of refugees? Do have any intuitive feel at all for the scale of carnage you are arguing for?

A simpler explanation is that the experience of a single neighborhood in a single city is simple not statistically representative of any segment of the larger population. All these 30 households sitting next door to one another suffered from the same localized events that affected the entire area. This isn’t 30 points of data but rather just 1.

This is exactly the kind of failure we expect to see when using cluster-sampling to study a phenomenon with a highly heterogeneous (uneven) distribution. There is no methodological reason not to just toss the entire cluster.

Aaron, as some posters have pointedly remarked in earlier threads: Fallujah was NOT thrown out of the study. Only the “excess death” figure was excluded. Other conclusions incorporating Fallujah (notably the mortality risk) remain in the section marked ‘findings.’

My count from Roberts Fig. 2 (pdf pg. 5) of ex-Fallujah violent deaths is as follows:

Jan 02 thru Feb 03 (preinvasion): 1
March 03 thru March 04 (pre-ILCS fieldwork): 13
April 04 thru May 04 (ILCS fieldwork): 4
Jun 04 thru Sept 10 (post-ILCS fieldwork): 4

Back ‘o the envelope comparison: ILCS postinvasion death-by-violence should be compared to 71% of Roberts postinvasion death-by-violence-ex-Fallujah. (13 + 0.5*4)/21

I posted some thoughts on Roberts (written mostly prior to the release of ILCS, alas) at Winds of Change.

I think your assumption that the Lancet and UN definitions of war related deaths being comparable isn’t as safe as you think. The study also mentions the Iraq Body Count which only includes violent deaths.

I did some rough calculations, assuming the UN numbers only included violent deaths, which I posted over at Tim Blairs:

98,000*43,000/60,070=70,152 Lancet, roughly, time adjust.

Now if we unscientifically assume that the other lancet numbers are also higher by over 79% of actual, the lancet non-violent casualties over that period are 15,154. 15,154+24,000=39,154.

Expand that out back over the lancet time period the lancet total becomes 54,698 (should remind everyone this number ignores the increase in violence after March 04).

Now, another problem with the lancet study is that, while their sampling methodology may not have been biased, much of their sample participants may have been. Also, I think, many medical deaths, such as heart attacks, simply happened earlier because of the war. I think we are likely to see lower medical deaths over the next few years that offset the increases of the first 2 years.

I think the violent deaths are probably exaggerated more than the medical deaths, so the real total is probably between 71,457 and 54,698 (using the lancet time period).

We can’t tell from the Lancet study whether the death rate increased after March 04, which further highlights how useless it is. I seriously doubt that the violent deathrate increased by 201% as Tim Lambert seems to suggest.

“Sorry, but the ILCS was conducted starting in March 2004, before the heavy fighting in Falluja. It neither confirms nor denies the Lancet’s findings about deaths in Falluja.”

Going to have to disagree. From Figure 2 [LIMS p 5] it is clear that significant fighting occurred in Falluja in June and December 2003. If the deaths in Falluja where in fact statistically representative of the larger population then those deaths should have shown up in the ILCS as 20.000-30,000 deaths in Al-Abar alone. Instead it shows only 3,686 for the entire center region of the country. (Which includes the entire Sunni Triangle except for Baghdad.)

Remember that LIMS claims to draw its statistical power from the ability to generalize from the experiences of the clusters. LIMS claims that we can reliably generalize from the experience of one little neighborhood of 30 houses in Falluja to rest of Iraq. The numbers returned by the Falluja cluster are so over the top that even with only 10% (20,000) of them falling in time frame of ILCS it would have met or exceeded the total for the rest of the country combined (20,057).

Trying to cram 200,000 deaths into the June-Sept 2004 span is even more silly, especially given the known geographical concentrations of the fighting in that period.

The only chance that Falluja cluster had of being relevant was that it represented the broader experiences of the entire Iraqi population. That is now definitively shown not to be the case.

Jim Lindgren agrees
with me that the ILCS supports the Lancet study. He also raises some concerns about some of the numbers in Lancet study:

Shannon Love has posted an excellent (I mean highly recommended) introduction to the Iraq Living Conditions Survey of 2004 (ILCS) at Chicago Boyz.

Something a little odd seems to be happening and I, for one, would like an explanation. Via Blithering Bunny I see a report in The Times: THE invasion of Iraq and its aftermath caused the deaths of 24,000 Iraqis, including