Johns Hopkins University: 100,000 Iraqis Killed?

stockula said:
Ruh-oh. Michael Totten linked to this on Instapundit.com. I thought it smelled a lot like the UN's prediction in 2003 that 500,000 civilians would die from the invasion and millions would become refugees, so this 100,000 dead civilians claim immediately set off the bullshit alarms in my head. But as always, Bush haters are willing to believe almost literally ANYTHING anti-Bush at face value, without the slightest examination. You'd think after almost 4 years of manufactured scandals, blatent disinformation like Fahrenheit 9/11, and Bush being exonerated and his critics made to look like shrill and hysterical exaggerators, they'd begin to see a pattern. Nope. Witness the missing explosives non-scandal, the Bush National Guard records, Niger yellowcake, fantasy pipelines, on and on and on.....

Bogus Lancet Study

Via The Command Post comes this study published in Lancet (free reg) which purports that 100,000 Iraqi have died from violence, most of it caused by Coalition air strikes, since the invasion of Iraq. Needless to say, this study will become an article of faith in certain circles but the study is obviously bogus on its face.

First, even without reading the study, alarm bells should go off. The study purports to show civilian casualties 5 to 6 times higher than any other reputable source. Most other sources put total combined civilian and military deaths from all causes at between 15,000 to 20,000. The Lancet study is a degree of magnitude higher. Why the difference?

Moreover, just rough calculations should call the figure into doubt. 100,000 deaths over roughly a year and a half equates to 183 deaths per day. Seen anything like that on the news? With that many people dying from air strikes every day we would expect to have at least one or two incidents where several hundred or even thousands of people died. Heard of anything like that? In fact, heard of any air strikes at all where more than a couple of dozen people died total?

Where did this suspicious number come from? Bad methodology.

From the summary:

Mistake One:

"A cluster sample survey was undertaken throughout Iraq during September, 2004"

It is bad practice to use a cluster sample for a distribution known to be highly asymmetrical. Since all sources agree that violence in Iraq is highly geographically concentrated, this means a cluster sample has a very high chance of exaggerating the number of deaths. If one or two of your clusters just happen to fall in a contended area it will skew everything. In fact, the study inadvertently suggests that this happened when it points out later that:

"Violent deaths were widespread, reported in 15 of 33 clusters..."

In fact, this suggest that violent deaths were not "widespread" as 18 of the 33 clusters reported zero deaths. if 54% of the clusters had no deaths then all the other deaths occurred in 46% of the clusters. If the deaths in those clusters followed a standard distribution most of the deaths would have occurred in less than 15% of the total clusters.

And bingo we see that:

"Two-thirds of all violent deaths were reported in one cluster in the city of Falluja"

(They also used a secondary grouping system (page 2, paragraph 3) that would cause further skewing.)

Mistake Two:

"33 clusters of 30 households each were interviewed about household composition, births, and deaths since January, 2002."

Self-reporting in third-world countries is notoriously unreliable. In the guts of the paper (page 3, paragraph 2) they say they tried to get death certificates for at least two deaths for each cluster but they never say how many of the deaths, if any, they actually verified. It is probable that many of the deaths, especially the oddly high number of a deaths of children by violence, never actually occurred.

So we have a sampling method that fails for diverse distributions, at least one tremendously skewed cluster and unverified reports of deaths.

Looking at the raw data they provide doesn't inspire any confidence whatsoever. Table 2 (page 4) shows the actual number of deaths reported. The study recorded 142 post-invasion deaths total with with 73 (51%) due to violence. Of those 73 deaths from violence, 52 occurred in Falluja. That means that all the other 21 deaths occurred in one of the 14 clusters were somebody died, or 1.5 deaths per cluster. Given what we know of the actual combat I am betting that most of the deaths occurred in three or four clusters and the rest had 1 death each. Given the low numbers of samples, one or two fabricated reports of deaths could seriously warp the entire study.

At the very end of the paper (page 7, paragraph 1) they concede that:

"We suspect that a random sample of 33 Iraqi locations is likely to encounter one or a couple of particularly devastated areas. Nonetheless, since 52 of 73 (71%) violent deaths and 53 of 142 (37%) deaths during the conflict occurred in one cluster, it is possible that by extraordinary chance, the survey mortality estimate has been skewed upward. "

Gee, you think? It's almost as if military violence is not randomly distributed across the population of Iraq but is instead intelligently directed at specific areas, rendering a statistical extrapolation of deaths totally useless.

In the next paragraph they admit:

"Removing half the increase in infant deaths and the Falluja data still produces a 37% increase in estimated mortality."

That puts their final numbers just above the high end of the range reported by other sources.

This "peer reviewed study" is a piece of polemical garbage. Everybody is supposed to take away the bumper sticker summary, "Coalition kills 100,000 Iraqi civilians, half of them children," without reading the details. It tries to use crude epidemiological models like those used to study disease and applies them to the conscious infliction of violence by human beings. The result is statistical static.

http://www.chicagoboyz.net/archives/002543.html

MrStitches said:
So 15-20,000 innocent lives is an acceptable loss then?

UpTight said:

Firstly, how many of those people were actually killed by allied forces?

Secondly, Saddam was killing - on average - 24,000 civilians every YEAR!!!

This war has saved lives

stockula said:
Ruh-oh. Michael Totten linked to this on Instapundit.com. I thought it smelled a lot like the UN's prediction in 2003 that 500,000 civilians would die from the invasion and millions would become refugees, so this 100,000 dead civilians claim immediately set off the bullshit alarms in my head. But as always, Bush haters are willing to believe almost literally ANYTHING anti-Bush at face value, without the slightest examination. You'd think after almost 4 years of manufactured scandals, blatent disinformation like Fahrenheit 9/11, and Bush being exonerated and his critics made to look like shrill and hysterical exaggerators, they'd begin to see a pattern. Nope. Witness the missing explosives non-scandal, the Bush National Guard records, Niger yellowcake, fantasy pipelines, on and on and on.....

Bogus Lancet Study

Via The Command Post comes this study published in Lancet (free reg) which purports that 100,000 Iraqi have died from violence, most of it caused by Coalition air strikes, since the invasion of Iraq. Needless to say, this study will become an article of faith in certain circles but the study is obviously bogus on its face.

First, even without reading the study, alarm bells should go off. The study purports to show civilian casualties 5 to 6 times higher than any other reputable source. Most other sources put total combined civilian and military deaths from all causes at between 15,000 to 20,000. The Lancet study is a degree of magnitude higher. Why the difference?

Moreover, just rough calculations should call the figure into doubt. 100,000 deaths over roughly a year and a half equates to 183 deaths per day. Seen anything like that on the news? With that many people dying from air strikes every day we would expect to have at least one or two incidents where several hundred or even thousands of people died. Heard of anything like that? In fact, heard of any air strikes at all where more than a couple of dozen people died total?

Where did this suspicious number come from? Bad methodology.

From the summary:

Mistake One:

"A cluster sample survey was undertaken throughout Iraq during September, 2004"

It is bad practice to use a cluster sample for a distribution known to be highly asymmetrical. Since all sources agree that violence in Iraq is highly geographically concentrated, this means a cluster sample has a very high chance of exaggerating the number of deaths. If one or two of your clusters just happen to fall in a contended area it will skew everything. In fact, the study inadvertently suggests that this happened when it points out later that:

"Violent deaths were widespread, reported in 15 of 33 clusters..."

In fact, this suggest that violent deaths were not "widespread" as 18 of the 33 clusters reported zero deaths. if 54% of the clusters had no deaths then all the other deaths occurred in 46% of the clusters. If the deaths in those clusters followed a standard distribution most of the deaths would have occurred in less than 15% of the total clusters.

And bingo we see that:

"Two-thirds of all violent deaths were reported in one cluster in the city of Falluja"

(They also used a secondary grouping system (page 2, paragraph 3) that would cause further skewing.)

Mistake Two:

"33 clusters of 30 households each were interviewed about household composition, births, and deaths since January, 2002."

Self-reporting in third-world countries is notoriously unreliable. In the guts of the paper (page 3, paragraph 2) they say they tried to get death certificates for at least two deaths for each cluster but they never say how many of the deaths, if any, they actually verified. It is probable that many of the deaths, especially the oddly high number of a deaths of children by violence, never actually occurred.

So we have a sampling method that fails for diverse distributions, at least one tremendously skewed cluster and unverified reports of deaths.

Looking at the raw data they provide doesn't inspire any confidence whatsoever. Table 2 (page 4) shows the actual number of deaths reported. The study recorded 142 post-invasion deaths total with with 73 (51%) due to violence. Of those 73 deaths from violence, 52 occurred in Falluja. That means that all the other 21 deaths occurred in one of the 14 clusters were somebody died, or 1.5 deaths per cluster. Given what we know of the actual combat I am betting that most of the deaths occurred in three or four clusters and the rest had 1 death each. Given the low numbers of samples, one or two fabricated reports of deaths could seriously warp the entire study.

At the very end of the paper (page 7, paragraph 1) they concede that:

"We suspect that a random sample of 33 Iraqi locations is likely to encounter one or a couple of particularly devastated areas. Nonetheless, since 52 of 73 (71%) violent deaths and 53 of 142 (37%) deaths during the conflict occurred in one cluster, it is possible that by extraordinary chance, the survey mortality estimate has been skewed upward. "

Gee, you think? It's almost as if military violence is not randomly distributed across the population of Iraq but is instead intelligently directed at specific areas, rendering a statistical extrapolation of deaths totally useless.

In the next paragraph they admit:

"Removing half the increase in infant deaths and the Falluja data still produces a 37% increase in estimated mortality."

That puts their final numbers just above the high end of the range reported by other sources.

This "peer reviewed study" is a piece of polemical garbage. Everybody is supposed to take away the bumper sticker summary, "Coalition kills 100,000 Iraqi civilians, half of them children," without reading the details. It tries to use crude epidemiological models like those used to study disease and applies them to the conscious infliction of violence by human beings. The result is statistical static.

http://www.chicagoboyz.net/archives/002543.html

UpTight said:

Saddam was killing - on average - 24,000 civilians every YEAR!!!

stockula said:

Bogus Lancet Study

[snip]

http://www.chicagoboyz.net/archives/002543.html

Before you all congratulate yourself too much, I should point that Ms. Love apparently didn't read the Lancet paper in question. Or, more likely, she read it but didn't understand what she was reading.

Case in point: Ms. Love makes the following grand pronouncement (and with such flourish!):

"And bingo we see that:

'Two-thirds of all violent deaths were reported in one cluster in the city of Falluja'"

What Ms. Love failed to comprehend (or maybe did comprehend but decided to leave out), is that the Fallujah data is an outlier, and is not included in the estimated 100,000 dead. To quote from the abstract:

"Two-thirds of all violent deaths were reported in one cluster in the city of Falluja. If we exclude the Falluja data, the risk of death is 1·5-fold (1·1–2·3) higher after the invasion. We estimate that 98 000 more deaths than expected (8000–194 000) happened after the invasion outside of Falluja and far more if the outlier Falluja cluster is included."

Ms. Love's faulty analysis wouldn't make it into any refereed journal. It's easy to post it on a blog, and fool some people into thinking that she actually has something to say.

stockula said:
First, even without reading the study, alarm bells should go off. The study purports to show civilian casualties 5 to 6 times higher than any other reputable source. Most other sources put total combined civilian and military deaths from all causes at between 15,000 to 20,000. The Lancet study is a degree of magnitude higher. Why the difference?

stockula said:
Ruh-oh. Michael Totten linked to this on Instapundit.com. I thought it smelled a lot like the UN's prediction in 2003 that 500,000 civilians would die from the invasion and millions would become refugees, so this 100,000 dead civilians claim immediately set off the bullshit alarms in my head. But as always, Bush haters are willing to believe almost literally ANYTHING anti-Bush at face value, without the slightest examination. You'd think after almost 4 years of manufactured scandals, blatent disinformation like Fahrenheit 9/11, and Bush being exonerated and his critics made to look like shrill and hysterical exaggerators, they'd begin to see a pattern. Nope. Witness the missing explosives non-scandal, the Bush National Guard records, Niger yellowcake, fantasy pipelines, on and on and on.....

stockula said:
First, even without reading the study, alarm bells should go off. The study purports to show civilian casualties 5 to 6 times higher than any other reputable source. Most other sources put total combined civilian and military deaths from all causes at between 15,000 to 20,000. The Lancet study is a degree of magnitude higher. Why the difference?

stockula said:
Moreover, just rough calculations should call the figure into doubt. 100,000 deaths over roughly a year and a half equates to 183 deaths per day. Seen anything like that on the news? With that many people dying from air strikes every day we would expect to have at least one or two incidents where several hundred or even thousands of people died. Heard of anything like that? In fact, heard of any air strikes at all where more than a couple of dozen people died total?

stockula said:
Where did this suspicious number come from? Bad methodology.

From the summary:

Mistake One:

"A cluster sample survey was undertaken throughout Iraq during September, 2004"

It is bad practice to use a cluster sample for a distribution known to be highly asymmetrical. Since all sources agree that violence in Iraq is highly geographically concentrated, this means a cluster sample has a very high chance of exaggerating the number of deaths. If one or two of your clusters just happen to fall in a contended area it will skew everything. In fact, the study inadvertently suggests that this happened when it points out later that:

stockula said:
In fact, this suggest that violent deaths were not "widespread" as 18 of the 33 clusters reported zero deaths. if 54% of the clusters had no deaths then all the other deaths occurred in 46% of the clusters. If the deaths in those clusters followed a standard distribution most of the deaths would have occurred in less than 15% of the total clusters.

stockula said:
Self-reporting in third-world countries is notoriously unreliable. In the guts of the paper (page 3, paragraph 2) they say they tried to get death certificates for at least two deaths for each cluster but they never say how many of the deaths, if any, they actually verified. It is probable that many of the deaths, especially the oddly high number of a deaths of children by violence, never actually occurred.

I am voting Bush because I can no longer tolerate stupidty.

Raoul_Duke said:

In the 1980's with the support of many in this current administration.

UpTight said:

except the mid 90's DOJ report concluded that the US supplied no weapons AT ALL to Saddam in the 80's

Mike said:

Thanks for calling be a moran. And you dont even know me. I guess you make up your mind with very little information. Maybe thats why you are choosing Kerry? Or is it Nader?

Keith said:

That's not what it said. It said we didn't BREAK ANY LAWS. It didn't say we didn't sell him weapons or things that could be turned into weapons.

JUSTICE DEPT. FINDS THERE WAS NO `IRAQGATE'

In mid-January the Justice Department declassified its latestinvestigation into alleged U.S. military support for Iraq duringthe 1980s (see ASM No. 22 p. 2).

Investigators found no evidence "that U.S. agencies or officialsillegally armed Iraq or that crimes were committed through barter-ing of CCC commodities for military equipment." Official U.S.policy at the time permitted exports of most dual-use items, whilebarring exports of military equipment (with the exception of com-munications equipment and a single pistol for Saddam Hussein).According to the report, the Reagan Administration repeatedlyconsidered increasing military aid to Iraq for its war with Iran,but Iraqi requests for U.S. military equipment were turned down in1986, 1987 and 1988.

J ustice Department investigators "produced no evidence of weaponstransfers to Iraq by or on behalf of the CIA." However, the CIA wasunable to produce some relevant records, due to hyper-compartment-alization of data. According to the report, "In one instan ce, ittook the CIA two months to identify the intended recipient countryof weapons shipped at the CIA's request."

Around the same time the Justice Department absolved the governmentof any wrong-doing, a former National Security Council officialfiled a n affidavit in a Florida lawsuit asserting that the CIAsecretly facilitated the sale of cluster bombs by Chilean armsmanufacturer Carlos Cardoen to Iraq in the mid-1980s (see box p. 5and New York Times 5 February 1995).

Source: "BNL Taskforce~Final Rep ort" and "Addendum", report to theAttorney General, Department of Justice, dated 21 October 1994,released publicly 17 January 1995

UpTight said: silly things

Mike said:

Thanks for calling be a moran. And you dont even know me. I guess you make up your mind with very little information. Maybe thats why you are choosing Kerry? Or is it Nader?

Keith said:

That's not what it said. It said we didn't BREAK ANY LAWS. It didn't say we didn't sell him weapons or things that could be turned into weapons.

stockula said:
I thought it smelled a lot like the UN's prediction in 2003 that 500,000 civilians would die from the invasion and millions would become refugees, so this 100,000 dead civilians claim immediately set off the bullshit alarms in my head. But as always, Bush haters are willing to believe almost literally ANYTHING anti-Bush at face value, without the slightest examination. You'd think after almost 4 years of manufactured scandals, blatent disinformation like Fahrenheit 9/11, and Bush being exonerated and his critics made to look like shrill and hysterical exaggerators, they'd begin to see a pattern. Nope. Witness the missing explosives non-scandal, the Bush National Guard records, Niger yellowcake, fantasy pipelines, on and on and on.....

UpTight said:

Firstly, how many of those people were actually killed by allied forces?

Secondly, Saddam was killing - on average - 24,000 civilians every YEAR!!!

This war has saved lives

prozacrefugee said:

Yup - the US is well on record on supplying large amounts of coventional weapons, non-military agricultural aid, and chemical weapon precursors (from US corporations, not from the government) to Iraq to aid them in war against Iran. This is the context for the famous picture of Rumsfeld and Hussien.

And the figure of 24,000 per year saying we saved lives is just misleading - because the vast majority of that figure is from the Iran war and attacks upon the Kurds which happened when Iraq was a US ally. Invading 15 years later did nothing to prevent any of those deaths.