Posted on 12/18/2004 11:57:50 PM PST by sigarms
Edited on 12/19/2004 1:44:00 AM PST by Jim Robinson. [history]
The authors of a peer-reviewed study, conducted by a survey team from Johns Hopkins University, claim that about 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war. Yet a close look at the actual study, published online today by the British medical journal the Lancet, reveals that this number is so loose as to be meaningless.
The report's authors derive this figure by estimating how many Iraqis died in a 14-month period before the U.S. invasion, conducting surveys on how many died in a similar period after the invasion began (more on those surveys later), and subtracting the difference. That difference—the number of "extra" deaths in the post-invasion period—signifies the war's toll. That number is 98,000. But read the passage that cites the calculation more fully:
We estimate there were 98,000 extra deaths (95% CI 8000-194 000) during the post-war period.
Readers who are accustomed to perusing statistical documents know what the set of numbers in the parentheses means. For the other 99.9 percent of you, I'll spell it out in plain English—which, disturbingly, the study never does. It means that the authors are 95 percent confident that the war-caused deaths totaled some number between 8,000 and 194,000. (The number cited in plain language—98,000—is roughly at the halfway point in this absurdly vast range.)
This isn't an estimate. It's a dart board.
[excerpted]
So, if such claims are accurate (and they aren't), and 75% of our kills are civilians, and we killed about 3-6K terrorists, that means there must be 12-24K civilians dead in Fallujah...right?
I'm sure *evidence* of this will be immediately forthcoming...yeah...right...
The US was going out of its way to do surgical strikes.
A few civilians may have been killed. But to claim that 3/4 of the ones we killed were civilians, is preposterous, unless you count terrorists as civilians, of course.
Not to mention counting how many Saddam killed and how many are NOT being killed, because Saddam's regime is no more.
Boo hoo
My title contains the essence of the article.
1. How many of these civilians were killed by the terrorists?
2. How does this compared to those killed by Saddam while Kofi's cronies skimmed the Oil-for-Food program.
You didn't bother to post the most important part of the article:
"Readers who are accustomed to perusing statistical documents know what the set of numbers in the parentheses means. For the other 99.9 percent of you, I'll spell it out in plain English—which, disturbingly, the study never does. It means that the authors are 95 percent confident that the war-caused deaths totaled some number between 8,000 and 194,000. (The number cited in plain language—98,000—is roughly at the halfway point in this absurdly vast range.)
This isn't an estimate. It's a dart board."
Unquote.
That is immaterial.
There is a section for your comments, and it is not the title.
When you use the wrong title, you make it impossible for others to find it by title search, ruining much of the archival usage of FR, and lead to people complaining about dupes when your article gets reposted.
1) The lie used to advance abortion was a million back-alley abortions were happening every year. This false 100,000 figure is the latest lie of the left.
2) Our US constitution requires an actual head count for the official purposes of a census. Keeping with this high standard, show me a stack of photocopied death certificates for this 100,000.
Actually, he did.
Jeez, where was all this concern when Saddamn was slaughtering people by the thousands?!
The best response is to stand up and cheer this article. It exposes the fraudulent claims of the original researchers who made up the numbers so as to attack America's liberation of Iraq.
All we heard back then was the sanctions on Iraq were killing 500,000 children a year. That figure was supplied by Saddam, of course.
Even more interesting, is they count every civilian killed by a terrorist and insurgeant.
Hmmm, when a car bomb goes off in some town in Iraq, and 15 little kids are blown to smitherians...is that somehow the US military's fault?
So true...good post.
Yeah, and Saddamn was the one subverting the sanctions. With the able assistance of the UN, of course.
You never heard the left complain about Saddam building palaces or giving Iraq's money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.
There's a simple way to separate out terrorist kills from civilian kills. Someone needs to publish the male/female death ratios. Since almost all the insurgents/terrorists are male, the further away from a 50/50 ratio you are, the greater the proportion of "good" kills there are.
Actually, this Slate article rips the original study apart and, for all intents and purposes, calls it junk science.
I summarized the Slate article's findings on Post 11 of another FR thread.
*******************************
The 100,000 number came from a Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health study.
The Hopkins researchers did not see a single dead Iraqi. Instead, they interviewed 30 Iraqi households in 33 “clusters” in Iraq and asked about deaths in each household before and after the Iraq War. They then estimated a pre and post Iraq War death rate based on the answers, be they true or false, that they were given. The difference in the death rates, the Hopkins researchers claimed, was the number of so-called “excess deaths caused by the Iraq War”.
Two-thirds of all the violent deaths reported in the study took place in a single cluster: the Fallujah cluster that was the hotbed of Baathist Party. Yet, every so-called “excess death”, reported as caused by anything whatsoever from a lung cancer to getting struck by lightning , was automatically classified as an “excess death caused by the Iraq War” by the Hopkins researchers.
. Even worse, the “excess death” number was grossly inflated by using a falsely low pre-war death rate in the calculations. The pre 1991 Gulf War Iraqi death rate, according to the United Nations, was 6.8 per 1,000. The post 1991 Gulf War Iraqi death rate claimed by the Hopkins researchers was only 5.0 per 1,000. The same people who once claimed that one million Iraqis, including half a million children, were killed by U.N sanctions after the 1991 Gulf War now want us to believe that the death rate in Iraq actually DECREASED after the 1991 Gulf War in order to validate the Hopkins study numbers.
It’s a classic case of the GIGO (Garbage In – Garbage Out) Effect: “If invalid data is entered in a computer program, the resulting output will also be invalid.”
The most damning critique of the Hopkins study, however, is the study’s own “Confidence Interval” number. The Hopkins study stated, “We estimate there were 98,000 extra deaths (95% CI 8000-194 000) during the post-war period.” What does that mean in plain English? (95% CI 8000-194 000) means that the Hopkins researchers were 95% confident that their “excess deaths caused by the Iraq War” came out to anywhere from 8,000 deaths to 194,000 deaths.
What’s the average American household income? Well, there is a 95% chance that it is somewhere between $8,000 and $194,000.
As a Slate.com critic of the Hopkins study wrote, “This isn't an estimate. It's a dart board.”
A detailed critique of the flaws of the Hopkins study can be found at Democrat-friendly MSNBC Slate.com:
100,000 Dead—or 8,000 How many Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war?
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