100,000 Dead—or 8,000 - How many Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war?

Slate ^ | Oct. 29, 2004 | Fred Kaplan

[sigarms]

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]

[Cobra64]

Have any of these scorekeepers ever heard of London, Dresden, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, Berlin, Auschvitz, Daschau?

Feel free to add to the list. I'm sure it would go to the basement.

[Cobra64]

I'm with on that sentiment.

[MikefromOhio]

How about Rome when the Goths finally got to it?

Stalingrad in World War 2

Any city in Poland.....

[piasa]

They'd get their food and water from the same place they've been getting it all along while under seige- Baghdad. Not to mention the US and aid organizations have been outside the city ready to provide water and other essentials for those who chose to leave all along. (It's part of the reason supporters were able to resupply the insurgents, unfortunately.)

[piasa]

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?

Why, yes, of course. If it wasn't for us those 15 kids would be in children's prisons - um, I mean village reeducation centers, or would be happily whiling away their early years in some bureaucrat's pedophile-playpen, or be recruited into the Fedeyeen Saddam to be trained in how to torture and bomb other more useless Kurdish kids.

[dirtboy]

a free and democratic country since 60 years due to your grandfathers that helped rebuilding it after defeating it.

Yeah, and the death toll in that war was far worse and the civilian casualties were far greater. This "study" is a load of bovine excrement.

[EllaMinnow]

I'd been wondering where the DUmmies got the "100,000 Iraqi civilians killed by the United States" that they love to throw around recklessly, accusing President Bush of genocide.

Now I know it's as far out in left field as all their other "facts."