posted
Note: This article is from 2004, but the number 100,000 is still used today by many on this board...how can that be?
Does this number include insurgents? or insurgent sympathizers? Does it include pre-war dead? or those killed by insurgents?
You be the judge----- ***************
100,000 Dead--or 8,000 How many Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war? By Fred Kaplan Posted Friday, Oct. 29, 2004, at 3:49 PM PT
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.
Imagine reading a poll reporting that George W. Bush will win somewhere between 4 percent and 96 percent of the votes in this Tuesday's election. You would say that this is a useless poll and that something must have gone terribly wrong with the sampling. The same is true of the Lancet article: It's a useless study; something went terribly wrong with the sampling.
The problem is, ultimately, not with the scholars who conducted the study; they did the best they could under the circumstances. The problem is the circumstances. It's hard to conduct reliable, random surveys--and to extrapolate meaningful data from the results of those surveys--in the chaotic, restrictive environment of war.
However, these scholars are responsible for the hype surrounding the study. Gilbert Burnham, one of the co-authors, told the International Herald Tribune (for a story reprinted in today's New York Times), "We're quite sure that the estimate of 100,000 is a conservative estimate." Yet the text of the study reveals this is simply untrue. Burnham should have said, "We're not quite sure what our estimate means. Assuming our model is accurate, the actual death toll might be 100,000, or it might be somewhere between 92,000 lower and 94,000 higher than that number."
Not a meaty headline, but truer to the findings of his own study.
Here's how the Johns Hopkins team--which, for the record, was led by Dr. Les Roberts of the university's Bloomberg School of Public Health--went about its work. They randomly selected 33 neighborhoods across Iraq--equal-sized population "clusters"--and, this past September, set out to interview 30 households in each. They asked how many people in each household died, of what causes, during the 14 months before the U.S. invasion--and how many died, of what, in the 17 months since the war began. They then took the results of their random sample and extrapolated them to the entire country, assuming that their 33 clusters were perfectly representative of all Iraq.
This is a time-honored technique for many epidemiological studies, but those conducting them have to take great care that the way they select the neighborhoods is truly random (which, as most poll-watchers of any sort know, is difficult under the easiest of circumstances). There's a further complication when studying the results of war, especially a war fought mainly by precision bombs dropped from the air: The damage is not randomly distributed; it's very heavily concentrated in a few areas.
The Johns Hopkins team had to confront this problem. One of the 33 clusters they selected happened to be in Fallujah, one of the most heavily bombed and shelled cities in all Iraq. Was it legitimate to extrapolate from a sample that included such an extreme case? More awkward yet, it turned out, two-thirds of all the violent deaths that the team recorded took place in the Fallujah cluster. They settled the dilemma by issuing two sets of figures--one with Fallujah, the other without. The estimate of 98,000 deaths is the extrapolation from the set that does not include Fallujah. What's the extrapolation for the set that does include Fallujah? They don't exactly say. Fallujah was nearly unique; it's impossible to figure out how to extrapolate from it. A question does arise, though: Is this difficulty a result of some peculiarity about the fighting in Fallujah? Or is it a result of some peculiarity in the survey's methodology?
There were other problems. The survey team simply could not visit some of the randomly chosen clusters; the roads were blocked off, in some cases by coalition checkpoints. So the team picked other, more accessible areas that had received similar amounts of damage. But it's unclear how they made this calculation. In any case, the detour destroyed the survey's randomness; the results are inherently tainted. In other cases, the team didn't find enough people in a cluster to interview, so they expanded the survey to an adjoining cluster. Again, at that point, the survey was no longer random, and so the results are suspect.
Beth Osborne Daponte, senior research scholar at Yale University's Institution for Social and Policy Studies, put the point diplomatically after reading the Lancet article this morning and discussing it with me in a phone conversation: "It attests to the difficulty of doing this sort of survey work during a war. ... No one can come up with any credible estimates yet, at least not through the sorts of methods used here."
The study, though, does have a fundamental flaw that has nothing to do with the limits imposed by wartime--and this flaw suggests that, within the study's wide range of possible casualty estimates, the real number tends more toward the lower end of the scale. In order to gauge the risk of death brought on by the war, the researchers first had to measure the risk of death in Iraq before the war. Based on their survey of how many people in the sampled households died before the war, they calculated that the mortality rate in prewar Iraq was 5 deaths per 1,000 people per year. The mortality rate after the war started--not including Fallujah--was 7.9 deaths per 1,000 people per year. In short, the risk of death in Iraq since the war is 58 percent higher (7.9 divided by 5 = 1.58) than it was before the war.
But there are two problems with this calculation. First, Daponte (who has studied Iraqi population figures for many years) questions the finding that prewar mortality was 5 deaths per 1,000. According to quite comprehensive data collected by the United Nations, Iraq's mortality rate from 1980-85 was 8.1 per 1,000. From 1985-90, the years leading up to the 1991 Gulf War, the rate declined to 6.8 per 1,000. After '91, the numbers are murkier, but clearly they went up. Whatever they were in 2002, they were almost certainly higher than 5 per 1,000. In other words, the wartime mortality rate--if it is 7.9 per 1,000--probably does not exceed the peacetime rate by as much as the Johns Hopkins team assumes.
The second problem with the calculation goes back to the problem cited at the top of this article--the margin of error. Here is the relevant passage from the study: "The risk of death is 1.5-fold (1.1 - 2.3) higher after the invasion." Those mysterious numbers in the parentheses mean the authors are 95 percent confident that the risk of death now is between 1.1 and 2.3 times higher than it was before the invasion--in other words, as little as 10 percent higher or as much as 130 percent higher. Again, the math is too vague to be useful.
There is one group out there counting civilian casualties in a way that's tangible, specific, and very useful--a team of mainly British researchers, led by Hamit Dardagan and John Sloboda, called Iraq Body Count. They have kept a running total of civilian deaths, derived entirely from press reports. Their count is triple fact-checked; their database is itemized and fastidiously sourced; and they take great pains to separate civilian from combatant casualties (for instance, last Tuesday, the group released a report estimating that, of the 800 Iraqis killed in last April's siege of Fallujah, 572 to 616 of them were civilians, at least 308 of them women and children).
The IBC estimates that between 14,181 and 16,312 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war--about half of them since the battlefield phase of the war ended last May. The group also notes that these figures are probably on the low side, since some deaths must have taken place outside the media's purview.
So, let's call it 15,000 or--allowing for deaths that the press didn't report--20,000 or 25,000, maybe 30,000 Iraqi civilians killed in a pre-emptive war waged (according to the latest rationale) on their behalf. That's a number more solidly rooted in reality than the Hopkins figure--and, given that fact, no less shocking.
posted
Things they didn't discuss or discuss enough:
1. Insurgents ARE civilians. There's no uniformed army....you can't tell who is who. There are even young kids fighting in the insurgency!! We know that we killed a lot of people resisting during the invasion, and those numbers were very, very high.
2. Most assume the deaths are caused by US Troops or the allies. We know that insurgents killed some civilians to "set-up" the US as a form of propaganda which was videotaped and broadcast on TV. There were even instances where stolen US troops uniforms were worn by insurgents in these propaganda video's, but that didn't happen too much. Mostly civilian killing to from the US though.....or insurgents hiding in heavily civilian areas or even civilian human shields. Lots of insurgents murdering citizens for being a part of the new iraq.....but under saddam, civilian murders were very common in higher numbers.
3. Counting the war with Iran and the chemical weapons used in that war, Saddam is responsible for approximately 3 million people over 26 years. That would be an average of about 116,000 per year. You can do the rest of the math and project what chaos he could wreak forward in the future....end of story.
4. And let's don't forget the small sparring that goes on between the Shiite and Sunni militants, for example. These aren't high numbers, but they certainly count as the total.
[ 29. October 2005, 12:19 AM: Message edited by: 24bit ]
Posts: 600 | From Las Vegas, NV | Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
I've posted the Lancet reports several times, and many on the Right here say they are 'Leftist'
The Lancet is a MEDICAL journal. They attempted to count all cases of death related DIRECTLY to this invasion.
the kicker is the fact that NOONE ELSE IS COUNTING U.S. officials quoted numerous times as SAYING SO.
..and are the counts direct relations to fire and bombs? Do they count disease and malnutrition (especially of children) over the years since the War began?
No, 24, they are not mistaking innocent Iraqis for insurgents.
Frankly. this question is deeply disturbing.
So,you are saying 50,000 is alright (roughly 17 times the amount that died on 911, and Iraq never atttacked us).
Is it just important to proove it is below the 100,000 mark so you can take another stab at the Liberrrrals?
These are lives we are talking about. No less valuable than yours or your kid's. Do you get that?
The lack of humanity in this is the hardest for me to swallow. These 'counts' do not even begin to address severe illness, witness of family member's gruesome death, starvation, no clean water.. ect, ect..
Tell me, how many are 'worth it' to you -- and furthermore what exactly has their death accomplished?? Do tell.
How is this different than historical acts of 'cleansing'?
Basically, you support genocide if these results in Iraq are OK with you, and have no information to deny it. Let us not forget that Saddam was backed by the U.S. financially and left unaddresed during the time he committed genocide as well. Nothing was done about it, it is only brought forth decades later to support an old agenda to have a foothold in oil land. Rotten to the core.
here is on the death count issue from 2003, more to follow:
************************************************
Published on Friday, September 5, 2003 by the Miami Herald
Who's Counting the Dead in Iraq?
by Helen Thomas
Remember the enemy body counts during the Vietnam War? Some of those U.S. tabulations were highly exaggerated in an effort to show gains on the battlefield.
Well, we don't do that anymore.
The Pentagon has meticulously reported the American fatality toll in Iraq, now up to 286. That number includes 183 deaths from hostile fire since the start of the war. It also includes 148 dead since May 1 when President Bush declared the end of major combat operations. A Pentagon spokesman said that 1,105 U.S. service personnel have been wounded since the war began.
That kind of numerical precision doesn't apply throughout Iraq. Trying to find the death count among Iraqis has proved to be mission impossible.
I asked Pentagon officials: ''How many Iraqis have been killed in this war?'' The answers were given ''on background'' -- meaning that the Pentagon spokesmen requested anonymity. The spokesmen were honest. They clearly were following orders from the policymakers when they replied that the Iraqi fatality toll was simply not our concern.
The reply to my first Pentagon call was: "We don't track them" (meanig the Iraqi dead)
Weeks later I pursued the question and was told by a Defense Department official: They don't count. They are not important,''meaning the casualty figures.
I later asked for an explanation of why there has been no attempt to find out the number of Iraqi war dead. A Pentagon officer patiently responded: ``In combat operations, we have objectives. We don't have an objective to kill people. Our objective was to remove Saddam Hussein from Iraq.''
''If the Iraqis laid down their arms,'' he added, ''there was no problem. But if we have to go in by force to kill them, the numbers don't make a difference. "Is not something we are concerned with.''said that U.S. forces used precision weapons to minimize the casualties.
We achieved our military objective. We did not count'' the enemy dead, he said.t would be difficult at best to determine who was killed when dealing with soldiers on the ground.''
An official at the U.S. Army Center of Military History acknowledged that the question of enemy fatalities ``is a bit sensitive to our people. We just don't face up to how many people were lost.''
Books at the history center refer to 50,000 Americans killed in World War I and some 250,000 Americans in World War II. Germany lost 1.8 million soldiers in World War I, and, as our archenemy in World War II, lost about 3.25 million people.
We do know, however, that in the Vietnam War 58,198 Americans died -- and many thousands more Vietnamese.
White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan was asked this week whether President Bush knows how many people were killed and wounded in Iraq -- ''not just Americans but the total people killed and wounded in Iraq since the beginning of the war.'' He dodged the question, simply saying that Bush is ``well aware of the sacrifices that our troops have made and the sacrifices that their families are making with our troops over there in Iraq.''
On March 18, two days before the U.S. invasion, Barbara Bush had an interview with ABC-TV's Diane Sawyer.
''Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many, what day it's gonna happen?'' Mrs. Bush declared. ''It's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?'' Maybe she is right, but I don't think so.
If we do not know or care about the human cost of war for the winners and losers, America will be forever diminished in the eyes of the world.
[ 29. October 2005, 11:59 AM: Message edited by: Mo ]
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heiwalove
Frequent Contributor (1K+ posts)
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posted
no, mo, i don't think he cares at all. he's made that all too clear.
Gee, the Lancet says this number huh? Did you understand how the Lancet's considerations were discounted?. I think everyone on Lymenet could make comments on the faulty thinking of lots of doctors in this country.
Maybe DuckDuckGooseGoose could sum it up?
No one else is counting--in your words Mo, so that means, no one is making them accountable for their statement.....and they know it.
I put no stock in the Lancet, which is a periodical for the medical community. When did they become experts on war casualties?
Every life counts Mo, we �LL know that....but, every life does not count three or four times more just to make a politcal point. Nor, does it count less for a point.
quote:Originally posted by heiwalove: no, mo, i don't think he cares at all. he's made that all too clear.
Oh no, that's an insult and an attack on my character. I'm gonna tell Mo, she's keeping track now ya know.
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