Democracy Now has an interview with Les Roberts. On the methodology:
I just want to say that what we did, this cluster survey approach, is the standard way of measuring mortality in very poor countries where the government isn't very functional or in times of war. And when UNICEF goes out and measures mortality in any developing country, this is what they do. When the U.S. government went at the end of the war in Kosovo or went at the end of the war in Afghanistan and the U.S. government measured the death rate, this is how they did it. And most ironically, the U.S. government has been spending millions of dollars per year, through something called the Smart Initiative, to train NGOs and UN workers to do cluster surveys to measure mortality in times of wars and disasters.
So, I think we used a very standard method. I think our results are couched appropriately in the relative imprecision of [inaudible]. It could conceivably be as few as 400,000 deaths. So we're upfront about that. We don't know the exact number. We just know the range, and we're very, very confident about both the method and the results.
On the comparison with official statistics:
We have gone and looked at every recent war we can find, and only in Bosnia did all governmental statistics add up to even one-fifth of the true death toll. And in Bosnia, the rate was 30 or 40 percent, with huge support for surveillance activities from the UN. So it's normal in times of war that communications systems break down, systems for registering events break down.
And in Saddam's last year of his reign, only about one-third of all deaths were captured at morgues and hospitals through the official government surveillance network. So, when things were good, if only a third of deaths were captured, what do you think it's like now?
On claims that the timing was political:
Well, if I'm not mistaken, Anthony Cordesman was formerly a Pentagon official, and, you know, I think he probably has a political lens in what he says. But this study has been underway for most of a year, in terms of organizing and getting it all together. It was done in June through July. It took some time to get the data out of Iraq, because of the logistical troubles of moving people in and out. We analyzed it carefully. We submitted it to The Lancet quite a while ago, and The Lancet had control over when this came out.
And I think this is just a lose-lose situation. You know, if this had come out two weeks ago, people would be saying the same thing. If this came out in the months after or the two months after the next election, people in Iraq would see this as very political in timing. So, you know, any time within a several month window here, we were going to get this accusation, and I just think it's bunk.
And more importantly, is it true? It is easy -- it's going to be very easy for a couple of reporters to go out and verify our findings, because what we've said is the death rate is four times higher. And a reporter will only have to go to four or five different villages, go visit the person who takes care of the graveyard and say, "Back in 2002, before the war, how many bodies typically came in here per week? And now, how many bodies com in here?" And actually, most graveyard attendants keep records. And if the number is four times higher, on average, you'll know we're right. If the numbers are the same, you'll know we're wrong. It is going to be very easy for people to verify this and get all of this talk about whether it's political out of the way, because the fundamental issue is, a certain number of Iraqis have died, and if our leaders are saying it's ten times lower than it really is, we are driving a wedge between us and the Middle East.
"[W]hat we've said is the death rate is four times higher."
This is a good point. It is simple, easy to understand and would be easily discredited if false.
Any deniers want to go try to prove that Saddam's kill rate was equal or more than what is happening now?
genocide
Dave,
For the unmpteenth time, what has 'Saddam's kill rate' got to do with this? It is a red herring to fall back on this, especially as the US provided full economic and diplomatic support for the tyrant during the period in the 1980's when he was committing his most serious crimes. Why is this salient fact always airbrushed from the aggressors memory? Is this the feeble way in which we support empire? Such a banal argument assumes the US invaded Iraq to liberate the people from Saddam Hussein, and that economic factors were not involved. But this is crap, pure and utter. If one searches for the rationale for the invasion in documents early during the war, it was all based on WMD; democracy promotion was not even indexed.
If its triage you are fishing for, then why not explain why the US supported Suharto, one of the biggest torturers and mass murders of the latter half of the twentieth century (and whose victim total makes even Saddam look like a school boy), or, for that matter, mass killers such as Armas, Montt, Pinochet, the Shah, Marcos, Constant and others?
Jeff: Umpteenth? I don't think we've ever met.
The only thing I think Saddam's kill rate has to do with is that it is what the louder critics of the Lancet study compare the Lancet study to to argue for 'incredibility'. Even if we posit their latest justification for the Iraq War as saving the Iraqis from Saddam, I think it is clear that we'd have to compare numbers from the same methodologies -- If they argue that we kill less than Saddam, how do we know how many Saddam killed? Would they use the Lancet methodology? Would they trust the administration's mortality reports? Would they trust the media?
Their pure crap stinks horribly even if you put it in the best possible light.
Of course, the Iraqis are better off now than before the invasion. Why go about making up inflated numbers about Iraqi deaths except to use them in some way as leverage in an upcoming election?
Think about it.
RWR
www.rightwingrocker.com
Rightwingrocker you are an accomplice to genocide. The increase in the mortality rate is actually mirrored in the reported deaths. The study fills in the unreported deaths to a very high probablity. The american conservatives have always been anti science. Look how they fight global warming, and evolution.
Would you call the person who wrote this an "accomplice to genocide"?
Conservatives are not anti-science. Quite the contrary, we require real proof, just like real scientists do. Your examples of "global warming" and evolution are perfect examples.
RWR
Don't mind RightWingRocker, guys. Hes so far out there, he doesnt even recognize our constitutional right to "maintenance in old age and also in case of sickness or loss of capacity to work."
RightWingRockhead: nearly all scientists accept descent with modification, and agree that the driving forces for this are mutation and natural selection. In other words, they accept the central claims of evolutionary biology. That you don't know this indicates that you don't know jack shit about science. So just go back to your rockhouse and keep smokin' those rocks.
Zorro,
Nearly all scientists are also on the government dole, therefore having a vested interest in the government and big-government types believing those things. That you don't know this indicates that you don't know jack shit about science.
I don't smoke or do drugs. Never have, never will. Maybe you should quit them.
By the way, in case your typical liberal emotional overreaction didn't allow you to notice, I didn't voice an opinion on the matter. I only stated that there simply isn't enough proof to conclude one way or the other on the question of evolution. There's even less evidence for global warming and, in fact, on that matter, there's plenty of proof to the contrary, regardless of your opinion or mine.
RWR
RightWing: you said:
There's even less evidence for global warming and, in fact, on that matter, there's plenty of proof to the contrary,
Anything specific?
J.
Even alarmists admit that there hasn't been significant warming in the last 8 years, but the best resource is this site, which uses actual instruments to document the actuals.
Enjoy!
http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/Index.jsp
RWR
I have been studying the Lancet article, and intend to write something more substantial, but here are a few concerns.
1. Cluster sampling can be a very good way of getting data in wartime situations, but it can also be very problematic. The most basic methodological error of this study is that it extrapolates from violent regions to less violent regions. The study should have been conducted by breaking Iraq into three different regions - Kurdistan, Central, and South - the central flaw of the study is that it generalizes to the entire population data from specific areas which are more violent. A solid researcher would have operationalized measures of violence based on observable military actions, number of troops in regions, etc., observable degrees of stability, etc. and then looked more closely at regions with the same methodological strategy. Anyone who is familiar with Kurdistan should know that one cannot extrapolate from Baghdad to that region with any degree of validity.
2. Another major flaw: the researchers simply picked clusters of households that were close to one another for the sake of their own safety. Well, I'm glad, in a country where there are supposed to be 650,000 dead bodies (where are they? I mean - the media is everywhere in Iraq and I don't know how they could miss that many bodies) that the researchers weren't killed ( what is the probability that they would have been if their numbers are that high?. My concern is the haphazardness with which they selected the samples: from what I could tell, they just chose streets randomly from a map and then interviwed people who live close to one another. Now, did they control for factors such as bombs having gone off in the are? How do we know for sure they did not select certain neighborhoods that were more violent? Then there is the fact that they said some household did not participate. How many? We aren't told this. Why not? They say they saw the death certificates, and I have no reason to doubt this, but a truly scientific study, one which would be published in a reputable journal such as the Lancet, would demand that we have copies of these in order to verify the data. There are so many claims and data that cannot be falsified that the level of scientific integrity is seriously in question.
Perhaps the most glaring problem is that the results are not replicable. If scientific findings are not replicable or falisfiable, then they are not valid.
3. It is unconscionable that the authors did not distinguish the status of the dead -- if you are a good Quaker, and you sincerely believe that all death, even of vicious Baathist and al-Qaeada thugs is lamentable, or if you are Ronald Reagan and think that SS officers were "victims" of Hitler and the Nazis, then I suppose that you would not want to distinguish between victims and perpetrators. This sort of thing happened in Bosnia has well. People would say that many people on "all sides" were killed, and this was true, but for the most part, it was Bosnian Muslims who were being killed by nationalist Serbs. The point here, is that the study insinuates, and the political uses of this bear this out, that the "insurgents" themselves are somehow victims of the US invasion, rather than active agents who have exploited the fog of war for their own attempt to terrorize Iraq away from its path to democracy. We all need to think about causation here: did the US "cause" the deaths? Most of the dead are victims of Islamic terrorists, and to be a terrorist is to specifically make yourself an agent of destruction. So we need to think about this more. One can never get away from the fact that the war set up the context in which they could do their killing, but we need to remember that the majority of Iraqis (as evidenced by voting in fair and free elections and public opinion polls) want democracy and it is the latter that are the targets of terrorists.
4. If you look carefully at the provenance of the study and the political language of the authors, it is blatantly clear that they have partisan positions against the war. You can actually see it in the language they have used subsequent to the publication of the study. In the Lancet, they have put on the holy mantle of science, but in their comments they belie a deep hostility toward the war that I think motivate They are asking us to put blind faith in the scientific method, as if it can resist all political biases. I sincerely believe from my battles with the anti-war crowd that many of them have adopted the same kinds of duplicitous tactics as the Bush administration. We are supposed to take these scientists at their word, but I really must at least raise the question since the Lancet has a strong reputation for publishing politically loaded scientific findings.
In a sense, I think that people who are criticizing the study but not really tucking into some of the shadier aspects of the methodology are basing their criticisms on the fact that the findings are counterintuitive. An MD friend of mind calls it the "interocular sensitivity test." The data are not backed up by bodies that can be seen and counted, the samples are not valid because they were too random (!), they don't square with any other reports of either a formal or informal nature. The anti-war factions have always prophesied gloom and doom for Iraq, and have always ignored good news coming from the country. Given the ideological corruption I have seen on American campuses in relation to the war, and given the ideoligical proclivities of the researchers themselves, as expressed in their own words in defense of the study, I cannot -- but wish I could - rule out the possibility that the researchers produced a set of figures that would bear out their most dire prophecies. There are enough methodological infelicities in the study to make me have to honestly consider that sordid hypothesis.
Thomas Cushman writes:
"I have been studying the Lancet article, and intend to write something more substantial...."
Please let us know when you do. You start by saying that the study "extrapolates from violent regions to less violent regions."
No, it doesn't. If you have been studying the article, how did you manage to get such a basic fact so hopelessly wrong?
You go on to say that "the media is everywhere in Iraq", which is a lie; numerous reporters have acknowledged that Iraq is too dangerous for them to cover properly. See, for just the latest example, the response of Paul Reynolds to Les Roberts, who suggested that reporters undertake a simple grave-counting exercise ("This would take 2 reporters one day to decide if we are basically correct or in error!"):
"The difficulty of course is that the international media is incapable of getting around safely to do something like that easily. The local media is a source but cannot be relied on by itself."
Where are the dead bodies, you ask? Les Roberts says they are mostly in graveyards, Thomas. Is that so very, very implausible?
If you want anyone to pay attention to your "more substantial" contribution, try addressing the issues instead of churning out cheap talking-points.
You have really only skirted over my points, but let me clarify.
I mean the sample is heavily weighted on urban areas and fails to make regional distinctions: you don't say anything about the alternative I propose, which would to do more specific regional sampling. Thus for instance, if Roberts had focused solely on Kurdistan then he would have not found what he was looking for. He would have found a success story, and let's be honest, he doesn't want to find that. Why have you not addressed this?
People should know that Les Roberts has a record of spinning events in Iraq for his own political aggrandizement. See the interview with him when he ran (unsucessfully) for the US Congress on www.thatsmydemocracy.com -- notice how he spins the Iraq war in certain ways. For instance, I have been working with research collected by Oxford and in the surveys (much more representative than tghe Lancet study), what was striking is that most Iraqis didn't really care about Abu Ghraib. It was a bad thing, I agree, but blown up all out of proportion, and the Iraqis didn't fall foir it. So instead, Roberts tells us about a cab driver shedding tears over Abu Ghraib. Great data, eh? I think there are reasons, given the weaknesses in the study, to suspect his objectivity here. I believe this study is simply the scientific handmaiden of political ideology. By the way, there have been many many scientific research polls that offer much more representative samples -- how was it that these researchers were able to get such representative samples in spite of the danger? Roberts' methods were self-serving and lazy.
And there is another aspect of the interview in democracynow.com -- consider this quote:
AMY GOODMAN: Les Roberts joins us now from Syracuse, New York. He's one of the main researchers of the study. He was with Johns Hopkins when he co-authored the study but has just taken a post at Columbia University. Les Roberts, welcome to Democracy Now!
LES ROBERTS: Hi, Amy. It's nice to be with you again.
AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you with us. Why don't you lay out exactly what you found?
LES ROBERTS: Sure, we, as you said, went to about 50 neighborhoods spread around Iraq that were picked at random, and each time we went, we knocked on 40 doors and asked people, "Who lived here on the first of January, 2002?" and "Who lived here today?" And we asked, "Had anyone been born or died in between?" And on those occasions, when people said someone die, we said, "Well, how did they die?" And we sort of wrote down the details: when, how old they were, what was the cause of death. And when it was violence, we asked, "Well, who did the killing? How exactly did it happen? What kind of weapon was used?" And at the end of the interview, when no one knew this was coming, we asked most of the time for a death certificate. And 92% of the time, people walked back into their houses and could produce a death certificate. So we are quite sure people didn't make this up.
First of all, he says they went to about 50 houses. Well, I would hope that basic science would call for a specification of the exact number. The article gives the exact number, but since every household had such a disproportionate effect on the overall number, it is important to get this exactly right. Whar really bothers me, though is the line: "And on those occasions, when people said someone die, we said, "Well, how did they die?" And we sort of wrote down the details" . Sort of wrote down the details. That's a wonderful way to apply scientific rigor.
I'm sorry you think my critiques are cheap talking points.
...if Roberts had focused solely on Kurdistan then he would have not found what he was looking for.
Please read the study before you comment on it. The bit you got wrong here was in failing to notice that clusters were assigned to provinces in proportion to population, using a method designed to give all households an equal chance of inclusion.
I think there are reasons, given the weaknesses in the study, to suspect his objectivity here.
If you are trying to convince people that a study is weak, you don't do much for your case by casually asserting the existence of weaknesses.
By the way, there have been many many scientific research polls that offer much more representative samples -- how was it that these researchers were able to get such representative samples in spite of the danger?
Please supply details of polls which were sufficiently scientific to rate publication in an internationally-recognised peer-reviewed journal such as The Lancet.
First of all, he says they went to about 50 houses.
Can you not even read the interview you are citing?
I'm sorry you think my critiques are cheap talking points.
Well, don't worry. I'm sure they go down a treat at Little Green Footballs. But would you please refrain from dumping the same comment into two or more threads here? It's an abuse of Tim Lambert's hospitality.