So, what could have gone wrong? The more excitable fringes of the US blogosphere have come out with some interesting stuff. Let's look at criticisms that don't hold water first.
Firstly, the turnout is unbelievably high. The report suggests that over 98% of people contacted agreed to be interviewed. For anyone involved in market research in this country the figure just sounds stupid. Phone polls here tend to get a response rate of something like 1 in 6. However, the truth is that - incredibly - response rates this high are the norm in Iraq. Earlier this year Johnny Heald of ORB gave a paper at the ESOMAR conference about his company's experience of polling in Iraq - they've done over 150 polls since the invasion, and get response rates in the region of 95%. In November 2003 they did a poll that got a response rate of 100%. That isn't rounding up. They contacted 1067 people, and 1067 agreed to be interviewed.
Secondly, people have been understandably confused by the mention of death certificates. Whenever possible interviewers asked if they could see the death certificate of people reported dead during the study. In 92% of cases those asked produced the certificate. This presents an apparent discrepancy - if over 80% of the deaths had been officially recorded, how come official Iraqi estimates of the dead were so low? The explanation given by the report - which seems perfectly reasonable - is that hospitals have continued to issue death certificates, but the system of collating the figures centrally has broken down to a large extent. In other words, a doctor in Iraq may still be giving out the paper certificates, but the figures are not necessarily passed on or registered with any higher authority.
Thirdly, some people have pondered whether Iraq's mortality rate from before the invasion as determined by the study seems unfeasibly low at 5.5 per 1000. This compares to mortality figures of 10.1 for the European Union, a group of far more developed countries with better nutrition and health care. If Iraq's pre-invasion mortality figure is artificially low, then it would wrongly inflate the number of excess deaths. However, the difference is actually because Iraq has a far younger population than the EU. Apart from countries in Southern Africa where AIDS is endemic, developed countries tend to have a higher mortality rate because they have more elderly people in proportion to young people, and an old person in a "safe" country is still more likely to die than a young fit person in an "unsafe" country. It seems that 5.3 is a perfectly reasonable figure when compared to mortality rates for similar countries like Egypt (5.2), Iran (5.6), Tunisia (5.1), Syria (4.8), Qatar (4.7), Bahrain (4.1). ...
Overall, the study seems sound. There are some legitimate questions about the effect of the two missing provinces and any large population movements, but at the end of the day they would have quite minor effects on the total: they are not suddenly going to bring the figures into line with the Iraqi government figures or the Iraq Body Count figures. The possible effect of an urban bias is more worrying, potentially this could skew the figures upwards. That said, 77% of Iraq's population live in urban areas, so even if there is a systemic bias here, in a worst case scenario of non-urban areas being entirely missed out and 23% of the country actually having a much lower mortality rate, it is not going to be a drastic change. For example - the report found the post-election death rate to be 13.2, if that actually applied only to urban areas, and the mortality rate in non-urban areas was still 5.5 (the pre-invasion figure), the overall rate would still be 11.4, which still equates to hundreds of thousands of extra deaths.
Salam Adil rounds up Iraqi bloggers response to Omar Fadil's innumerate critique. For example, Konfused Kid:
Could you tell me, my dear friends Omar and Mohammed, WHY is this list [the Lancet report] fake? do you have a single shred of proof as to why these Lancet documents and statistics are such a 'disgrace to all the women, children and men who died'? merely calling it fake and disgusting just don't cut it, please stop living the lie, and take a look outside your window. You call them careless for the victims of this country! I cannot believe this! "Using data for own gains." You have just proved your own point. .. I don't want you to renounce America, we need them as much as you are afraid that they will leave, but I just want you to say the truth, for God's sake
Adil concludes with:
Little Penguin is also moved to add his voice to this debate: "What surprises me as an Iraqi is the fact that some Iraqis have also doubted the authenticity and the scientific validity of the report;... many will have seen recent blogs denouncing the report and claiming that the calculations used by its authors were manipulative and sadistic. On our television screens, the Iraqi government's spokesman, Ali Al Dabbagh, has also rejected the report arguing that the government is 'doing it's best to protect the Iraqi people.' ... To suggest that the statistics published in the report are exaggerated is an incredibly insulting statement. Not only does it undermine the horrific atrocities that Iraqis have endured over the past three years, but it also has an underlying, if not blunt, message of cynicism and distrust of Iraqi potential. Despite some occasions where they refer to Iraqis as "heroes" who deserve to be saluted, it's quite clear that this is only said to shut us up; in reality, and in accordance to their ceaseless propagating of the deteriorating American policies in Iraq - they have done but one thing.. distorted reality."
Iraq The Model's response? Well, so far they removed Konfused Kid from their blog roll.
Ampersand coins a term for a fallacy that frequently appears in criticisms of the Lancet study. "The Great Wall Of China Fallacy."
Sherri: Some statisticians calculated that the great wall of China is made out of 3,873,000,000 bricks.
Michelle: That's an absurd number of bricks! Why, if you combined the Empire State Building with Lenin's Tomb and added on the Pyramid of King Tut, you still wouldn't have 3,873,000,000 bricks! Clearly, the methodology used by that study is flawed beyond belief.
Sherri: What flaws are those?
Michelle: Weren't you listening? More bricks than the Empire State Building, Lenin's Tomb and a pyramid combined
IRIN has a report on the study
"We can say that the research is more representative because it depended on what families were telling us. But it also shows a different Iraq reality and according to our valuation on the [margin of] error, from that 600,000 people, we are sure that 250,000 have been killed since March 2003," Barak Ibrahim, a political analyst and professor at Mustansiryiah University, told IRIN. He also participated in the research. ...
[UN humanitarian chief Jan] Egeland went on to say that he was aware of "many, many cases where there is underreporting" of casualties, which could explain the vast difference between the Lancet study and other reports that put the number of deaths in the tens of thousands.
Ampersand linked to a very interesting article about how the body count in Iraq is being manipulated by the government. It's pretty convincing. Not that anyone should care, but I'm retracting my praise of IBC's response. I have no idea what the true death toll is in Iraq and neither do they.
http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/world/article.jsp?content=20061016_13…
To say that Omar's critique was innumerate is to do it too much credit. Basically, it was a lunatic rant calling the authors liars and bloodthirsty sadists. There was not one coherent criticism.
Its no surprising that wingnuts have latched on these 2 mentally disturbed loonies as their idols.
I love how finding about if anyone in someone's family had been killed is likened to market research, perhaps regarding a new shampoo. I wish I could go through life so deluded. Much less agita, much more self-righteous pomposity.
Donald,
Is shows you just how wretched conditions must be in Iraq when James Baker returns from a fact-finding mission there and effectively admits defeat. One of his three recommendations is that the US-UK war party should open into negotiations with Iran and Syria to help broker a solution. Ouch! I can hear the war planners - people like Perle, Wolfowitz, Armitage and their neocon brethren shuddering now at the mere thought of it. It is clear that they never envisaged what is happening now in their worst nightmares. Their aim, to place a compliant pro-Israel regime of Chalabi and the ANC on Iraq and to widen the war to attack Iran and Syria and to control a region of vital economic and political importance seems like a million miles away now. But how many senior intelligence personnel and war critics who warned explicitly of the possibility of a regional meltdown were listened to leading up to tis evil adenture in expansionism? The state-corporate media were too husy slobbering over articles from the likes of Judith Miller and her sole source of information (Chalabi, re-directed via the White House) to give any attention to the critics of this impending disaster.