CBS news reports
Iraq's Health Minister Ali al-Shemari said about 150,000 Iraqis have been killed by insurgents since the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
For every person killed about three have been wounded in violence since the war started in March 2003, al-Shemari told reporters during a visit to Vienna. He did not explain how he arrived at the figure, which is three times most other estimates.
The health minister also said the United States should hand Iraqis full control of its army and police force. Doing so, he said, would allow the Iraqi government to bring the violence under control within six months.
"The army of America didn't do its job ... they tie the hands of my government," al-Shemari said. "They should hand us the power, we are a sovereign country," he said, adding that as a first step, U.S. soldiers should leave Iraq's cities.
Al-Shemari is a controversial figure and member of the movement of radical anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Some U.S. officials have complained that the ministry has diverted supplies to al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia.
Obviously you should take his claim with a grain of salt, but add in those killed by the coalition, the Iraqi government, the militias and criminal violence and you'd get a number similar to Lancet 2.
Certainly the argument that Iraqi Ministry of Health figures contradict the Lancet study is off the table.
The International Herald Tribune expands a little on Al-Shemari's methodology:
Certainly the argument that Iraqi Ministry of Health figures contradict the Lancet study is off the table.
That's something I suppose but it that was a crap argument anyway. The MoH figure is dictated by the political situation. But at least we will be spared an IBC "reality check" and inventive theories about flaws in the methodology.
Question for Josh: will the IBC's JHU Reality Check be revised in the light of this new "information" - perhaps the line will be that the MoH information system is clearly working very smoothly (just with a slight lag), contrary to the claims of Burnham et al?
Question for Josh: will the IBC's JHU Reality Check be revised in the light of this new "information" - perhaps the line will be that the MoH information system is clearly working very smoothly (just with a slight lag), contrary to the claims of Burnham et al?
Of course not. IBC's comments are based on actual documented death figures, not on one official's crystal ball gazing. That this "estimate" is groundless, and prone to inflation, is illustrated by the methods it says he employed to concoct it, whose flaws would be quickly dissected and uncovered quickly enough by any of you if his "estimate" was problematic for Lancet. (It is of course problematic if taking these comments seriously, not least because the Minister also said "Since three and a half years, since the change of the Saddam regime, some people say we have 600,000 are killed. This is an exaggerated number. I think 150 is OK," http://news.bostonherald.com/international/view.bg?articleid=166517. )
But then only those comments that support your position are ever taken seriously.
As always with Tim, Roberts..etc.:
"He offers up an untidy pile of factoids, some of which are true but out of context, some of which are not at all true, and some of which he seems to have conjured up out of thin air. What they all have in common is that they support his position."
There is simply no factoid you guys will not leap at, if it can be used somehow to support Lancet.
Rubbish, Josh. This is the very same Ministry of Health you repeatedly cite in your bogus "reality check" - which is in reality just a clumsy hatchet job. The guy is completely untrustworthy. Tim knows that, you know that - and you knew it when you put your name to that disgraceful document.
While I have no real difficulties accepting the Lancet figures as the closest approximation of reality, there is little or no reason to put much weight in the estimates given by al-Shemari. We have very little information on how he arrived at these estimates, just as was the case with George W Bush's "50,000" estimate.
Given that al-Shemari also says that he views the Lancet report as claiming 600,000 "were killed" rather than what the report actually said about causes of death, this does not help one to view him as having mastered his brief.
Josh is still foaming at the mere suggestion that the IBC count is miles below the real death toll of civilians in Iraq (e.g. along the lines of the JHU-Lancet figures). On a similar note, I'd like to ask Josh how many civilians he reckons might have been killed (a) in Viet Nam and Cambodia by US forces between 1961 and 1973; (b) how many civilians died in Nicaragua as a result of US state terror 1984-89; (c) how many civilians died as a result of the sanctions imposed on Iraq after the first Gulf War, bearing in mind that 70 members of Congress signed a letter for President Clinton slamming what they referred to as 'genocide masqeurading as policy'. And these are just three examples of US-sponsored butchery. There are volumes more. Considering how worked up Josh is at TimL, Les Roberts, and anyone else who questions the wisdom of the IBC undercount, and since IBC professes to be highly critical of the Iraq War, I am sure that Josh must be apoplectic at the human casualties of these other transgressions.
"This is the very same Ministry of Health you repeatedly cite".
No Kevin, I have not cited an official giving off-hand comments about what "estimate" he thinks might be "OK". You are, again, distorting the truth to suit your agenda, as seems required of everyone involved in the project of Lancet-puffery.
Kevin, its no use arguing with a musician who gets more worked up at people suggesting that Bush and co. are guilty of mass murder than at his own blood-soaked government. But old Josh is, bit by bit, revealing his hand: On another thread he wrote, "Donald, the last thing the press needs is to be told lies by people in the anti-war movement". The 'press', by which I suspect Josh means 'free press' of the corporate kind, wouldn't emphasize the death toll in Iraq if every last victim was counted, one by one. Their job is to normalize the unthinkable and to marginalize dissenting views. Evidently, Josh must be living on another planet.
For me, this is the clincher from Josh: "To be told lies by people in the anti-war movement". Forget the fact that the pro-war movement have been guilty of serial lying since before the Iraq War, lies which facilitated an illegal war, and which have led to the virtual destruction of a country. No, Josh gives these criminals a free pass, because he wants to focus on the 'lies' by people in the anti-war movement.
No Kevin, I have not cited an official giving off-hand comments about what "estimate" he thinks might be "OK".
No Josh, you cited the Ministry of Health; which is what I wrote. Amazing that you can quote me verbatim and then distort what I wrote in your very first sentence. Your next sentence accuses me of distortion. Do you need to practice long hours to develop this kind of rhetorical skill?
You may wish to note that this official isn't just any official - he's the Health Minister, which, as you might have guessed, means that he is in charge of the Ministry of Health. Your so-called "reality check" makes several references to implications (mostly "implied" by your twisted logic rather than by any defensible premises). So you may wish to note that a clear implication of this official's words - i.e., of the Minister's words - is that the figures issued by his own ministry (that's the Ministry of Health by the way) are deplorably incomplete, at least in his (admittedly untrustworthy) opinion.
These are the figures your "reality check" appeals to.
Josh, of course this 150,000 number is pure crap--that's the point. You can't trust casualty statistics that come from a government in the midst of a war. They lie to promote whatever view they want to promote. We know this is often true in other wars and there's no reason to think Iraq is different--in fact, this story shows it isn't. And there have been other stories that have made the same point--that the statistics are sometimes covered up, sometimes manipulated, and sometimes unavailable.
"No, Josh gives these criminals a free pass"
Sigh... I give up. This place is a nut house.
Donald, that is not a casualty statistic. It's someone doing a crude and inflationary extrapolation from casualty statistics and giving a guess based on it.
"No, Josh gives these criminals a free pass"
Sigh... I give up. This place is a nut house.
Donald, that's not a casualty statistic. That's a crude and inflationary extrapolation based on casualty statistics. Casualty statistics are the figures the MoH compiles of actual deaths, like those we cite, and which Roberts falsifies downwards in his publications and media appearances.
But fine, I'll just accept that everything is a Big Lie, except the Lancet report, to make you all happy.
But old Josh is, bit by bit, revealing his hand ....
Jeff,
Up until now I felt you were being a bit hard on Josh. He seems sincere enough in his opposition to the war and he may well be more anti-war, in general, than I am. Not being American I am philosophical about the fact that great powers throw their weight around. The French did, the Brits did, the Chinese will when their turn comes.
What pisses me off is the dishonesty. He writes "Donald, that's not a casualty statistic" as if Donald had suggested it was anything of the sort, when in fact he described it as "pure crap". When the likes of Seixon or TallDave do that sort of thing, I'm inclined to say, okay, the guy isn't too good at following an argument. But Josh can follow an argument very well indeed when he has a decent case, so I have no doubt that he is just being tactically obtuse.
But here is something to ponder: now that the Minister for Health is floating mortality "estimates" in the six-figure range, it may not be very long before the "official" Ministry figures are dramatically revised upwards. As Brad DeLong likes to say, the cossacks work for the Tsar. What figures will Bush cite then?
Josh, you are now officially beyond pathetic. I hope other people at IBC don´t know you are displaying such a putrid lack of reason. You seem to give your best efforts to give IBC a terrible name.
Yes. You do cite the iraqi MoH. Yes, you thought it was ok to use those inept beaurocrats when it suited your campaign of discrediting The Lancet report. Yes, you are being way beyond dishonest if you claim to believe them when they put their crap 'on writing', but bitch about how silly they sound when they put orally. It is disturbing that you would pretend to think that the difference between an 'official' and a charlatan is laser printer.
Things are a bit heated here.
Anyway, Josh, official-sounding statistics from governments that have reasons to cover things up can also be lies, and I know I've seen news stories about statistics not being available, or statistics being covered up. This happens in other wars--not all wars all the time, but often enough. I read Alistair Horne's book on the French/Algerian war several years ago and he had detailed numbers from the French government about the number of civilians killed by the Algerian insurgents, and only vague estimates about the number of civilians who'd been killed "accidentally" (Horne's word) by the French. Why do you think that is?
I'm not 100 percent sure of anything here, and so maybe the official Iraqi casualty statistics are not a huge undercount, but there'd be nothing in the least bit surprising if they are.
"lies' by people in the anti-war movement."?
Since the antiwar crowd seem to be the only ones who got things right on Iraq -- namely that deposing Saddam would be the easy part and that the hard part would be securing the country afterward, which would likely result in a prolonged, bloody quagmire that killed lots of people on both sides -- I'd say we need the anti-war "nuts to tell us some more "lies". (see, for example, The Reckoning, by Sandra Mackey, if you want to find out how the invasion and occupation of Iraq turned out before the invasion and occupation) .
We seem to have entered a George in Blunderland world where lies are true and truth is false. Bunny's are cute, but as a general rule, it's not a good idea to follow them down holes -- particularly not rat holes.
With Ken Mehlman "retiring" the US Republics need someone like joshd. There is strong competition with Mike Steele and Rick Santorum tho.
I'm finding all this to be depressingly absurdist.
The IBC methodology and number is fine for what it is - but it is what it is. And what it is, is a count of deaths that have been clearly, unmistakeably, undeniably documented by at least two english language press sources. Those deaths absolutely occured, there can be no doubt about it, period.
Fine - that is good information, and a valid and necessary number.
The IBC puts a hard floor on the number of deaths. It puts a hard undisputable value at one end of a range, when one goes to estimate the number of deaths by a mechanism that isnt tied to that limtied reporting channel. There are at least 50,000 deaths in Iraq.
Now, joshd, I hear you arguing that the top end of any valid range is, must be, close to that floor value of 50,000. Your argument reduces to, "the methodology we are using at IBC cant be missing too many deaths, so the true value cant be much higher that what we see." It is clear that this must be your point; you are hotly disputing a value from the head of the Iraqi Ministry of Health that is just 3 times that of the IBC floor value as being clearly wrong, because it is so much higher than the IBC value.
So the obvious question is, what is your evidence that drives your conviction that IBC is missing less than half the deaths in Iraq? What is the methodology you used to derive that evidence, and to analyze it? And what convinces you that your methodology and analysis is better than that used by Lancet?
I await your answers.
Eli Rabett:
I intended no offense by my above statement that "Bunny's are cute, but as a general rule, it's not a good idea to follow them down holes -- particularly not rat holes."
And it was only a general rule. I must admit after looking at the excellent analysis (eg, of the Hansen scenarios) that you have provided on your blog, I'd probably make an exception in your case: I'd follow you down a hole, though I must admit, I'd still draw the line in the sand with the rat hole.
As best I can tell, the reasons IBC believes its numbers are over half of the total are as follows--
1. They just don't think it's possible the number could be many times higher without the news getting out somehow, maybe through the Arab press. Their response on the English language press vs. Arab press issue is that the Arab press accounts are translated into English and they've never seen any casualties listed there that they didn't already know about. Or something like that. Surely some bureaucrat somewhere would have leaked the news if large numbers of deaths were being covered up.
(To me, it's at least possible that those shadowy Iraq organizations which have given higher figures--one was 128,000 deaths by mid 2005 and another was 37,000 deaths by the fall of 2003--might be examples of Iraqis leaking news that the death toll is higher. But we don't know who these people are, so IBC dismisses them. We also have Iraqi bloggers --Riverbend and Raed--who say that in their personal experience the mortality rate seems consistent with Lancet2 numbers, since everyone they know has lost members of their extended families.)
2. They think the ILCS survey supports them. If I recall correctly, IBC's civilian death toll was roughly 10,000 or maybe a bit higher for the ILCS period. ILCS said 24,000 "war-related" deaths and some of those might have been insurgents and/or Iraqi army soldiers, so they conclude IBC probably caught the majority of civilian deaths.
3. Claims in the Lancet papers that American air strikes continue to kill tens of thousands of Iraqis each year are unsupported by any evidence that air strikes are common enough to be doing this. The number of air strikes in the invasion phase was far higher than the number since, as far as we know, so most of the air strike deaths probably occurred then.
(My own response-- you can't predict how many civilians are going to die in X number of air strikes unless you know where they are aimed. Air strikes launched against insurgents in urban areas would probably kill more people than air strikes launched against conventional military targets. But yeah, it is very surprising to read about tens of thousands of air strike deaths.)
Haven't been keeping up here for a while, has anybody noted the argument (from Crooked Timber I think?) re 650K deaths/26 million people in 3 years being a conservative number for a civil war? can't find the original but a synopsis is at http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2006/10/15/lancet_redux.php
where another poster points out that the argument that "This is just beyond reasonable belief" would not cut it when applied to something like quantum mechanics. Although apparently in some circles it is widely accepted regarding evolution.
I don't think either this apparently informal estimate of the number killed nor the Lancet study, with its remarkably low refusal rate and whopping approximation of 30,000 (mostly) insurgents killed entirely by air strikes in the last yearly period measured, is likely correct.
Donald Johnson:
This article: http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,83349,00.html
may be of interest with regards to point 2. Air strikes are not as common as they were in the invasion, but are still happening regularly.
Mike: " with its remarkably low refusal rate..."
Posted by: Mike
That's been covered before; do a search on Deltoid. The takeaway is that many surveys in Iraq have response rates that would be preposterously high in other countries.
I see that I managed to make a mistake numbering my points--I tend to get in trouble when counting past 2.
Thanks for the link, Shinobi. One other interesting point in that article is how it stresses our lack of knowledge of what our military is doing in Iraq. The press appears to be dependent on press releases by governments, Iraqi or American, for much or most of their reporting. That particularly includes number of insurgents killed--I've found a handful of estimates for the number of insurgents the US kills (roughly 10-15,000 per year, at least in the 2004-2005 period) and Josh pointed out to me that the number (cited by Brookings Institution's Michael O'Hanlon) probably comes from the Pentagon and can't be trusted. But then that ought to hold for other death statistics. It's clear the press has no independent way of counting insurgent dead.
no worries - originally got the link from Talking Points Memo.
You're so eager to blind yourself Donald.
The source of the insurgent figure is unknown to me. That I have to guess at its source, and there's no indication as to how it was compiled means I don't take it very seriously.
This does not hold for all other statistics.
I speculated that it sounds like it could have been some Pentagon official describing their supposed glorious victories over insurgents, killing huge numbers of them, much like you can find "jihadist" websites describing glorious victories over Coalition forces in which the brave insurgents have killed some absurd number of US troops or where you can sometimes find unsubstantiated reports of supposed surveys that found some huge numbers of civilians killed.
Presumably you're hoping to find some way to say that this all suggests that the MoH have falsified their statistics downwards. This would be odd given the meticulous documentation their more detailed records show from the various provinces, and it would be still more odd for them to falsify the actual statistics downwards only to have the Minister go and publicy "estimate" them upwards.
However, I'm sure there are all manner of conjectured conspiracy theories that will make all this perfectly reasonable.
joshd, you have not addressed the direct questions I asked of you.
Lee, you can get an idea of the answers from readig the two articles on this on the IBC home page.
But then I have not said there "can't be" anything as in your version of what I've said or think, and I am not "hotly disputing" this Minister statement. I'm just pointing out what it is based on and therefore why I don't take it very seriously.
That's circular, Josh. You cite the "meticulous" documentation from various provinces, which means little--the whole question is whether one can trust the documentation. We may find that out after the war is over--even then, what I'd like to see are several Lancet style surveys done by different groups to see what answers they come up with. One could get a rough idea now if the polling groups that ask Iraqis their opinions about whether they favored attacks on US troops decided to do a poll on how many households had lost members to violence. Though to be honest I'd want to know who commissioned the poll.
As I've said before, one thing that makes me give some credence to death tolls in the hundreds of thousands is the fact that some Iraqis find it believable based on their claim that everyone they know has suffered deaths in their extended families. That doesn't sound like a toll of 1 in 500.
But we'll know--maybe--after the war is over. Or maybe not.
"That's circular, Josh. You cite the "meticulous" documentation from various provinces, which means little--the whole question is whether one can trust the documentation."
You haven't given any reason why we can't, other than vague conspiracy theorizing. But then if we go that route we should certainly talk about whether we can trust numbers compiled by anonymous surveyors based on what anonymous Iraqis had supposedly told them, all of which is confidential and unverifiable of course.
If we go your route it seems we're back to knowing nothing at all (the Pentagon was right all along, there's no point trying to keep track because there's no reliable way) and we must simply rely on your free floating conjuectures and anecdotal inferences. I have more faith in the documentary record, and it seems so do you, whenever it suits you, such as with those nebulously sourced insurgent statistics.
There's no great virtue in claiming to know things when you don't, Josh. You don't know that the Iraqi statistics are trustworthy, but you talk as though this ought to be the default assumption of any reasonable person and not to adopt this viewpoint is to be unreasonable. I don't agree.
Dismissing the testimony of actual Iraqis as "anecdotal" doesn't make the evidence go away. If the Iraqi bloggers are telling the truth about the death toll in the families of the people they know, then it's an anomaly that is difficult to explain unless the death toll is much higher than IBC claims. People's personal impressions of the death rate ought to be able to distinguish between a 1 in 500 mortality rate and a 1 in 40. You pretty much have to say that they are lying or very badly mistaken and then we're back to wondering who to believe.
This issue could be settled if several independent groups repeated the Lancet study. Since polls are taken of Iraqi opinions on dangerous subjects, this shouldn't be an impossible task. I'd stress the "independent" in the independent groups, however--I wouldn't believe anything funded by the US or Iraqi governments.
Donald, if it should not be the default assumption that the official statistics compiled by the morgues and various hospitals and MoH were carried out to the best of their ability (but with inherent limitations), then it should certainly aslo not be the default assumption for confidential anonymous information compiled by anonymous interviewers in the Lancet survey. At least in the former case you know who's doing and saying what, and you know exactly what the claimed sources are, and these statistics could be independently checked against the various hospitals in the different provinces.
And I would not be too confident in many groups repeating the Lancet survey. If there is some inherent problem in the Lancet methodology (like the main st. bias thing for example), repeating the same survey many times would tend to produce the same wrong results many times. Many independent studies is important, but not all using the same method.
Actually, Josh, I'd be more inclined to believe anonymous people about what's happening in Iraq--people who are easily identified are easily targeted.
As for different groups, I take it for granted that different groups might employ different methods. Even Lancet 2 was different from Lancet 1. But it's obvious that nobody other than the Lancet team has been interested in trying--one can read polls about Iraqi attitudes (one taken just a month or two ago) and somehow for some mysterious reason it's never occurred to anyone that if they can get statistically significant results on what people think about attacking troops, then one could get statistically significant results on how many households in Iraq have lost family members to violence since March 2003. Though, surprise, surprise, there was a poll mentioned in a story cited by Mike about the number of households in Baghdad that lost members to Saddam's violence. (WIth no description of methodology or possible biases, of course.)
I don't think it takes a genius to notice this and it suggests to me that the press just isn't that serious about the death toll issue.
"Actually, Josh, I'd be more inclined to believe anonymous people about what's happening in Iraq--people who are easily identified are easily targeted."
And people who are anonymous can say any old thing at all and never have to stand behind what they claimed or take any consequences if they lied (this is made all the better if all the data is secret and there's no way for anyone to even check the claims, unlike with MoH statistics).
Josh conveniently "forgets" to mention the fact that the Lancet study verified reported deaths by checking death certificates.
'Josh conveniently "forgets" to mention the fact that the Lancet study verified reported deaths by checking death certificates.'
Sure they did.
Dave Surls, are you implying that they lied and made deliberately fraudulent claims?
These must be the conspiracy theories to which Josh referred -
LA Times June 25th
I've no doubt Iraqi health workers try their best, working under terrible conditions, but it doesn't sound like we are getting meticulous documentation from Anbar, does it? What we are getting is a gross undercount. So how are things in the capital? -
Baghdad official who exposed executions flees
March 2nd
The Baghdad morgue is controlled by the Ministry of Health, whose Sadrist masters terrorized Bakir into fleeing the country because he released mortality data. This is the same ministry whose data Iraq Body Count employ (when it suits them). Take a look at the government under which it operates -
Official Says Shiite Party Suppressed Body Count
March 9, 2006
Not looking good is it? Not remotely like an environment conducive to the generation of trustworthy data. But then, why would it? As Patrick Cockburn noted:
"Josh conveniently "forgets" to mention the fact that the Lancet study verified reported deaths by checking death certificates."
No Tim, I haven't "forgotten" as that's one of the many anonymous and unverifiable claims that I was referring to.
The "verification" is just another anonymous claim which nobody can check. This is what Donald believes (or doesn't believe?) should have the "default assumption" of being "trustworthy", unlike other data which can be tracked to specific sources and may provide some means of verification, and which is therefore not to be trusted.
"Dave Surls, are you implying that they lied and made deliberately fraudulent claims?"
They don't look very honest to me.
How is the death certificate claim "anonymous?" We know who it came from--Roberts et al. themselves.
And what data would that be? Obviously not the media reports IBC relies on, unless the reporters are always named and personally walked around tallying up bodies and taking photos to match, rather than relying on death tolls reported by the army or the Iraqi police or eyewitnesses. Obviously not the Ministry of Health statements, unless we know the names of all the hundreds or thousands of personnel involved in doing bodycounts and passing the info along to the MoH.
So what data on current Iraq mortality, exactly, involve fewer levels of anonymity and dubious verifiability than the Johns Hopkins studies? And from among that set, what data actually provide an estimate of current mortality rather than, like bodycounts, a lower bound?
This kind of fraudulent defamation is what I've come to expect from you Ron:
"This is the same ministry whose data Iraq Body Count employ (when it suits them)."
It's difficult too, to imagine the scale of shamelessness and projection required for a champion of Lancet/Roberts to accuse IBC of employing data selectively when it suits them.
"How is the death certificate claim "anonymous?" We know who it came from--Roberts et al. themselves."
No, Roberts didn't see any death certificates. He's passing along someone else's claim, who in turn was told it by someone else, who was in turn....
I'm not sure whether the Roberts claim is a 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 5th-hand claim, but it's clear he's not the source.
That's not what "anonymous" means. Roberts et al. have explicitly attached their names to the claim that most death reports came with certificates attached. You can complain that their evidence for that claim comes from anonymous sources, and is therefore unreliable, but that doesn't make the claim itself anonymous.
And again, as opposed to who else? IBC passes along a death toll for a given bombing/shootout/etc. from a media report, which was written up by editor X based on a communication from reporter Y, who heard that death toll from spokesman Z for the US army or the Iraqi police or one of the Ministries, who got it from...where?
"That's not what "anonymous" means. Roberts et al. have explicitly attached their names to the claim that most death reports came with certificates attached."
So? It's easy to attach your name to a claim that nobody can check. If I put my name to a claim that somebody said X, and I don't tell you who said X and that all the evidence for X is a secret, then putting my name to it doesn't mean anything. I can't be disproved, and on the faint chance that it is someday disproved I can just blame it on the anonymous source whom I trusted, but who misled me. Doesn't mean much. The source of the claim is still anonymous
As for IBC, the sources are either specific morgues or hospitals, or specific reporters, or who quote specific sources, usually medics or police or other officials. If you'd like to assume that some of these reports are made up, and that IBC has therefore overcounted, fine. But the difference is that IBC uses a diverse array of sources, reporters, who cite a diverse array of sources, and with most incidents tied to particular places and times, all of which, though difficult, could be traced back to sources and investigated if anyone was so inclined. With Lancet all the data is secret and so is tied to no particular people or locations and can't be checked. And all the data is centralized into a few hands, meaning one person or small group can completely alter the whole thing by themselves, in secret presentation.
Now, I've typically taken as my "default assumption" to take the data on faith as presented, that these were the actual results of the survey performed, as claimed, with whatever inherent limitations that may entail. It's possible that it could be otherwise, but the IBC article assumes this of Lancet data throughout. If people now would like to say that IBC should be criticized for making the same kind of "default assumption" about MoH data, they are on pretty weak ground imo. And they're doing so selectively ("when it suits them"), as such a criticism, if it is valid, should apply equally, if not much more so, to making that "default assumption" of the anonymous and uncheckable Lancet data.
If you'd like to assume that some of these reports are made up, and that IBC has therefore overcounted, fine.
What's "therefore" doing in that sentence? It's entirely possible that the IBC database contains fabrications. Last time I looked it even contained a couple of very obvious (though minor) duplications, which does not inspire confidence. But it certainly does not follow that IBC has overcounted. A database can be padded out with lots of dodgy data and still reach a total count which is far short of the true total. A substantial fraction of IBC's total comes from Baghdad Morgue figures, which are not audited.
As an unkind visitor to this site remarked recently, we don't have to choose between the belief that JHU is rubbish and the belief that IBC is rubbish. Both of them could be.
But there is no doubt that JHU has a far more impressive research record.
"Last time I looked it even contained a couple of very obvious (though minor) duplications"
Such as?
"..there is no doubt that JHU has a far more impressive research record."
as posted by: Kevin Donoghue | November 14, 2006 03:37 AM
That means nothing when they ignore readily available lifetables from the WHO showing there were NO excess deaths in 2003-04, not many in 2004-05, and around 260,000 in 2005-06, when clearly it was Iraqis killing each other, not Americans killing Iraqis. Academics at JHU are as capable of being charlatans as anywhere else, as when they ignore the WHO's lifetables for Iraq in 2001, except more so when "inspired" by the grand charlatan Les Roberts (and his acolyte Robert).
Such as?
Such as Sheikh Noman al-Juburi, Shiite cleric and SCIRI official, killed in a drive-by shooting in Diwaniyah on 30 September 2006. The IBC incident code is k4111 and it is also duplicated - that's what caught my eye. It ought not to be possible to enter the same incident code twice. Likewise with k3855; again just a single death so it has no material impact on the total, but it's no way to manage a database.
Tim Curtin huffed and puffed:
Oh, Tim Curtin. I am not an acolyte of Roberts -- I've never met him. I stand on my own two feet when I say that you know nothing about demographic methods or data, and that you're a hack who was hoping that we didn't either.
So...that's not what "anonymous" means. I understand the substance of your objection, but the wording was wrong. It's just not correct to call claims made by the named members of the Roberts et al. team "anonymous." That's all I'm saying.
Really? Because I keep looking up source articles for IBC-listed events and finding "...said interior ministry sources." Or "...said police." Or "...said a US military report." Very few of them seem to give an actual name to the source or the spokesman. Reporters and/or editors are often mentioned, of course, but that's no help unless they did the bodycounts themselves. They're just passing along the claim, as you said of Roberts.
Now, maybe all the articles I can find are simply abridged versions and they really do have the names of the sources. Okay then--did they do the actual bodycount? Or are they simply repeating a number handed down by a superior, who got it from a secretary, who compiled it from the reports of the people who actually did the counting? Does IBC even know how many levels of anonymity are involved here?
Contrast that with the Johns Hopkins study. We know how many anonymous investigators were involved, and we know something about them. Two survey teams, each made up of 2 males and 2 females, all medical doctors, fluent in English and Arabic. We know that the teams were supervised in the field by the very much non-anonymous Iraqi professor Riyadh Lafta, who will have to shoulder even more of the blame than Roberts and Burnham if the numbers are found to be untrustworthy. We know that they met with American team members twice, in Jordan. That's far more information about the actual people counting deaths than you get in almost any media report.
You're making it very hard to believe you actually work with IBC. You're saying you think it's most likely an overcount now? So when IBC says, "It is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media" in its FAQ, is it just kidding?
How about the possibility that none of those reports are made up, but that the countless anonymous personnel compiling bodycounts are counting low on average, such that the IBC total's a serious undercount?
How about the possibility that some of those reports are made up, and the anonymous bodycounters have been biased, so that the IBC total could either be too high or too low?
How about the possibility that anonymity isn't the fatal flaw you think it is, so that both IBC and Roberts et al. have reasonably accurate estimates of their respective mortality categories, with the IBC estimate being appropriately much smaller because of their narrower criteria on cause-of-death and their requirement that the mass media report it?
Great. Have you done it? Or is IBC just hopeful that if somebody actually bothered, they'd be successful in tracing the chain of information back from, say, a US military spokesman to the grunt who actually counted the bodies, taking names and verifying reliability all the way? From their FAQ, it certainly seems like the latter: "We rely on the combined, and self-correcting, professionalism of the world's press to deliver meaningful maxima and minima for our count."
But at the precise point where the data becomes completely centralized, the people in charge are no longer anonymous. The first person up the chain of command on the Roberts et al. survey to oversee all the data is Professor Lafta. We have a name.
Of course it could be that Professor Lafta paid all eight of the survey personnel big bucks to let him mess around with their data. A repeat survey by a different team should clear that up, or possibly an investigation of Professor Lafta's finances.
On the contrary, I think people would like IBC to be consistent here, rather than previously accepting a MoH estimate "on faith" and now rejecting it as "one official's crystal ball gazing," as you did previously.
Tim Curtin, internets legend:
Breathtaking in the splendor of his vision Curtin stands astride the stage of world affairs today as a colossus of sorts. A prodigious command of arithmetic and ppmvs propelloring him ever onward and upward, he throws off sparks of politics and epidemiology and demography and statistics and econometrics and stuff as he goes. I think I love this man, a savant for our times.
Wow,
Tim Curtin is now backing the idea that there were 260,000 excess Iraqi deaths in just one year?
As usual almost all attempts to advance knowledge here result in ad hom and personal abuse. But I fear not, the struggle availeth in the end.
Robert: the WHO life tables show the following percentage distribution of deaths in Iraq in 2001 by age group (with the Lancet's for 2002 in brackets)
Ages 0-14: 41 (14); Ages 15-59: 26 (32); Ages 60+: 5 (51).
I know you cannot nor ever will accept that there should be some benchmarking when constructing a sample especially when neither quota nor non-random as in the JHU study. At all events, the JHU structure of mortality pre-invasion might as well have been for Les Roberts' Kinshasa (probably it was in truth) as for Iraq, for all the realism of its depiction of Iraq before the war. If JHU could not get mortality right for 2002, why should we believe them post-invasion?
Lee: "my" figure" for 260,000 excess deaths in 2005-06 was simply an adjustment of the JHU figure to the WHO crude mortality rate in 2001. So it is not my figure but theirs corrected, and once again you typify the low calibre and abusiveness of most contributions to this thread.
I hesitate to enter this discussion at this stage since there's so much personal acrimony flying around but I have a serious question for Josh:
The IBC says it counts civilian casualties only but includes, for example, a report of several hundred violent deaths recorded by the Baghdad central morgue. How can you know that these fatalities don't include insurgents?
Tim Curtin smacked himself with:
Tim, your arithmetic skills appear to be consistent with everything else you do: 41+26+5 doesn't add up to 100. (Actually, 14+32+51 doesn't either, but at least it's in the right ballpark).
But let's ignore that for the moment, because there's a substantive problem that trumps your bad math. Almost all of the difference between the WHO estimate and the JHU estimates of CDR are related to the IMR. Take a look at the [data and methods underlying WHO's Iraq LT](http://whqlibdoc.who.int/hq/2001/a78629.pdf) and you'll see two things: 1) the infant and childhood mortality is based on data from what years, and what methods? (hint: page 48 of the .pdf) And 2) the LT is based on Brass relational logit models, projected up to 2001. As we've already established, you don't know anything about LTs, but even if you don't believe me you can look up one of the known weaknesses with Brass logits: although they work quite well for the majority of the age span, even in the best of circumstances they don't do very well at the very earliest and very oldest ages (and we don't know whether these were the best of circumstances).
Tim, as long as you're looking stuff up, [here's something that you might want to read](http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf).
Robert: apologies for typos, unfortunately this blog won't take straight pastes from Excel, and 2 of the figures got transposed from the JHU actuals. They should read (WHO first, Lancet in brackets):
Ages 0-14: 41 (17); Ages 15-59: 54 (32); Ages 60+: 5 (51).
So my point stands: the JHU baseline from 2002 is so out of line with WHO for 2001 that there have to be doubts as to the representativeness of their clusters and cohorts. Apologies again for my lousy typing.
Tim Curtin, my points stand, too:
1. You don't know anything about life tables, and your only hope was that no one here did, either.
2. [You should read this](http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf).
Robert: More typing etc errors on my part I fear, here are the corrections, but the discrepancy with JHU remains very large, the R between the two would not be good.
Ages 0-14: 51 (17); Ages 15-59: 22 (32); Ages 60+: 27 (51).
The child mortality survey in Iraq in 1999 used by WHO seems relevant and timely, showing up in the life table as plausibly high, in line apparently with an earlier Lancet study (but I have not checked the latter) The questions remain, where is the JHU Life Table, why are their non-violent death rates for Iraq in 2002 so out of line with those in all countries in the region, and why as academics did JHU not refer to the WHO even if only to show if they could why it was less reliable than that well known repository of truth the CIA?
"the very much non-anonymous Iraqi professor Riyadh Lafta, who will have to shoulder even more of the blame than Roberts and Burnham if the numbers are found to be untrustworthy."
And how would someone go about finding this out? That's the point. You can't. Nobody has to "shoulder" anything if the claims are non-disproveable. The point is if we're not to take MoH data "on faith" as you say, then there's no reason (less reason) to take Lancet data as such.
"On the contrary, I think people would like IBC to be consistent here, rather than previously accepting a MoH estimate "on faith" and now rejecting it as "one official's crystal ball gazing," as you did previously."
People are not interested in that because this inconsistency is a fantasy you've invented. The former "it" is not the latter "it". Two completely different things, even if you need to pretend otherwise to beat up your straw man.
And how would someone go about finding this out?
Les Roberts had a suggestion: check the graveyards.
A rather obvious difference between the Iraqi government and JHU is that the JHU team are calling for further investigation whereas the Iraqi government is actively hostile to it, as Ron F's links attest. That's a useful clue as to which source is more honest.
Tim Curtin wrote:
Tim, no need to apologize for typos. Everyoen mkaes tehm, inculding me. What you should be apologizing for is wasting our time with cheesy, poorly reasoned arguments.
It's certainly relevant. It's completely unclear whether it's timely. The 1999 survey addressed child mortality in the period from 1990 to 1998 (Ragout will now jump in to claim that no reputable survey uses a recall period of that length). A fair question is whether under-5 (and particularly infant) mortality decreased between 1998 and 2002 and, if so, by how much. Child and infant mortality is sensitive to both good and bad nutrition and good and bad healthcare, so it can zoom up pretty fast but can also decrease pretty fast, especially if the healthcare infrastructure is already present.
But even if it didn't budge, your cheesiest hackery is still about the cohort nature of the Roberts and Burnham studies. It's entirely reasonable to ask whether the 1999 ICMMS makes us suspicious of the pre-invasion mortality estimates from the JHU studies -- but that's not what you were doing. It's completely unreasonable to use the WHO LT CDR to determine the pre- to post-invasion delta. That's what you were doing, and that's why you're a hack. A cheesy one.
Are you ever going to explain why this isn't vastly more true of pretty much all the media reports IBC relies on? If it turns out that Reuters or the Associated Press have missed a large fraction of attacks, or have systematically undercounted deaths in the attacks they did report...tell me, who takes responsibility for the error? The editor? The reporter? The spokesman who told the reporter the death count? The spokesman's boss? The person who told the spokesman's boss? The person who actually counted bodies? Anybody?
Never mind, here's an easier question. You keep saying that the reliability of Roberts et al. is torpedoed by the anonymity of their field survey teams. So how would their claims be more reliable if we knew everyone's name?
Think about it. The study's been out for over a month now. Each survey team brought in half the data. It would be glaringly obvious to them if the published numbers were different, and they could easily come forward and talk about that. They haven't. Why? Well, maybe Riyadh Lafta paid them tons of money and drugs to keep silent. Or maybe Les Roberts has their families tied up and dangling over a shark tank. Either way, if there's fraud, they have to be in on it. So how would identifying them help you verify the numbers? They'll only lie and tell you whatever the Johns Hopkins people want them to say, right?
Unfortunately, if you think Roberts et al. are liars and frauds, to such a degree that neither the Lancet's expert reviewers nor the anonymous survey teams were able or willing to unmask them, you're just going to have to go over there and do a study to prove them wrong. Repeat their survey--they've done it twice now, so apparently it's doable. Or track the size of cemeteries, as Roberts suggested.
Ah, yes. Two completely different things. Because previously, when you accepted the Ministry of Health data, it was based on compiled Iraqi hospital data. As IBC's own "Reality Check" says:
"It is a long-established finding that around three times as many people are injured in modern wars as are killed in them. This is borne out in Iraq in statistics gathered by the Iraqi Ministry of Health (MoH). Their casualty monitoring centre was set up in Spring 2004 to allow the Ministry to allocate resources in response to conflict-related violence across Iraq (excluding the Kurdish-administered regions). The system is claimed to be manned 24 hours a day, with hospitals phoning the Ministry in Baghdad on a daily basis (when necessary) to report on dead and wounded from conflict-related violence..."
Whereas now, when you're rejecting the same Ministry's data as "one official's crystal ball gazing," it's...based on compiled Iraqi hospital data:
"This includes all Iraqis killed -- police, ordinary people, children," he said, adding that people who were kidnapped and later found dead were also included in his estimate. He said the figures were compiled by counting bodies brought to "forensic institutes" or hospitals."
Yes, there's certainly a critical difference here. Namely, you liked the MoH's first set of figures a whole lot more than their revised set.
Robert says: "Ragout will now jump in to claim that no reputable survey uses a recall period of that length."
But Robert knows very well that the questions used on the demographers' life table surveys are nothing like those used in the Lancet studies. They don't ask, "who lived in your household on new years day 8 years ago and have any of them died since?" The demographers know perfectly well that this type of question would be meaningless over such long time spans.
Instead they ask about much more specific people than "household members": they ask about children, sisters, fathers, and so on. And despite asking much more precise questions than the Lancet team did, they still have big problems with recall bias and double-counting. And of course, these are two of main problems with the Lancet study that I've been pointing to.
Robert is right that the WHO life table numbers don't undermine the Lancet study: the WHO figures for 2001 are projections from an earlier period when infant mortality was much higher.
But it's still fair to ask why 2002 is the appropriate counterfactual, and not 1991-1998. If we hadn't invaded, would 2002's slack sanction & inspection regime have lasted? Or would we have gone back to the more stringent sanctions of 1991-1998?
It's hard to say, of course, but I do know that before the invasion, the Bush administration was pushing for tighter sanctions, and had convinced the UN to pass a new sanctions regime (security council resolution 1409). Similarly, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's alternative to war wasn't to keep on doing the same old things. They called for "coercive inspections," backed up by military force.
joshd,
Maybe you can answer a question I've raised on other threads on this blog. The IBC's 50,000 deaths figure, over 3 1/2 years, for 26 million Iraqis, gives a violent death rate of about 55 per 100,000. That's not very much higher than the murder rate in Washington, DC, where I live (about 40 per 100,000).
But what I read in the papers about Iraq is much more horrific than what I read about crime in DC. Does the IBC really claim that Iraq is only slightly more dangerous than DC?
"Ah, yes. Two completely different things. Because previously, when you accepted the Ministry of Health data, it was based on compiled Iraqi hospital data. ....
Whereas now, when you're rejecting the same Ministry's data as "one official's crystal ball gazing," it's...based on compiled Iraqi hospital data"
No, Anton, you're misinformed.
The former case is the data. The second case is a crude projection from the data. We "accepted" the former and "rejected" the latter. As I said, your "inconsistency" is something you've invented.
That is, unless you already knew this and you were just playing a deceptive game with the ambiguity in the term "based on", in which case I think I know where you may have learned that trick.
Ragout, no IBC doesn't claim that. It's wrong to compare a whole country to a city, first of all. Cities have more violent crime than rural areas, and when you include all rural areas in a big country it waters down the rates you'd see if you had looked only at a big city. So the comparison is inconsistent. If you compared Baghdad figures to DC it would not be close. If you compared Iraq figures to overall US figures it would not be close.
Also, the same limitations would apply to the rates that apply to the count. Unless the count is complete the count is low. Unless the count is complete the rates you draw from the count are low. Which is another inconsistency, as DC rates will be based on more or less complete data.
And lastly, IBC removes 2002 crime levels from entries like Baghdad morgue. So there's a pre-war crime-rate that would have to be added back in.
Here's a long article by Nir Rosen, arguably one of the best journalists in Iraq. I found it via Juan Cole.
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR31.6/rosen.html
It's long, but partway down he says the ministry of health virtually ceased to function after the Shia victory in early 2005.
And at the end of the article he states his belief that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died, probably more than have died under Saddam.
No.
I already quoted the minister on this, so it's hard to believe you're honestly mistaken, but here it is again anyway.
"This includes all Iraqis killed -- police, ordinary people, children," he said, adding that people who were kidnapped and later found dead were also included in his estimate. He said the figures were compiled by counting bodies brought to "forensic institutes" or hospitals."
Not a projection or an extrapolation, according to the Health Minister himself. A simple count.
Could he be wrong, lying or simply overly concise about the methodology? Sure. But that could have been a problem with the last Ministry estimate too. Consistency.
I'm sorry. To be fair, I admit that the Ministry's mortality estimate for the early part of the war is almost certainly a projection, simply because they hadn't set up their casualty monitoring system until spring 2004.
The reason I know this is that it's true for the Ministry's earlier, IBC-accepted estimates as well. Again, consistency. As mentioned in IBC's "Reality Checks:"
And the Ministry continues to support that 3:1 wounded:dead ratio, by the way.
Ragout claimed:
Hmmm. Well, I disagree but perhaps not for the reason you expect: there have been some astoundingly braindead demographic surveys. In fact, many of the techniques developed for analyzing flawed or incomplete data were invented in order to correct post hoc for screwed up surveys.
It turns out that in a very informal way and with just one person, someone has already carried out something close to Les Roberts's suggestion about talking to gravediggers. And this anonymous person claims that the morgue is getting 4 times as many bodies as they used to get. This appeared in an Oct 11 issue of Macleans' magazine which someone at another blog pointed out.
http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/world/article.jsp?content=20061016_13…
That claim aside, the impression left by the article is not one that would encourage belief in IBC's numbers.
In the interest of fairness, there's also an article in the NYT today (no link--I saw it in our paper copy at home) about air strikes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and if the official numbers are right, it's almost impossible to believe that tens of thousands of people are dying in air strikes. Maybe the official numbers are wrong, or maybe the Lancet2 respondents are confusing air strikes with other explosions (from mortars maybe?). Or just lying about the perpetrators.
Will Donald's suggestion turn out to be the unpalatable yet ultimately bearable one on which the warring parties here, or at least the reality based and the less unhinged of the crazies, come to agree and armistice be declared?
Is it possible that some interviewed Iraqis, able to produce death certificates as evidence that they have had a household member die during the period studied by the Lancet team, may be inclined to cast blame on an invading foreign power they feel most deserves that blame? Is it conceivable that some Iraqis may be a little truthy in their attribution of the cause(s) of death by violence in their family?
It would go without saying that from sea to shining sea nothing less than the complete and beautiful truth would be spoken in an advanced country such as America.
My outsider's impression of US military usage (corrections welcome) is that an attack carried out by a helicopter or even an AC-130 is not an air strike; the term seems to be reserved for jet sorties. For those on the receiving end, most likely if something drops through the roof and explodes, it's an air strike.
Kevin,
Assuming you're talking about that NY Times article, which reported Air Force figures, you're right that they wouldn't include helicopter strikes. The deal that the Army and Air Force made is that the Air Force gets the planes and the Army gets the helicopters.
My impression from the NY Times article is that an AC-130 attack would count as an air strike, but here I'm just guessing.
This post is a corrective to the inaccurate version of of this MoH "estimate" being promoted by Anton Mates and others. I believe i posted an explanation of this here before, but my post doesn't seem to be here now.
He claims that this estimate is simply a count of bodies, like those that IBC cited in its Reality Checks piece here:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/press/pr14/4.php
This is not the case. The "methodology" for producing the Health Ministers' guestimation has been described:
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2006/11/11/2003335773 and http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/11/09/europe/EU_GEN_Austria_Iraqis_…
The "methodology" was described by the Health Minister saying:
"Each day we lost 100 persons, that means per month 3,000, per year it's 36,000, plus or minus 10 percent,"
"Al-Shemari said on Thursday that he based his figure on an estimate of 100 bodies per day brought to morgues and hospitals -- though such a calculation would come out closer to 130,000 in total."
What he did here was take the recent (and much higher than previous periods) total of about 100 deaths per-day that was being recorded by the hospitals and morgues in 2006, took this as an average (rather than a peak) and extrapolated it across the entire 3.5 years of the war.
As I said, the "150,000" figure is a crude projection from the data, namely 2006 per-day rates extrapolated back to 2003. What IBC used was the data itself, two completely different things.
That this is the origin of the figure also renders invalid any claims that this figure refers only to people killed by "insurgents".
Since it's a crude projection from ministry and morgue data it will merely by an extrapolated version of what's been recorded by hospitals and morgues. These sources do not disaggregate all these deaths by perpetrator, and would have no way to do so in a lot of cases. They take whatever bodies come in. As such, any claim that the "150,000" projection is all killed by insurgents is fanciful, because the deaths this is being projected from were not all killed by insurgents.
But then, the projection is unsound to begin with, as it posits a recent peak as an overall average and draws projections under that assumption.
No, I don't claim that. In my last post on this thread, I pointed out that this estimate does involve some extrapolation, because neither it nor the earlier IBC-cited MoH estimate employ data before early 2004. The two are in fact based off the same dataset; the newer estimate simply includes the data for the last few months as well.
This is wrong. From the article you cite:
"He said the ministry had started keeping records in early 2004, effectively meaning that those killed during the actual invasion and in the ensuing months were not included in this figure."
His data doesn't just cover 2006, but 2005 and most of 2004 as well.
No. Again, the MoH data extends exactly as far back as it did for the earlier, IBC-touted estimate. It's the same data set. To quote from the "Reality Checks,"
"This is borne out in Iraq in statistics gathered by the Iraqi Ministry of Health (MoH). Their casualty monitoring centre was set up in Spring 2004 to allow the Ministry to allocate resources in response to conflict-related violence across Iraq (excluding the Kurdish-administered regions)....
The MoH has reported 2.9 wounded for each person killed in the period from mid-2004 to mid-2006."
I'm rather surprised that you're not aware of this, Josh, since you're listed as an author on the "Reality Checks."
That's true enough, certainly. It appears to refer to all deaths from violence:
"He blamed Sunni insurgents, Wahhabis -- Sunni religious extremists -- and criminal gangs for the deaths.
Hassan Salem, of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) said the 150,000 figure included civilians, police and the bodies of people who were abducted, later found dead and collected at morgues run by the Health Ministry. "
Although it's slightly unclear whether it includes dead insurgents themselves.
Anton writes: "In my last post on this thread, I pointed out that this estimate does involve some extrapolation, because neither it nor the earlier IBC-cited MoH estimate employ data before early 2004. The two are in fact based off the same dataset; the newer estimate simply includes the data for the last few months as well."
The 'extrapolation' does not involve only data before 2004. Almost the whole thing is an 'extrapolation'. Data that they do have in 2004 is not '100 deaths per day'. Everything except the last few months of 2006 before this comment was made is being "extrapolated" to 100 deaths per day.
And the two are not "based off the same dataset". What we used is the data set, not some speculation "based" off of it, like that offered by the Health Minister in his press conference, or like any other figure one could speculate "based" off that data set in some way or another.
So you are incorrect on both counts.
"His data doesn't just cover 2006, but 2005 and most of 2004 as well."
Yes, their data covers that whole period, but the Health Minister ignored most of that data. The only data he used was the recent 2006 rate of 100 deaths per day. All the other data they have for 2005 and 2004 are overwritten by this extrapolation. He extrapolated the 100 per day over top of, and overrode, the data they have for 2004 and 2005, which does not show 100 deaths per day, nowhere near it for the most part. And he *also* extrapolated this 2006 rate across the first year where he doesn't have data.
What IBC cited was their raw data of the number of deaths they've recorded. The comment the Health Minister gave in Vienna was a speculation of what deaths might be out there "based" crudely on part of this raw data.
Source, please.
Nope. From the Reality Checks:
"The MoH has reported 2.9 wounded for each person killed in the period from mid-2004 to mid-2006. An almost identical ratio was confirmed in IBC's independent analysis of media-derived data for the first two years after the invasion.
"If 600,000 people have died violent deaths, then the 3:1 ratio implies that 1,800,000 Iraqis have by now been wounded. This would correspond to 1 in every 15 Iraqis."
In other words, IBC took the wounded/dead ratio from the MoH dataset, extrapolated backward through 2003, and justified that extrapolation by reference to media articles.
Anton, on your first posting asking for a source, I've already provided the sources which explain that "100 per day" was multiplied across the whole period 2003-2006:
'Each day we lost 100 persons, that means per month 3,000, per year it's 36,000, plus or minus 10 percent," al-Shemari said. "So by three years, 120,000, half year 20,000, that means 140,000, plus or minus 10 percent," he said, explaining how he came to the figures.'
That's 2006 data extrapolated over top of 2004 and 2005 data (which they have) *and* over top of 2003 and early 2004 (which they don't have). Their 2004 and 2005 data (which is much lower than "100 per day") is being overwritten by the "100 per day" from 2006. It is not just the missing data for the first year being filled in with 2006 rates.
On your second posting, the ratio of injury to death we used is not solely from MoH, or IBC, but is "a long-established finding that around three times as many people are injured in modern wars as are killed in them", confirmed again by IBC and MoH (that is, by MoH' full two-year data, not just the last few months of it extrapolated backward and over top of the earlier data, as per the health minister's speculation). 3:1 does not depend on "extrapolating backward" MoH data, and certainly not over top of itself. And 3:1 is but one of a range of ratios we examine.
What makes you think the "100 per day" is from 2006 in particular, as opposed to an average across 2004-2006? That doesn't make much sense given that the Ministry spokesman in the Taipei Times article explicitly mentioned data back to 2004 in the same discussion. And, according to the article, he was "effectively meaning that those killed during the actual invasion and in the ensuing months were not included in this figure," which would make it an undercount and would mean there was no extrapolation at all.
Which is even hazier than extrapolating from the actual hospital data gathered later; you're extrapolating from other wars entirely! As well as, of course, media reports.
"What makes you think the "100 per day" is from 2006 in particular, as opposed to an average across 2004-2006?"
because I'm informed on this topic and you're not. I know what their figures have been over the course of the war.
Even Saint Les already told you (in his ODI table) that MoH rates averaged 22 "violent deaths per day implied" up to at least mid-2005. Even if you know nothing else about any of this I would have assumed you would have followed at least what he's said so you could know what you're supposed to think and say.
[joshd](http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf) wrote:
I just snorted coffee out my nose.
Well, hell, why didn't you tell us you were telepathically linked to the Iraqi Ministry of Health in the first place? Would have made the discussion shorter.
Thanks for the citation. Notice that the table, and the attached reference, are from 2005 themselves. So what makes you think the MoH couldn't have since revised their death estimates for the 2003-2005 period?
And yet that turned out not to be the case. Perhaps people are siding with Roberts et al. because it's a good study, and not because he's taken control of their minds, hm?
Anton writes: "So what makes you think the MoH couldn't have since revised their death estimates for the 2003-2005 period?"
Your questions just get more silly. I'm not going to bother. You believe whatever you feel you need to.
and.. "Perhaps people are siding with Roberts et al. because it's a good study".
Unlikely to be the case around here. Most people in these parts sided with it - and against anyone or anything that might question it - knee-jerk before they'd even read it or examined it for any flaws or weaknesses, and are siding with it mostly because they find political utility and ideological confirmation in the huge abstract number, confirmed again by the fact that they reject or ignore far better studies that apparently don't serve that function as well, among other tell-tale indicators, such as trying to cherry-pick this speculation by the health minister and pretend it's some new hard data revealed.
Ah well. If you ever do come up with actual evidence for this "The Iraqi MoH is right when it agrees with us and wrong when it disagrees with us" thing, feel free to share.
[joshd](http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf) wrote:
Perhaps so, perhaps not, but how would you know that to be the case? Oh, right: because you, [joshd](http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf), are informed.
Anton, I have no need or interest to come up with "evidence" for the various straw men you decide to invent.
And resident 'expert' Robert continues to offer commentary that is notable only for its total emptiness.