iraq mortality

The WikiLeaks Iraq archive, while incomplete, reveals many more previously unreported violent deaths in the Iraq war -- Iraq Body Count say that the archive reveals 15,000 people shot, blown up, had the heads cut off or killed in some other way that they had not recorded. So Tim Blair, who claimed that the Iraq Body Count was way way too high (and predicted that the coalition would suffer "below 50" casualties) has posted a correction. Ha ha, just kidding. Blair has a post claiming that the WikiLeaks archive, which is, as I have already noted, incomplete, proves that the Lancet study on…

Andrew Mack emails me to draw attention to his paper ("Estimating War Deaths: An Arena of Contestation" by Spagat, Mack, Cooper and Kreutz), which criticizes Obermeyer et al's paper Fifty years of violent war deaths from Vietnam to Bosnia. I commented on Obermeyer et al in this post. I agree with some of their criticism. The regression that used for correcting PRIO estimates of war deaths is wrong and the conclusion that they drew using this correction -- that there is no evidence that war deaths have decreased is unfounded. I'm not persuaded by their general criticisms of survey…

With US combat troops withdrawing from Iraq's cities it is time to compare the 4639 coalition casualties with the predictions made by warbloggers before the war: John Hawkins: "Probably 300 or less"Charles Johnson:"Very few"Henry Hanks: "Less than 200"Laurence Simon: "A Few hundred"Rachael Lucas: "Less than three thousand"Scott Ott: "Dozens"Glenn Reynolds: "Fewer than 100"Tim Blair: "Below 50"Ken Layne: "a few hundred"Steven Den Beste: "50-150" And there were roughly a million excess Iraqi deaths.

As promised, the Lancet has published a correction to the 2nd Lancet study: Burnham G, Lafta R, Doocy S, Roberts L. Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey. Lancet 2006; 368: 1421--28--The Methods section of this Article (Oct 21, 2006) stated that "Participants were assured that no unique identifiers would be gathered." Upon review, it was determined that a significant number of the surveys contained names of respondents and household inhabitants. This was a lapse in the authors' obligations to protect participants. However, to the authors' knowledge…