SubscribeTech Central Station didn’t just post Worstall’s correction by itself. They have had a second attempt at debunking the Lancet study, posting an article by Michael Fumento. Fumento argues:From Tim Lambert's round up of Lancet study dedbunking entitled Tim Worstall on the Lancet study
the researchers didn’t feel themselves bound by anything official, like death certificates. Interviews were just fine. “In the Iraqi culture it was unlikely for respondents to fabricate deaths,” they wrote.
Unfortunately, Fumento seems to have missed the immediately preceding sentences in the Lancet paper, where they noted that, when asked, 81% confirmed with death certificates:
In 63 of 78 (81%) households where confirmations were attempted, respondents were able to produce the death certificate for the decedent. When households could not produce the death certificate, interviewers felt in all cases that the explanation offered was reasonable eg, the death had been very recent, the certificate was locked away and only the husband who was not home had the key. We think it is unlikely that deaths were falsely recorded.
Fumento’s “killer” argument is:
Cluster sampling can be valid if it uses reliable data, rather than on inherently unreliable self-reporting. But it can also be easily skewed by picking out hotspots — like determining how much of a nation’s population wears dentures by surveying only nursing homes.
In fact, intentionally or otherwise, that’s pretty much what The Lancet did. Most of the clusters had no deaths whatsoever. But here’s the real bombshell: “Two-thirds of all violent deaths were reported in one cluster in the city of Falluja,” the journal reported. That’s it; game over; report worthless.
Trouble is, Fumento has once more been extraordinarily careless in his reading of the study. Here are the two sentences in the report that follow the one he quoted:
If we exclude the Falluja data, the risk of death is 1.5-fold (1.1-2.3) higher after the invasion. We estimate that 98 000 more deaths than expected (8000-194 000) happened after the invasion outside of Falluja and far more if the outlier Falluja cluster is included.
That’s right, they properly excluded the outlier Falluja in their estimate of 98,000 and Fumento didn’t notice this fact. That’s it; game over; Fumento article worthless.
Specifically, under the assumptions of the survey, the authors estimate that there is a 95% chance that the two limiting values they obtain enclose the true number of deaths. Loosely, you can turn this around and regard this as a 95% chance that the true value lies in the interval (and hence a 5% chance that the true number lies outside that interval). Further (if we assume a symmetric distribution, which is plausible), there is a 50% chance that the total number of deaths exceeded 98,000, and a 2.5% chance that it was less than 8,000.... but one hundred thousand deaths is an easily-abused statistic
To put this into English, it means `we're not sure exactly how many, but a hell of a lot of people almost certainly died'. Make up your own mind, but in my view the low estimates of the number of dead in Iraq should now be regarded with deep suspicion...
Almost all national-level statistics are based on extrapolation (or, more accurately, sampling). Are we supposed to believe that (say) the Census or (for another example) Government research showing public support for ID cards are worthless because they did not count each individual living person in the country?
The implication that no casualty figures could be accurate unless they are derived from a `detailed body count' is also absurd, especially given that Coalition forces have refused to conduct any such research; in any case, a `body count' would severely underestimate the total number killed -- partly because many bodies will not be recovered (for instance, those killed when bombed buildings collapse), and partly because it's now impossible accurately to count the bodies of those who have already died and been buried.
Further, the survey did not treat `Iraq as if every area was one and the same', as even a cursory inspection of the paper will tell the reader. Similarly, the survey did not `assume that bombing had taken place throughout Iraq'; instead, samples were taken at numerous locations in order to account for the geographical distribution of damage (many of the sampled areas were unbombed, as you would expect). Specifically, as I have remarked, the headline number excludes Fallujah, because of the high concentration of bombing and difficulties of conducting the survey there.
The deaths of civilians in Iraq may indeed add up to violations of the Geneva Conventions, especially Article IV. This became apparent to me last year, when I headed a multinational team of medical and public health researchers to investigate the scale of fatalities associated with the U.S. invasion of Iraq and subsequent violence.Do Iraqi Civilian Casualties Matter? by Les Roberts
The resulting report, published in the British medical journal The Lancet, estimated around 100,000 and possibly far more civilians have died because of the invasion. Our study was based on 988 household interviews in 33 randomly picked neighborhoods from across the entire country, and covered the period between on the beginning of the war (March 2003) and September 2004.
Most disturbing and certain about the results, is that over 80 percent of violent deaths were caused by U.S. forces and that most of the people they killed were women and children. None of the deaths we recorded involved intentional wrongdoing on the part of individual soldiers, instead being mostly from artillery and aerial weaponry. When I presented these results to about thirty Pentagon employees last fall, one came up to me afterwards and said, "We have dropped about 50,000 bombs, mostly on insurgents hiding behind civilians. What the [expletive] did you think was going to happen?" Our survey team's 100,000 death estimate for the first 18 months after the U.S. led-invasion equates to about 101 coalition-attributed violent deaths per day...
To demonstrate another source of accounting for fatalities commonly cited in the Middle-eastern press, Figure 1 represents the record of deaths made at the largest morgue in Baghdad for all of 2003 through September 2004. Before the war, about 10 percent of all Baghdad deaths were recorded in this morgue. (Data for December 2003 are missing.) While the use of morgues and the populations they serve can change over time and does not provide a true rate of death, the 2.7 fold increase of recorded deaths in the 18 months after the invasion is both dramatic and is almost all explained by the increase in gunshot and explosion-related wounds...
...It is more probable, however, that the estimates of 20,000 to 30,000 civilian deaths cited in the American press are too low, most likely by a factor of five or ten.
Consider the respective arcs of the two conflicts. In Vietnam, the United States entered a divided country with a simmering civil war and left behind a nasty tyranny. In Iraq, the US has unseated a nasty tyranny but may leave behind a simmering civil war that could lead to a divided country.George Kennan appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1966:
Kennan opened with a statement that likely resonates with many Americans today. If not already involved in the war, he said, "I would know of no reason why we should wish to become so involved, and I could think of several reasons why we should wish not to."
...
"However justified our action may be in our own eyes, it has failed to win either enthusiasm or confidence, even among peoples normally friendly to us," Kennan said.
...
Kennan concluded his Senate testimony with a well-known quotation from John Quincy Adams. "[America] goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy," said our sixth president. "She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."
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Mission Accomplished! Nothing appears to happen.
posted by Artw at 2:38 PM on June 30, 2006