"I will go to France to protest against this madness and violate the [new] law if I see it necessary. And I will commit the crime to be prosecuted there so that these two irrational mentalities can race to put me into jail," he told Reuters. He said the French draft law and the Armenian issue was being exploited by those in France and the EU opposed to Turkey's EU entry."Finally, this bill, which would make it a crime to deny that Armenia suffered genocide by the Ottoman turks, would certainly be seen in the US as an infringement on 1st amendment rights. This is one of the more repellent uses of tragedy as political football that I have encountered in recent days. Looks like France is learning from US.
...civilian deaths caused by coalition military action and by military or paramilitary responses to the coalition presence (e.g. insurgent and terrorist attacks).On the other hand the latest study (Lancet link, PDF file), derives its numbers from total mortality rates. So IBC's count is a subset of the Lancet count by definition.
It also includes excess civilian deaths caused by criminal action resulting from the breakdown in law and order which followed the coalition invasion
"An overwhelming majority believes that the U.S. military presence in Iraq is provoking more conflict than it is preventing and there is growing confidence in the Iraqi army," the summary said. "If the U.S. made a commitment to withdraw, a majority believes that this would strengthen the Iraqi government.The rest can be blamed on the folks that the US is fighting
"In addition, some 890,000 Iraqis have moved to Jordan, Iran and Syria since Saddam's fall, the minister, Abdul-Samad Sultan. The flight is solidifying the sectarian divide in this country of around 30 million people.posted by ericb at 9:07 AM on October 11, 2006
More than 300,000 Iraqis have fled their homes to other parts of Iraq to escape violence since the 2003 fall of Saddam Hussein, with the rate swelling in the past six months of Shiite-Sunni killings, the immigration minister said Tuesday.
In addition, some 890,000 Iraqis have moved to Jordan, Iran and Syria since Saddam's fall, the minister, Abdul-Samad Sultan, told reporters.
The flight is solidifying the sectarian divide in this country of around 30 million people.
Those who moved within Iraq went to areas where their own community dominates - Shiites leaving Sunni-majority or mixed areas for Shiite ones and vice-versa - he said.
...Statistics released by the ministry show that 51,000 families have fled their homes to move to another part of Iraq. Sultan said the ministry assumes an average of six people per family, putting the number at 306,000 people."
I actually expected that Saddam would broadcast a message to Iraqis today, reminding them of the fact that he is still legally their 'elected president', as he has occasionally done in the past few months. But he has been mysteriously silent for a while. Maybe the Americans are really closing in on him as they say. I want to live long enough to see him caught ALIVE. the possibilities would be endless. I'm sure it would be a great day for some real celebration in Iraq. I just hope the Americans won't make the stupid mistake of killing him like they did with his sons. Some might ask 'but wouldn't you like to see him killed?'. Believe me I would. But I would rather see him alive and humiliated for all he has done to this country and to humanity. I'm not even sure a trial would satisfy me. I want him to be put in a large glass cage at Fardus square where his statue once stood. It should be bulletproof so that no idiot would simply come and shoot him. He would sit in rags and be fed garbage once a day. People from all over Iraq and the world would come to watch him until he rots. It would be our national zoo, our primary tourists attraction. I would give 20 years of my life just to see that. And I'm sure 30 million Iraqis would do the same. I just hope someone from the Pentagon is listening.In January 2004, a 19-year-old relative of his drowned after being forced to jump into a river by American soldiers.
The actual statement of claim is pretty simple when you reduce it to the nub. The Iraqi survey team claims to have randomly interviewed households totalling 12,801 individuals, and found that exactly 300 of them had died violently between the U.S invasion and July, 2006. Survivors produced approximately 240 death certificates that confirmed this.posted by russilwvong at 3:45 PM on October 12, 2006
That math (even if you use only the certified deaths) works out to 5.5 violent deaths per thousand people per annum in Iraq. Extrapolate that to the entire population of Iraq and you get a number in the 450,000 range. Assume the other 60 undocumented violent deaths were truthful reports, as well, and you're up to 600K.
...Convincing those critics who see this number and declare “that can’t possibly be right,” or “my gut says no” or “this doesn’t even pass the smell test” is difficult. This is partly because some will just think that any estimate that sounds bad must be false, and take refuge in old saws about lies, damned lies, and what have you. But it’s also partly because six hundred thousand violent deaths since the war began seems huge—and, frankly, it is. As this typical guy says, that’s equivalent to 3 to 10 Hiroshima atomic blasts, 6 to 20 Nagasaki atomic blasts or 10 Dresden bombing campaigns.Ten times as many people might be dying and to what end ? It will be worse if we leave ? I have news for you--no matter what happens it will be worse than you can imagine, worse for them, worse for us. We sowed the wind and now reap the whirlwind.
Yes, that’s right. Those events happened in a single day or over a very short period. The present estimate is for a large country of twenty six million people over three and a half years. Sadly, this means it’s quite achievable. As Juan Cole points out, you just have to believe that four our five people a day are being shot or otherwise killed in each of Iraq’s major towns outside of Baghdad.
...If neither a careful reading of the study itself nor examples like Cole’s will do anything to make you doubt the cognitive power of your bowels, then there’s probably not much to be done.
Consider this, though. Even small societies are big. And big societies are huge. Nearly two and a half million people die in the United States every year. Nearly seven hundred thousand people die of heart disease. I can say with confidence that about a hundred and fifteen people died in road accidents today in the U.S., as did yesterday, and will tomorrow, and the day after that. And about fifty people in the U.S. died today as the result of assault, and will again tomorrow. These numbers are accurate, but I don’t mean them as any kind of serious comparison. They’re just a catalyst for the imagination. Fifty in the U.S., five hundred in Iraq. The two countries are very different, but is it really so inconceivable that ten times as many people might be dying violently on any given day in Iraq than in the United States
The results speak for themselves...The numbers do add up
And the results were shocking. In the 18 months before the invasion, the sample reported 82 deaths, two of them from violence. In the 39 months since the invasion, the sample households had seen 547 deaths, 300 of them from violence. The death rate expressed as deaths per 1,000 per year had gone up from 5.5 to 13.3.
Talk of confidence intervals becomes frankly irrelevant at this point. If you want to pick a figure for the precise number of excess deaths, then (1.33% - 0.55%) x 26,000,000 x 3.25 = 659,000 is as good as any, multiplying out the difference between the death rates by the population of Iraq and the time since the invasion. But we're interested in the qualitative conclusion here.
That qualitative conclusion is this: things have got worse, and they have got a lot worse, not a little bit worse. Whatever detailed criticisms one might make of the methodology of the study (and I have searched assiduously for the last two years, with the assistance of a lot of partisans of the Iraq war who have tried to pick holes in the study, and not found any), the numbers are too big. If you go out and ask 12,000 people whether a family member has died and get reports of 300 deaths from violence, then that is not consistent with there being only 60,000 deaths from violence in a country of 26 million. It is not even nearly consistent.
This is the question to always keep at the front of your mind when arguments are being slung around (and it is the general question one should always be thinking of when people talk statistics). How Would One Get This Sample, If The Facts Were Not This Way? There is really only one answer - that the study was fraudulent... Anyone who wants to dispute the important conclusion of the study has to be prepared to accuse the authors of fraud, and presumably to accept the legal consequences of doing so.
There has to be some accountability here. It is not good enough for the pro-intervention community to shrug their shoulders and say that the fatalities caused by the insurgents are not our fault and not part of the moral calculus. I would surely like to see the insurgents in the ICC on war crimes charges, but the Nuremberg convention was also correct to say that aggression was "the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole". The people who started this war of aggression need to face up to the fact, and that is a political issue.posted by y2karl at 10:58 AM on October 13, 2006
I had anticipated that the team behind Iraq Body Count would react to the latest survey on Iraqi mortalities published in the Lancet by trying to minimise their import and undermine their reliability. I was not wrong. The reason is fairly simple: they're defending their turf. They have been engaged in this operation ever since Media Lens asked them what they thought of the fact that mainstream media outlets were using their figures as reliable maximum estimates of the dead, and why they didn't challenge this evident untruth even though they acknowledged on their site that it was indeed an untruth. Their place in the media spotlight is threatened, and such is the only occasion under which they have put up any kind of a fight, even going so far during the spat with Media Lens to compare their opponents to terrorists on BBC 2.Counting the Dead: IBC attempt to undermine Lancet report.
I appreciate the Socratic method involved in IBC's attempt to rebut the findings of Burnham et al: rather than address themselves to matters of data collection, statistical analysis and methodology, about which the research team are often attacked in ignorance, IBC tries to examine a number of implications that result if one accepts the study's findings. Describing these implications as extremely anomalous, they conclude that the findings cannot be accurate. This assessment and their offering of it rests on some assumptions that are unsound...
And this is it. The whole thing is an enormous and misleading exercise in circularity, a massive raise of the eyebrow, a titanic exercise in obfuscation. They cannot touch the study for methodology, they cannot find anything in it that is badly done: not a single cluster wrongly placed, not a single false extrapolation, not a particle of evidence of any fraudulence or fecklessness. They hazily refer to possible bias, but on the basis of nothing more solid than that this would explain away the uncomfortable implications that they draw. As Daniel Davies points out, the chances of the Lancet authors obtaining the sample they did, if the facts were much closer to what the IBC records, are so low that it would have to be fraud. The IBC cannot and do not make this accusation, because they are not prepared to test their flimsy insinuations and doubts in a court of law. For a proffered rebuttal entitled 'Reality Checks', the IBC's intervention is breathtakingly short on either rebuttal or reality.
As Daniel Davies points out, the chances of the Lancet authors obtaining the sample they did, if the facts were much closer to what the IBC records, are so low that it would have to be fraud. The IBC cannot and do not make this accusation, because they are not prepared to test their flimsy insinuations and doubts in a court of law.posted by y2karl at 8:44 AM on October 17, 2006
IBC’s apologia talks about the Iraqi Living Conditions Study...Iraq Body Count’s Distortions
The ILCS doesn’t have any figure for the total death rate, so it’s really incomparable with the Lancet study. But even if it were, IBC’s claim that the ILCS must take precedence betrays ignorance of statistical testing. The meaning of “the 95% confidence interval of the 650,000 figure is 400,000-900,000″ is “If the real figure is between 400,000 and 900,000, then the Lancet study’s methodology gives a 95% confidence interval that includes 650,000.”
In other words, the Lancet study may have a large error margin, but it also has high enough a figure that it doesn’t matter. From the above formulation, if some group releases a study that says 400,000 Iraqis died, then the Lancet’s figure is within its margin of error, so we can’t conclude the group is wrong. But if a group claims that 40,000 Iraqis died, then the Lancet’s figure is well outside its margin, so the Lancet contradicts it.
When we have two contradictory studies, we can’t ever assume that the one with the larger sample size is wrong. We can only assume that if we have some discrepancy that lies within the margin of error. If the discrepancy is this big, we need to investigate the methodologies and see who’s doing a mistake; it’s possible neither side is, but the probability of that is vanishingly small. In this case, we have a study of Iraqi death rates that uses a standard epidemiological methodology, versus a compilation of media reports that not only neglects deaths not reported to the authorities but also neglects deaths not mentioned in the media.
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posted by orthogonality at 12:59 AM on October 11, 2006