Comments on: On the response to the 600,000 Iraqi dead http://jdallen.org/politics/on-the-response-to-the-600000-iraqi-dead/ "To Bigotry No Sanction, To Persecution No Assistance" Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:33:17 -0700 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 By: Marty http://jdallen.org/politics/on-the-response-to-the-600000-iraqi-dead/comment-page-1/#comment-1365 Marty Thu, 12 Oct 2006 20:27:53 +0000 http://jdallen.org/politics/on-the-response-to-the-600000-iraqi-dead/#comment-1365 Bush has lied about the numbers for a long time. It is all about keeping a competitor out of the oil business. Sounds like Iran is next. Bush has lied about the numbers for a long time. It is all about keeping a competitor out of the oil business. Sounds like Iran is next.

]]> By: James Allen http://jdallen.org/politics/on-the-response-to-the-600000-iraqi-dead/comment-page-1/#comment-1363 James Allen Thu, 12 Oct 2006 19:11:31 +0000 http://jdallen.org/politics/on-the-response-to-the-600000-iraqi-dead/#comment-1363 <a href="http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/daniel_davies/2006/10/how_to_not_lie_with_statistics.html" rel="nofollow">The Guardian</a> has an explanation of how they arrived at that number and what it should mean to us. <blockquote>[...] The results speak for themselves. There was a sample of 12,801 individuals in 1,849 households, in 47 geographical locations. That is a big sample, not a small one. The opinion polls from Mori and such which measure political support use a sample size of about 2,000 individuals, and they have a margin of error of +/- 3%. If Margaret Beckett looks at the Labour party's rating in the polls, she presumably considers this to be reasonably reliable, so she should not contribute to public ignorance by allowing her department to disparage "small samples extrapolated to the whole country". The Iraq Body Count website and the Iraqi government statistics are not better measures than the survey results, because one of the things we know about war zones is that casualties are under-reported, usually by a factor of more than five. 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. [...] </blockquote> The Guardian has an explanation of how they arrived at that number and what it should mean to us.

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The results speak for themselves. There was a sample of 12,801 individuals in 1,849 households, in 47 geographical locations. That is a big sample, not a small one. The opinion polls from Mori and such which measure political support use a sample size of about 2,000 individuals, and they have a margin of error of +/- 3%. If Margaret Beckett looks at the Labour party’s rating in the polls, she presumably considers this to be reasonably reliable, so she should not contribute to public ignorance by allowing her department to disparage “small samples extrapolated to the whole country”. The Iraq Body Count website and the Iraqi government statistics are not better measures than the survey results, because one of the things we know about war zones is that casualties are under-reported, usually by a factor of more than five.

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.
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