Asymmetrical Information

Yet they reacted with furious anger to anyone who suggested that an estimate that indicated over 15% of military-aged males in the Sunni triangle may already be dead could be just a mite high

Although what you actually did was to post about a dozen times, with changing rationales every time, trying to claim that it was *much* too high. A bit of self-criticism is in order, perhaps?

The admirable attitude would have been a hopeful attempt to prove the study wrong, laced with a powerful fear that it was not. That attitude was almost nowhere to be found. Instead, it was about beating the hawks.

You yourself, however, decided to impugn the integrity of the survey team (insinuating that they faked their data) and claim that they were playing partisan politics with the US Congressional elections. Let's just get it straight on how honourable and admirable everyone was.

Jane, I share your emotion. The problem is, in my mind, that having that emotion is a trigger for me that I may be perceiving something with bias. Having that kind of emotion forces me to think twice about my conclusions. Do you use such emotions within yourself in such ways?

Dquared, they impugned their own integrity, publicly announcing that they had attempted to influence US elections with the earlier version.

As for the rest: I stated reasons that I thought the numbers were too high, dug in, and found others. Pardon me, but that's a damn sight better than "Don't focus on the number", possibly the weakest defense I've ever heard of a study whose only contribution to human knowlege was a number, unless you think that the rest of us were unaware that people were being killed in Iraq. And you're hardly one to talk about shifting rationales, since every time reason was found that one of your previous assertions was wrong, you found an entirely new reason that the study must be right. I was certainly a damn site fairer to the arguments of those I disagreed with than you were.

I will still admit that it is well within the realm of possibility that that graveyard count will eventually validate the study. But if I had to bet, I'd bet against it. In fact, offer me good enough odds to counterbalance the difference in our salaries, and I'd be happy to head over to Longbets with you.

Pardon me, but that's a damn sight better than "Don't focus on the number", possibly the weakest defense I've ever heard of a study whose only contribution to human knowlege was a number

Please. You're humiliating yourself. Don't post at all about statistics if you didn't understand that. Plenty of people who failed introductory statistics courses understood what I was talking about. If this is the level of your understanding, it's woeful.

And you're hardly one to talk about shifting rationales since every time reason was found that one of your previous assertions was wrong, you found an entirely new reason that the study must be right

Rubbish. I thought the study's methodology was valid and said so. It was impossible for me to anticipate the wide and wild variety of errors that people came up with in trying to pick holes in it, so I (and Tim Lambert, and everyone else involved) answered them as they came.

You're making a separate claim here that in discussing the Lancet studies, I made assertions which were proved to be wrong. I don't think this is true at all, other than perhaps some trivial matters of quotation. And to be honest, I don't remember getting any trivial matters wrong either (I think I once misidentified a Kurdish province as non-Kurdish or something, but that's about it).

You are doing exactly what you talked about here; you're remembering yourself as more civil and reasonable than you were, and you're remembering the substantive debate as going less hugely one-sidedly against you than it did.

I was certainly a damn site fairer to the arguments of those I disagreed with than you were.

This was presumably because the people who disagreed with you were not, in general, doing so on the basis of serious and demonstrable errors.

Sigh. Daniel, Bayesian analysis is not exactly rocket science, and yes, I did understand what you were talking about. But that's not exactly a proud claim, because the insight was trivial. What are the odds of getting this result if everything in Iraq is great? Very low. What are the odds that everything in Iraq is great? Nonexistant. What is the study telling us that we didn't already know, except insofar as it is some sort of vaguely reliable guide to the magnitude of the problem? Waving your hands around and barking confidently at those who disagree with you may impress the commenters at Crooked Timber, but it leaves me rather cold.

I notice that you claim not to make errors and abandon them, while making an error and abandoning it in the previous post. Are you planning to acknowlege that my allegedly scurrilous accusation against the integrity of the researchers is rubbish, given that they themselves had proudly proclaimed their willingness to commit the offense with which I allegedly impugned their honour?

What are the odds of getting this result if everything in Iraq is great? Very low. What are the odds that everything in Iraq is great? Nonexistant

Those aren't the only hypotheses you can test. How about

1) What are the odds of getting this result if things are only as bad as the President said they were? Nonexistent.
2) What are the odds of getting this result if things were only as bad as the (already utterly unacceptable) Iraq Body Count estimate suggested? Very low
3) What are the odds of getting this result if fewer people had died in Iraq than in Darfur? Still pretty low

What is the study telling us that we didn't already know

That the problem is significantly greater than we had thought, and getting worse. This is the point of the data.

Are you planning to acknowlege that my allegedly scurrilous accusation against the integrity of the researchers is rubbish, given that they themselves had proudly proclaimed their willingness to commit the offense with which I allegedly impugned their honour?

No, because you did, in fact, insinuate that the Iraqi survey team had falsified interviews. You also claimed that the Lancet had published the study for partisan political reasons. The researchers have not admitted this, and you, not me, are wrong here. They have said that they aimed to influence the debate over the Iraq War.

At any rate, my point is not to revisit the Burnham study; if you want to offer me some decent odds on Longbets, let's go, and otherwise, we'll each have to allow the other to have their own opinion until some better data is available to either verify or refute Burnham's results. My point is to talk about the attitude of winning at all cost, which you are richly demonstrating (and I'm not doing so well at either). There was a very unattractive glee at the prospect of a really large number of dead Iraqis, because hey, that'll show the hawks.

we'll each have to allow the other to have their own opinion

You are allowed to have your own opinion, but not your own mathematics.

While we’re offering hypotheses –

What are the odds of the Iraq Body Count getting the results they did given that the Lancet study is correct? Vanishingly small.

What are the chances that the President, his aides, the military, troops who have served in Iraq, Brookings and everyone else you can reference would come up with estimates much lower than the Lancet study given that the Lancet study is correct? Again, vanishingly small.

So what are we to do?

The Bayesian rational actor adjusts his priors on the basis of new information. Unless the new information is definitive, he does not throw out his priors. To do so is to engage in a form of irrationality that smacks of bias. The sort of bias, in fact, that might lead one to the offer the value judgment that the numbers of the Iraq Body Count are “already utterly unacceptable” as if it were obviously true.

One reasonable heuristic is to assess the extent to which you should adjust your priors by the surprisingness of the new information. I’m sorry, but the fact that someone who is an enthusiastic opponent of the war has come up with casualty numbers much higher than anyone else’s is simply not surprising. Much more surprising is that the Iraq Body Count would stick by their numbers when a much bigger alternative makes itself available.

One is not entitled to one’s own mathematics. Fortunately, that is not what is at issue here. One is entitled to one’s own probability assessments, since they are only a way of expressing beliefs about uncertain events. Given the predictability of the results in light of the project participants and the degree to which they diverge from all other estimates, I assess the probability of the study that was published in Lancet being near the truth as being very small, and so I will adjust my priors very little.

I win! Last word!

Jane is being more than fair in looking at herself from the "dove's" side, in a manner in which a "dove" would do so. That's the problem with people like her. They're all to willing to give others the benefit of the doubt and view things from the other viewpoint.

It's ok to do I guess as long as the otherside isn't barking mad and obsesses with bringing down "the shrub".

Bush is far from perfect. He's down right incompetent at some things. But it's still true that criticism is not a policy. Outline how to do it better, and EXACTLY where it was wrong. So much quarterbacking I see makes assumptions about how things are being performed on the ground and says how we should do things differently. Unless you have the list of policy information that the pentagon gives to its commanders I fail to see how you can properly criticize the implementation. You may try to do so based on assumptions which are made from seeing how things turned out, but the simple fact is, the only way to get the iraqis to do what we want, if they don't willingly want to do is is kill a lot of them. Not something I think is a pretty thought.

Put it this way, if Canada came down and said you need to start paying extra taxes to canada, and they were going to ask you to do so because it was necessary, would you? No. Now if they pointed a gun at you and started shooting, would you? Yes. The Iraqis don't want to listen to us. Some say that means we pull out. Would leave us with our hands relatively clean because at least we didn't have to kill a bunch to get the result we wanted. But it would also leave a cesspool of terrorism, that for right or wrong reasons of its creation, will exist in Iraq and ultimately come home to us.

"At any rate, my point is not to revisit the Burnham study;"

No. Your point seems to be to try to reclaim the moral high ground by impugning the character of those on the other side of the argument and to throw the heat off the actual consequences of advocating invasion. Those evil, evil, doves. Wanting people to be DEAD! We just wanted to invade, we didn't want anybody to actually be killed as a result!

You swipe against the "doves" for not being civil, then toss out the snide "I thought that wanting to win no matter how many dead bodies that entailed was supposed to be the problem with the hawks side." as a parting shot. Nice. Classy. Not hypocritical at all!

For what it's worth, I know that at least some of the researchers promoting the "main street bias" explanation of why the Burnham et al. study's numbers were so high were (and remain) doves.

Daniel, c'mon. You know we are not arguing about the mathematics; we are arguing about the data collection. Now my commenters know that too, so you can stop with the handwaving. I don't know how the numbers went wrong, and yes, I think that bad collection by unsupervised amateur researchers is a possibility, so you can stop making insinuations about that. But checking the figure against other known results, it seems more likely to be an outlier than not.

Jane,

I think it prudent to abandon the debate with dsquared. Accounting for the discrepencies between the study and actual counts of mortality in Iraq will have to await better data sets. Until then, the debate is pointless.

Rather, the study's supporters seemed to want it to be true, because it supported their prior beliefs.

You have no evidence for this except it fits beliefs that help you feel good about yourself.

Conclusion: you're an unapologetic war mongering idiot that likes to set up strawmen and then say, "it's twue, it's twue, it's weally weally twue!"

You know we are not arguing about the mathematics; we are arguing about the data collection.

At that point, in order to reasonably doubt the results, you need either specific complaints about the methodology used to collect the data, or you need a more reliable data set to compare it to. In the first round of argument on the study, I don't recall seeing either a complaint about the methodology that appeared to be valid after discussion, or a contradictory data set that there was any reason to think was more reliable.

The IBC, for example, is obviously less reliable -- its methodology requires that each death be confirmed in two English language accounts. While this is a great way to get a rock-bottom floor on the number of civilian deaths, it's also necessarily going to undercount total excess deaths severely.

you need either specific complaints about the methodology

My "specific complaint" is that none of the defenders of the study have answered my simple question:

Has this method been tried someplace where the official count is likely to be very close to correct? Any cluster-sampled death counts in New York City or County Cork or the Gifu prefecture?

Many have argued that this method is "widely used" or "widely accepted" or the "best available." All of which may be true, but my question is, does it work? And how do we know if it works or not?

Still waiting for an answer.

That anyone died over this misplaced and tragic adventure is sad and pathetic. Iraqis are not terrorists. remember that...

Now my commenters know that too, so you can stop with the handwaving.

Handwaving nothing -- he's flapping like a dove on codeine. It's amusing for the first ten minutes, anyway.

I don't recall seeing either a complaint about the methodology that appeared to be valid after discussion, or a contradictory data set that there was any reason to think was more reliable.

Of course you don't. The primary complaint wasn't that the methodology was inherently flawed, the complaint was that the methodology wasn't really capable of giving a statistically reliable dataset under the circumstances.

Granted, the fact that it did produce a number with political uses was promptly siezed upon, with potential for side effects of memory loss.

The primary complaint wasn't that the methodology was inherently flawed, the complaint was that the methodology wasn't really capable of giving a statistically reliable dataset under the circumstances.

I'm just going to sit back and look at this one for a while.

Jane, thanks for admitting you were wrong to support the war in Iraq.

I would suggest that the key pitfall to watch out for is *lack of humility*. As Hans Morgenthau puts it:

"When an intellectual finds himself in the seat of power he is tempted to equate the power of his intellect with the power of his office. As he could mould the printed word to suit his ideas so he now expects the real world to respond to his actions. Hence his confidence in himself, his pride, his optimism; hence, also, the absence of the tragic sense of life, of humility, of that fear and trembling with which great statesmen have approached their task, knowing that in trying to mould the political world they must act like gods, without the knowledge, the wisdom, the power, and the goodness which their task demands."

I think it's great that you're admitting you were wrong. But to me (and presumably to other commenters), your continued criticism of the doves looks like an attempt to salvage your pride.

(If it matters, I supported the war.)

"But the study's supporters seemed so focused on winning, on proving that the hawks were bad, wrong, stupid people and the war was an awful, awful, awful thing that the meaning of the numbers got lost in the argument. No one seemed to have any sense that for them to be right, an extra half-million people would have to be dead. The admirable attitude would have been a hopeful attempt to prove the study wrong, laced with a powerful fear that it was not. That attitude was almost nowhere to be found. Instead, it was about beating the hawks."

I think it is dangerous to speculate about the motivations and desires of people one is in a very emotional debate with. It is certainly not helpful to tell them that they secretly wish for hundreds of thousands to have died.

Tom

Jane -

Instead of odds, use a body count. In other words, what number would you be willing to bet, at even odds, $1000, that the unbiased body count will be below. (Of course, you two will have to define unbiased and deaths by what dates and such).

The number that dqsuared announces his willingness to bet at even odds will be the lower limit that he thinks actually probable, perhaps his 25th percentile estimate.

If dsquared is unable to announce such a figure, then we are free to conclude that he is a liar, and not just a hand-waver.

Meanwhile, you can calculate the highest number at which you would place an even money bet, say your 75th percentile.

Ideally, an honest broker would hold your two numbers in secret until both had provided them. If his number is not below yours, then the bet is on at the average of the two numbers. On the other hand, if your numbers overlap, then you actually agree somewhat about the probable number of deaths, and we can all be stunned and amazed and stop treating you both like partisan dummies.

If the bet is on, then in a number of years, one of you will gain money and bragging rights. If the body count is below X, you win, above x, he wins.

Sound fun?

Twill00, this isn't a game. Foreign policy isn't a form of entertainment, like football or chess.

We're talking about people who have died because of the war: maybe tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands. Try to imagine what an Iraqi reading your post would be thinking.

Well the UN says it was just under 40k...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070117/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq

And a crazy right winger like myself would generally assume that estimate of 40k "civilians" would have quite a few terrorists in it.

Oh, and the Iraqis themselves disagree with the UN count and say it was really substantially less.

Notice what DD doesn't and can't deny: He and Tim Lambert and many other "liberals" exhibited quite an amazingly passionate desire to prove that the Lancet study was true. They desperately wanted it to be the case that 600,000 people had died; that's what was driving them to make so many arguments in support of a sampling methodology that produced a result that was obviously an extreme outlier compared to everything else.

hmmm: "Well the UN says it was just under 40k...

Just to clarify (for anyone not up on the news), this figure refers to civilian deaths from violence in 2006.

" It is certainly not helpful to tell them that they secretly wish for hundreds of thousands to have died."

Indeed, it's hard for me to reply to this post - strangely enough, being glibly told that I secretly wish for an extra half-million people to be dead just to prove me right makes me a bit angry. I'm trying to refrain from responding to it in a way that seems appropriate, largely since that would only serve to feed into the dynamic she's got going here, and reinforce her belief that those of us who opposed this disaster are just nasty illogical dirtyhippies.

- Unlike the iguna-in-every-household scenario suggested in the original post, the range suggested by the Lancet study seemed all too horribly plausible.

" Yet they reacted with furious anger to anyone who suggested that an estimate that indicated over 15% of military-aged males in the Sunni triangle may already be dead could be just a mite high."

If that's how you want to describe those suggestions, fine. But anyway, yeah, odd that hearing the folks who had supported this war frantically insist on a lower death count or was ah . . . upsetting.

"The admirable attitude would have been a hopeful attempt to prove the study wrong, laced with a powerful fear that it was not."

Attempting to prove the study wrong - that's indeed an admirable attitude for a certain ~scientific/rational mode of thought. Outside the confines of that particular (and immensely valuable) intellectual methodology . . . .
. . . well, both this and Chait's piece are very good examples of - I'm not sure what it's called. Tinkerbell syndrome? Threemonkeyitis? This idea that it's a virtue to try to hide from unpleasant realities, hoping every harder, clapping ever louder.

"I thought that wanting to win no matter how many dead bodies that entailed was supposed to be the problem with the hawks side."

Except in our case, you're talking about (supposedly) nonexistent dead bodies (supposedly) produced by confirmation bias, while in the hawks' case, we're talking about all-too-real dead bodies produced ultimately by the hawks' actions.

Yeah, this seems more like a debate about, say, the number of people murdered in the Holocaust. Maybe I argue 6 million, you argue 5 million. Geez, how can I be so callous as to want to win the argument, since that would mean another million people were murdered?

Perhaps I'd just like to know the truth, since no conclusion we come to can affect the true number of dead? Or perhaps I'd like to win because I like winning arguments. But still, winning or losing the argument won't change the number of people murdered any.

albatross, I was just about to make the exact same point with the exact same analogy.

Would you say the following looks like a pretty good public dove analysis, ca. 2002, that was right about Iraq and for the right reasons? Was he just simply luckier than you, whether in the roll of the dice or having better biases for solving this particular problem, or did he actually see the landscape more clearly and show better judgment? Your call.

http://www.obama2010.us/2002/10/26/iraq_war.php

I guess the thousands Saddam was killing don't count, right? Because we have nirvana on the kumbaya side, vs the current state of bushitler incompetence.

My preference would be the destruction of our enemies, starting with Iran. Let them rebuild themselves. I don't care if they like us. I'd rather they fear us.

Notice what DD doesn't and can't deny: He and Tim Lambert and many other "liberals" exhibited quite an amazingly passionate desire to prove that the Lancet study was true.

I can and do deny this disgusting claim. Myself and Tim were passionate about wanting to refute ill-informed objections to the methodology of the study. This is because it was a good piece of science written about a very important subject, and there were lots of people trying to find reasons for ignoring its important conclusions, in what looked to be appallingly bad faith.

You might as well say that the Anti-Defamation League "desperately want it to be the case" that 6 million Jews were killed in Nazi Germany.

So, according to the UN's estimates, what Iraq itself claims is very high, and most certainly includes "bad guys", 34,000 people were killed last year. So I suppose that means in the previous years it was a real killing melee huh?

DD,

Is there even the slightest chance that you or anyone else will answer my question?

I ask in good faith and with a desire to learn, but nobody answers, prefering to trade insults.

Rob, you do not in fact have either "good faith" or "a desire to learn". You have in fact been asking this question since the first Lancet survey came out. I, Tim Lambert and several others have told you that a) cluster sampling is a normal, textbook methodology which is tried and true and very well understood and b) the cluster sample estimates carried out in former Yugoslavia were later checked against census data and proved to be much more accurate than any other method of investigation. I say this not in any hope that you will stop trying to blow smoke here, but only in the modest hope that neutral onlookers will not be fooled.

DD -- sorry, but on reading the writings of you and Lambert et al., one gets the uneasy feeling that the Lancet study was greeted not with the thought, "I surely hope that is not true," but "This is awful -- but hot damn, it's a great chance to beat up on Bush! Man the brigades to defend the study at all costs, no matter how much of an outlier it seems!"

The analogy to the ADL is quite a bit off the mark. The Holocaust is a well-defined and much-studied historical event, and the ADL is simply after accuracy. Not so here. What has happened in Iraq is not a much-studied historical event; everyone admits that it's a rotten state of affairs, but there's a difference in the level of rottenness (150,000 dead isn't the same as 600,000, at least not to the additional 450,000 people whose lives we're talking about).

How would the ADL react if a study came out purporting to show that while everyone else thought that 100 Israelis were killed by suicide bombs in the past year (to make up a figure), if you extrapolate from a small sampling, the actual figure is 700. Would the ADL say, "Yes! This has got to be right! We simply must defend this study, because it's another arrow in our quiver to show how evil the Palestinians are!" Or would the ADL take a more skeptical look at whether the sampling was collected in the right places, etc.? I have the feeling that the ADL wouldn't necessarily be quite so gleeful to believe the largest available statistic about how many Jews have died. Maybe I'm wrong; this is all hypothetical anyway. The only point is that the Holocaust analogy is silly.

DD,

I have never questioned your motivations or honesty, so I do not appriciate your offensive tone or insinuations. If you wish to snap at others, feel free, but you have no justification for doing so with me. Finally, I would be curious by what means you divine my intentions and internal states of mind; such a talent would be exceedingly useful in my profession (IAAL).

This is the first of your replies or Tim Lambert's to this question that I have ever seen; I apologize if I missed the others. Nobody else has even attempted to address this point in the forums I frequent; most study defenders just said "That's what they did in Darfur."

To take your points in reverse order: the Yugoslavia study you mention would appear to answer my question, so thank you. Indeed, if that had been the extent of your answer, it would have had the effect of raising the unfortunate tone around here.

On the other hand, the fact that something is a "normal, textbook method" doesn't mean it actually works, which was my point all along. In order to be "tried and true," a methodology must actually be tried. I do not understand why this basic question (has it been tried?) seems so shocking or out-of-order to you.

Let's return to the glory days of yester year when Jane was so sure of herself that anyone who disagreed was an idiot shall we?

I can't be mad at these little dweebs. I'm too busy laughing. And I think some in New York are going to laugh even harder when they try to unleash some civil disobedience, Lenin style, and some New Yorker who understands the horrors of war all too well picks up a two-by-four and teaches them how very effective violence can be when it's applied in a firm, pre-emptive manner.

Yep, Jane is one adam's apple short of Anne Coulter.

DD -- sorry, but on reading the writings of you and Lambert et al., one gets the uneasy feeling that the Lancet study was greeted not with the thought, "I surely hope that is not true," but "This is awful -- but hot damn, it's a great chance to beat up on Bush! Man the brigades to defend the study at all costs, no matter how much of an outlier it seems!"

Well, John, if you think it's OK to make such disgusting accusations on the basis of nothing more than "I get an uneasy feeling", then I am certainly not going to discuss the matter further.

Davebo: give it a rest with the sexist insults with you? Megan is utterly wrong here and attributing the nastiest of motives to other people on the basis of no evidence. That is perfectly bad enough, it would not be any better if a man or an unattractive woman did it and thus the personal remarks are unnecessary and nasty.

How's this for a poser:

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/01/better_off_losi.html

"the personal remarks are unnecessary and nasty"

Yes comparing someone to Anne Coulter is a pretty low blow.

The Adam's apple meme should go away. Davebo is, however, right to call attention to some of the past rhetoric that makes the complaints about "tone" and who wanted to portray the other side as "bad, wrong, stupid people" so ridiculous.

John: "one gets the uneasy feeling that the Lancet study was greeted not with the thought, "I surely hope that is not true," but "This is awful -- but hot damn, it's a great chance to beat up on Bush!

Perhaps you do get that uneasy feeling, but I fear it says more about you than it says about us.

One of the reason the "doves" have been driven bat-shit-crazy is that many of the "hawks" STILL want to start more wars! Like Iran. And Syria. And Somalia. (WTF ?!?) And some of the "hawks" work in the Whitehouse.

While you may be comfortable thinking of Iraq in a retrospective way, some of us are terrified that you crazy Americans are going to go make a bigger hell-hole next door. This potential does not calm my nerves. And complaining about my lack of grace in pointing out that America likes to shoot people but seldom makes things better doing it seems oddly besides the point.

I will be happy to beat my breast and discuss my moral/intellectual failings once a year passes when the USA kills fewer people than terrorists ever have. I'm hoping 2008 might be such a year. The last few haven't been so kind, and this one isn't shaping up so well.

OK, then, DD, show me where you admit that it's reasonable to be skeptical of the Lancet study's results (after all, no study is beyond skepticism, is it?)

For example, the Iraqi Body Count people came up with several devastating criticisms of the Lancet result: http://www.iraqbodycount.org/press/pr14.php?PHPSESSID=aded8a3ff4216addbfb569af0755eee2

On average, a thousand Iraqis have been violently killed every single day in the first half of 2006, with less than a tenth of them being noticed by any public surveillance mechanisms;

Some 800,000 or more Iraqis suffered blast wounds and other serious conflict-related injuries in the past two years, but less than a tenth of them received any kind of hospital treatment;

Over 7% of the entire adult male population of Iraq has already been killed in violence, with no less than 10% in the worst affected areas covering most of central Iraq;

Half a million death certificates were received by families which were never officially recorded as having been issued;

The Coalition has killed far more Iraqis in the last year than in earlier years containing the initial massive "Shock and Awe" invasion and the major assaults on Falluja.

If these assertions are true, they further imply:

incompetence and/or fraud on a truly massive scale by Iraqi officials in hospitals and ministries, on a local, regional and national level, perfectly coordinated from the moment the occupation began;

bizarre and self-destructive behaviour on the part of all but a small minority of 800,000 injured, mostly non-combatant, Iraqis;

the utter failure of local or external agencies to notice and respond to a decimation of the adult male population in key urban areas;

an abject failure of the media, Iraqi as well as international, to observe that Coalition-caused events of the scale they reported during the three-week invasion in 2003 have been occurring every month for over a year. Now these strike me as serious criticisms from people who clearly care about the number of dead Iraqis. Have you ever seriously addressed their criticisms, beyond just hand-waving denial? Do you agree that if a study or methodology producees a result that seems facially implausible in half a dozen different ways (such as if a study found that 20% of Americans had been killed in trampoline accidents), then it might just be worth taking a more skeptical look? Or do you continue to have the attitude that any and all reasons for skepticism must be denied at all costs?

If so, then yes, it's legitimate for someone else to wonder just why it's so damned important to you (or anyone else) that the study be 100% correct in every way.

OK, then, DD, show me where you admit that it's reasonable to be skeptical of the Lancet study's results (after all, no study is beyond skepticism, is it?)

For example, the Iraqi Body Count people came up with several devastating criticisms of the Lancet result: http://www.iraqbodycount.org/press/pr14.php?PHPSESSID=aded8a3ff4216addbfb569af0755eee2

The Iraqi mortality estimates published in the Lancet in October 2006 imply, among other things, that: On average, a thousand Iraqis have been violently killed every single day in the first half of 2006, with less than a tenth of them being noticed by any public surveillance mechanisms;

Some 800,000 or more Iraqis suffered blast wounds and other serious conflict-related injuries in the past two years, but less than a tenth of them received any kind of hospital treatment;

Over 7% of the entire adult male population of Iraq has already been killed in violence, with no less than 10% in the worst affected areas covering most of central Iraq;

Half a million death certificates were received by families which were never officially recorded as having been issued;

The Coalition has killed far more Iraqis in the last year than in earlier years containing the initial massive "Shock and Awe" invasion and the major assaults on Falluja.

If these assertions are true, they further imply:

incompetence and/or fraud on a truly massive scale by Iraqi officials in hospitals and ministries, on a local, regional and national level, perfectly coordinated from the moment the occupation began;

bizarre and self-destructive behaviour on the part of all but a small minority of 800,000 injured, mostly non-combatant, Iraqis;

the utter failure of local or external agencies to notice and respond to a decimation of the adult male population in key urban areas;

an abject failure of the media, Iraqi as well as international, to observe that Coalition-caused events of the scale they reported during the three-week invasion in 2003 have been occurring every month for over a year.

Now these strike me as serious criticisms from people who clearly care about the number of dead Iraqis. Have you ever seriously addressed their criticisms, beyond just hand-waving denial? Do you agree that if a study or methodology producees a result that seems facially implausible in half a dozen different ways (such as if a study found that 20% of Americans had been killed in trampoline accidents), then it might just be worth taking a more skeptical look? Or do you continue to have the attitude that any and all reasons for skepticism must be denied at all costs?

If so, then yes, it's legitimate for someone else to wonder just why it's so damned important to you (or anyone else) that the study be 100% correct in every way.

OK, then, DD

No, not OK. I am not going to discuss this or anything else with you until you withdraw that incredibly offensive accusation.

DD,

Undoubtedly I should not let personal pique get in the way of rational argument, but you've been pretty offensive to me, personally, without good cause so far as I can tell.

DD -- I withdraw the accusation that you personally wanted X-hundred-thousand Iraqis to die so that you could make a political point. But can you offer a reason for your (or Lambert's) refusal to brook any skepticism here? It will be just a wee bit too convenient to profess that you guys are just completely unbiased non-partisans whose sole passion in life is to explore technical points of survey methodology.

Also, as I mentioned, IBC puts out several good reasons to be skeptical of the ultimate results (none of which have to do with IBC's own methodology, so don't even bother throwing up that red herring). Why is it treated as a matter of religious heresy if one raises these sorts of skeptical questions?

Would you say the following looks like a pretty good public dove analysis, ca. 2002, that was right about Iraq and for the right reasons?

Not it wasn’t. It was pretty much fever swamp material including the accusation from Barack Obama that the Iraqi phase of the War was simply an attempt to “distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals.”

If Obama really believes that rather than is simply pandering to the BAF base of the Democratic Party then in addition to being a light-weight, he’s insane.

Michael,

America shoots people but seldom makes things better? Like Europe and Japan in WWII? Would Vietnam and Cambodia have turned out WORSE if we had stayed? Is South Korea some sort of hell-hole compared to the North because we spent a couple of years killing people? What about Panama and Grenada? The fact is that things have much more often than not been better because we were willing to shoot people when called upon and worse when we decide we're not going to get involved.

Also, please note that no matter whose numbers you believe, the vast proportion of the Iraqi deaths we’re talking about were at the hands of terrorists. Since they aren’t in Iraq, where are all of these people you believe the Americans have killed?

So if Syria wants to overrun Lebanon, Iran wants to kill every Jew near whom they can fire a missile and the Islamic Courts types in Somalia want to exterminate whole regions of West Africa, we should all hope and pray that nobody for God’s sake tries to do anything about it? Please tell me you don't really believe what you're saying!

There is undoubtedly a portion of the far left who wants more Iraqis deaths, more chaos, more destruction because they know it will make Bush and "neocons" look bad. Period. So what if thousands of Iraqis die -- I mean, it's not like they're anybody they know. If it gets those impeachment hearings fired up, well, sacrifices have to be made.

It's a very small percentage, but they tend to be quite loud.

There is undoubtedly a portion of the far left who wants more Iraqis deaths

In any way rivalling the portion of the pro-war centre who want more Iraqi deaths, the better to teach those bastard that they've been defeated?

I doubt it.

Would Vietnam and Cambodia have turned out WORSE if we had stayed?

You weren't officially "in" Cambodia, remember? And yes, it turned out far worse because you "stayed." Much of Pol Pot's support base came from people who were render homeless by the bombing campaign.

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