It's nice to see some scientific work going into the causality count in the Iraq war. Most of the surveys/official estimations are way off, the Opinion Research Business survey reported over a million deaths while most US sources stated around 100k mark.
This report is somewhere in the middle, which is most realistic.
There have been very serious studies done on Iraqi war mortality for quite some time, starting with Roberts and Burnham, who did two very credible epidemiological surveys of mortality in 2004 and 2006 (published in the Lancet) using a similar approach as the study referenced above. The later study estimated somewhere around 600,000+ (95% confidence interval of 392,979 to 942,636) had already died by 2006 (and this before the renewed sectarian violence and US offensive in 2007).
It's notable that even this new study's lead author thinks their half-million figure is an underestimate:
""We think it is roughly around half a million people dead. And that is likely a low estimate," says Hagopian. "People need to know the cost in human lives of the decision to go to war."
I remember that This American Life did a piece on the Lancet studies when they came out. They focused on how the widespread reaction (in the West) to their numbers was one of stubborn disbelief, despite the fact that these were the most credible researchers in the field and that they used standard techniques.
I thought it was fun how many people on the left knew how it was, with so wildly varying data.
But of course, it never happens that researchers cheat on research papers. Or interviewers in another country "fix" the answers. Or a hundred other things.
If I have a thesis in life, it is that paid shills and idealists lie. The idealists "know" how it is, so the problem is how to get people to think "correctly".
Perhaps you know much more about this than I do. My memory is that the Lancet authors were serious, qualified researchers who had done much similar work in the past and whose objectivity had not previously been disputed. If there's a critique to be made of their work, a snarky "that can't be right" blog post certainly doesn't cut it. The authors of the new PLoS study say that they've taken into account criticisms of earlier work; I am sure they have the Lancet articles (among others) in mind, but I do not know the details.
The Iraq Body Count project has bothered me for years because they only count individually confirmable deaths. There is nothing wrong with that as documentary work, but there is something terribly wrong with citing the number of deaths so counted as anything like a credible total for the war, when it is obviously a severe lower bound. War is random and chaotic. Very many people die whose paperwork does not get filled out. It is painfully obvious that statistical techniques are required to arrive at a good estimate under such circumstances. Thus to cite the Iraq Body Count as the total number of deaths in the war is dishonest, yet that is exactly how it has routinely been cited, and I don't understand why they (or at least the people who quote them in media pieces) have not been called out on this more often.
Uh, I can't see how that is relevant to the specific points I raised. (It isn't relevant to talk about someone else using the IBC data in a way IBC don't recommend. And there were lots of criticism before, see the first Lancet report. It is not good with a political motive either -- timing reports to influence an election.)
1. So you have no answer to the Iraq Body Count reality check and just ignore it? (E.g. where is the conspiracy needed to hide all the missing maimed -- and make their prostheses?!)
2. Nothing to say about the scathing criticism of lacking integrity in the second link?
3. Considering your lack of answers on 1 and 2, you might want to retract the claim that others put their heads in the sand. :-)
4. And a new point: You are aware of that Beth Osborne is a Lancet Report critic? She has documented integrity since she got problems from "too high" mortality values in the first Gulf war... And many other heavyweights in exactly the right field?
Since you have just ignored my references and arguments, I guess there is nothing else to say? (The point 1 I have asked about since it was reported, never a relevant answer.)
I'm not having the kind of argument with you that you seem to think I am. I looked at the articles you mentioned. Certainly their criticisms are devastating if, and only if, they are true and fair. Are they? I can't say. I don't have time to read the studies. If you have, and you've arrived at your beliefs based on factual analysis rather than ideology, that's good.
My point about IBC was not intended to dispute what you said, but rather to vent something that has bothered me for a long time. Sorry that wasn't clear. I feel slightly justified by the fact that your second link does the very thing I was complaining about:
these results were anywhere from seven to 14 times as high as other credible estimates, including those made by the non-partisan Iraq Body Count, a consortium of U.S. and U.K researchers, also concerned about the human toll of the war
This is deeply misleading. IBC's number is guaranteed to be a far underestimate: there's no credible scenario under which all or even most of the deaths in a bloody, messy war could be neatly individually documented, not to mention accessible to foreign researchers over the internet. That's like counting individual raindrops and adding only the drops you counted to produce an estimate of total rainfall. A proper statistical study would be expected to come up with a much higher number; an order of magnitude difference is probably not unreasonable. That doesn't prove the Lancet study was proper; perhaps other criticisms are more serious. But this is the only one I feel able to comment on and the fact that they included it without pointing out that it is comparing an apple with a raisin does not give me confidence. (Neither does your description of these documents as "hilarious". I don't see any hilarity there. I do smell an ideological agenda.)
This may be unfair of me, but I can't help feeling suspicious of the fact that IBC hasn't done more to counteract this widespread—I'd even say universal, based on what I've seen—misuse of their data for absurd lowballing of the damage caused by that war. They say their motivation is to do justice to the human tragedy of the war. Shouldn't they be the first to object to dishonest uses of their work which obscure how tragic it was?
As a last note (and as a last chance for the pathetic down voters that lack better ways of arguing :-) ):
I Googled. There really is some guy that wrote a book and claims that the embarrassing Wikileaked internal US data is a conspiracy! :-)
He had an article up at one of the usual left extremist sites (alternet? zmag?). Sorry, should have written this when I read it.
He also ignored the obvious reality check from IBC and why the needed conspiracies to hide them isn't visible in the Wikileaks documents.
(E.g. where the Hell are all the dead buried?! How could they get most every doctor to keep quiet -- if the Lancet report is correct, any larger hospital morgue in Bagdad should see almost as many dead as the whole country's official statistics!? Why weren't death certificates given out (important in Iraq)? Where are the hundreds of thousands maimed -- and who made their prostheses?! Etc)
Also, I doubt there is discussion of why the Wikileaks lacked information of the conspiracies to influence the other measurements with larger data sets than Lancet. And the conspiracies needed to keep hiding e.g. data about all the maimed, predicted by the Lancet report, after US left. And so on, ad nauseam.
I doubt he covers the serious academic criticism.
And probably no discussion of the simple solution -- idealists lie... Hell, lots of researchers fake results just to get published.
I still predict you will like the book... :-)
What I learned from this discussion: The US extreme left/right are equally crazy.
I still chuckle when I think about your claim that all are in denial, except left extremists... Thanks for that.
I might add that Iraq Body Count has a bit funny history.
First, they were criticized by the Bush administration for overcounting. Then by the extreme left for undercounting!
Now the Wikileaks report, which I linked, discuss this -- so the internal US data is out! They are a bit higher than the low counts, still far from the Lancet report.
No signs of the conspiracies needed to hide the missing effects discussed by the IBC reality check (link above).
This change the subject of the discussion.
The question now is: Did the Lancet report authors cheat? Or just the local interviewers? Their data was totally wrong and the authors defended it like a bear mother defends her cub.
If they are honest, you'd expect a mea culpa and discussion about why their data is wrong.
But we won't get any public discussion of the Wikileaks from them -- any more than they discussed the IBC reality check (see discussion above).
As I wrote above -- idealists lie. This is typical when dishonest people finally are disproved, they just stop discussing the subject.
(The Wikileaks show other embarrassing facts which should be a media scandal getting people sacked, it is hardly a planned leak.)
You still ignore every argument I wrote. Including the internal documents (Wikileaks).
So I'll not add more arguments, just a quick note:
AGAIN -- IBC write explicitly they are a lower bound.
Claims 7-14 times greater than the IBC do need good papers -- from authors that haven't been criticized on moral grounds, for not releasing data timely and doesn't look to have political motives. That is not the Lancet Report...
(And what an organization specialized in polling write about other subjects is not so interesting anyway, but you lack everything else?)
This report is somewhere in the middle, which is most realistic.