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?)
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?