PEACE:
Foreign Policy & Terrorism | November 24, 2004
IRAQ
WAR
DEAD
ESTIMATE
CONTROVERSY
A
Posting in "Comments
From Left Field"
You
might find this interesting, as I did -- a question from a
friendly Midwest blogger about the Lancet
study (PDF)
using
statistics to estimate the number of Iraqis killed during our
intervention in Iraq. Criticisms vs. the study were raised by an
article in Slate, and those criticisms were (I think) well
answered by an article in Crooked Timber. First the question I
got (with the links); then my response...
I
was discussing this
article from Slate by Kaplan
who disagreed with the methodology.
However, someone responded with a link
that argued that the criticisms weren't valid.
From what I can understand, the dispute was centering around
whether the regions were representative and whether the 95%
confidence margin was too wide to invalidate the poll. They seem
to be in dispute about what even the key "rules" are
to determining this sort of thing so I know I'm out of my league
arbitering it.
OK,
I've had a chance to read both articles. When I was reading the
first, I was making mental notes; and lo and behold, the second
author (in Crooked
Timber)
made the points I was thinking of, and several others and better
than I could.
The first author raises a good point about the wideness of the
confidence intervals; the second author correctly points out
that the most likely value in a confidence interval is the
central value -- the likelihood of other values in the range
drops off dramatically the farther away you get from the central
value (giving rise to the characteristic "bell curve"
describing a "normally" distributed population -- basically any large population). It's just much more likely in
an honest sampling to get a value, say, 1 point away from the
average than 2 points away; much more likely to get a value 2
points away than 3 points away; and so forth.
You can conduct an experiment yourself: Try flipping a coin ten
times. You'll probably get heads five times. You're less likely
to get heads four or six times, and you're a lot less likely to
get heads three or seven times -- try repeating your ten-flip
experiment several times; I bet those are the results you get
(of course, you could just get "lucky" and get heads
every single time; but that's highly unlikely, by common sense
and statistics, describing the real world).
I might only add that the wideness of the confidence interval
should give us more, not less, confidence in the researchers:
They are erring on the side of caution, not recklessness, by
reporting such a wide range.
The sampling method seems to me (not an expert on stats, just a
student of the fascinating subject) to be reasonable, for all
the reasons the second author cited. His minefield analogy was
brilliant: You can see how such "cluster" sampling
(sampling randomly selected neighborhoods nationwide rather
than, say, every tenth person all across the country -- an
impractical alternative to this cluster method, a historically
reliable method) will tend to UNDERestimate, not overestimate,
such "rare" events as violent death -- you're
"lucky" to hit any pockets of such unusual occurrences
(assuming that violent deaths are "unusual" in the
population -- even during wartime most people don't get killed,
which is why we're looking at these estimates).
Personally, I think the authors of the study should have
included, not excluded, the data from the neighborhood that
their random sampling happened to select in Falluja, even though
it showed a much higher death rate than elsewhere in the
country: Of course it did, because it was a center of
resistance; and it was not the only place in the Sunni Triangle
that was so inclined and so hard hit -- that's the whole point
of cluster sampling over the whole country (the samples selected
by random global positioning points) -- if you're in a
"minefield", you're going to hit a "mine"
every so often (to use the second author's analogy).
The comparison by the first author of death rates in a pre-war
study (whose possible and perhaps probable sources of error are
examined by the second author) with pre-war estimates in the
second study is not terribly useful: The two studies were very
much unlike, in methodology and focus (ex. infants and adults),
so it's rather like comparing apples and oranges (If the Lancet
study had used such comparisons, its critics would really be
having a field day). What's more the issue is how significantly
death rates have increased, using the same methodology and
samples etc. in the Lancet's pre- and post-war analyses. And as
the second author points out -- and as common sense dictates -- the death rates in Iraq have evidently increased significantly
and probably dramatically with the war and its aftermath.
The issue of "lying Iraqis" seems the strongest to me;
however, the second author points out that in at least 81% of
the cases in which the veracity was challenged, there were death
certificates available to back up the reports of deaths (One
could assume all sorts of conspiracies from there onward, but
there is apparently no evidence to contradict this finding). The
data appears legitimate.
And the second author does well in quickly debunking the
comparison of the Lancet findings with the confirmed death
totals reported to the media; obviously, in wartime, a lot of
deaths go unreported -- again why we have to try to estimate
deaths from the best samples we can get.
How many people -- civilians, combatants, civilian/combatants --
have died in Iraq because of the war? No one really knows or
ever will know with a great deal of precision -- that's the
nature of warfare, down through the ages. Regardless of how it
has been over-hyped or legitimately or incorrectly critiqued,
this study does seem to make a serious attempt, using legitimate
and time-tested methods, to give us some sort of idea of the
real human cost of our intervention in Iraq, most likely
measured in the tens of thousands of lives.
I must add, however, that if we are to make a full accounting
that we must add in the deaths (not to mention maimings etc.)
resulting from the additional interventions our government has
made in Iraq over the years (primarily to maintain a stable
supply of oil): Our government helped install and maintain
Saddam Hussein, who used murder as a tool not only to maintain
power once he got in but also to gain power in the first place,
which was well known to our government at the time; our
government backed Hussein in the Iran/Iraq War, which he started
and which resulted in the deaths of some one million people; our
government backed Hussein when he gassed the Kurds (An infamous,
contemporaneous photo even shows Rumsfeld shaking Saddam's hand;
and components and/or delivery systems for the poison gas were,
I believe, supplied at least in part by American companies,
under the supervision of our government); and our government
encouraged the Shiites in the south to revolt after the first
Persian Gulf War, then stood by and allowed Hussein to slaughter
them (resulting in those mass graves we've heard so much about).
We've had the blood of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis on our
hands for decades. Ironically, by getting rid of Saddam (who no
longer was a cooperative puppet), we are "cleaning up a
mess" that we had a big hand in creating. Hopefully, we
will make things better for the common Iraqi people in the
long-run; but I doubt they will have a government that will be
much less of a cooperative puppet than that of Saddam Hussein
pre-Gulf War I.
As Ronald Reagan so bluntly put it, our interest in the Middle
East can be spelled in three little letters: "O - I -
L".
We ain't invadin' the dictatorial republic of No-oil-istan.
Today, Iraq; tomorrow, Iran. What's a consonant between friends?
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