100,000 Iraqi Civilians have died in current war
 

I thought the following article was very interesting, especially since it appears in the highly prestigous Chronicle of Higher Education:
http://chronicle.com/temp/email.php?...5m3h7noo5ikert

The stance of Bush and the Pentagon seems to be "if we don't know about it, we don't have to care." As the article itself notes, look at the widespread outpouring of sympathy and assistance for the victims of the Tsunami's versus the public's almost total indifference to the news of the deaths estimated by this study. :eyebrow:

At least we liberated them from the hardships of living in war-torn Iraq.

Sympathy and assistance for the living. :cool:

On the eve of a contentious presidential election -- fought in part over U.S. policy on Iraq -- many American newspapers and television news programs ignored the study or buried reports about it far from the top headlines.

I don't recall the major party candidates differing substantially on the war. A better Dem candidate could have argued US policy but with his voting record Kerry couldn't.

Well Madame Albright took credit for 500,000 deaths during sanctions so perhaps we are seeing an improvement here.

Why don't they just make the number up? It will have the same impact.

You probably didn't read the entire article. It went on to describe the sampling techniques used, and how they were well within the criterea for sociological/scientific studies. The article also noted that this same researcher was the one who made the estimates of the numbers killed in the Rwandan Civil War and that these estimates were widely accepted as being accurate. The 100,000 figure is within a 95% confidence level of being the correct one.

I read the entire article and was unimpressed. No I do not believe the number. Partly because despite the fact that they found somebody to say the guy's methodology was sound, to me it seems utterly ludicrous. But mostly because without a massive coverup, it would be impossible to kill that many people without having bodies littering the landscape that somebody would notice. Even the non-rebuilt hospitals would be full.

Why would someone use "sampling techniques" instead of an actual body count? Besides, statistics should only be applied to recurring events as they tend to zero in on the liklihood of an outcome over a number of observations.

I think, for example, there is more than a 99% confidence interval that the winning lottery ticket was not, in fact, a winner. Over time, the "99% of the time the ticket will not be a winner" conclusion will be proven correct. But you can't take an average and apply it to a single observation. At best, its meaningless and at worst, its very misleading.

Its been my experience that when stats meets politics, hold your nose.

"Lies, damn lies, and statistics."

Yeah- It makes more sense not to have a count at all- especially when the numbers aren't well liked.

Flippant

The pentagon refuses to do a civilian body count. A body count which comes from an Iraqi source would be automatically suspect. Thus, it was left to a highly respected researcher from an American university to investigate the true number of civilian deaths in the war.

In case you haven't noticed, private Americans are not exactly welcome these days in Iraq. Thus, westerners cannot just show up at Iraqi funeral homes and ask them how many war dead they are burying today. Even the Iraqi's who helped gather the data were frightened if it got out that they were working for an American researcher. Death certificates were requested (and supplied 63% of the time) of those households which answered positively to having a war inflicted death among its members in the past year.

I think possibly you are misunderstanding the principles of statistics. I"ll buy that lottery ticket which has a 95% chance of being a winner since you don't want it.

As for where are all the dead bodies? They buried them.

Under normal combat situations there will be two injured for every one dead. Under bombing situations the ratio could be higher. Where are the 200,000 injured? Where are the hospitals full of crying patients with missing limbs? Where are the photo ops for the insurgents? How could such a thing be covered up?

Interesting. So you think this survey is probably the "lottery winner" survey that falls outside the 95% confidence area, and moreover the real number is below, not above, that number.

I guess that's the attitude of most people buying lottery tickets. Though the average lottery ticket has a much lower cost.

Under "no medical facilities" situations the ratio could be lower.

To reiterate what UT said earlier, the actual figure, taking into account only sampling error, was 101,000 plus or minus 93,000. When your error bars are of the same magnitude as your data points, you don't have data; you have junk.

You don't understand statistical sampling. Here's a rough graph of what the results show. The probability (0 - 1) of any given number being the correct one is a point on the y-axis, the number of casualties (1 - 300,000) is a point on the x-axis. When graphed, you get the following bell shaped curve (sorry it ain't prettier, but I've got work to do):

Shouldn't that 300,000 be 200,000?

yeah, I just threw it in there as the extreme with 0 probability. like I said it's a quick and dirty just to give people a basic understanding of how the numbers work.

I _do_ understand statistical sampling. They didn't give the confidence interval for that range, unfortunately. But I think you've drawn your curve with too small a std deviation.

And remember that's considering only statistical sampling uncertainty.

Hey, what do you want from a sketch drawn on a Domino's pizza napkin while at the same time going over notes for my next lecture? Next time I'll send it in for peer review, first. Good to know someone else around here understands sexually transmitted diseases among deviates! :D

Seriously, anyone who questions the sampling methodology or linear regression techniques used should at least take a look at the original paper published in The Lancet. http://www.thelancet.com/home
Registration is free and the document can be found here:
http://pdf.thelancet.com/pdfdownload...1264.1&x=x.pdf

The conclusions this study draws have grave implications regarding the US conduct of the war. Dismissing the data without even looking at the source is not what I would have expected from educated people who honestly want to understand what is happening in Iraq.

So is accepting the data. It's bullshit on its face, and you want to believe it so hard.

All it takes is a little numeracy and a functioning bullshit detector, not a degree in statistical analysis.

At one point they claim to have seen death certs for a majority of the dead. If there are certs, the information has been documented and can be confirmed. Where are the hospitals with this information? How do they have time to process the injured and dead to the point where they can document them? This is a similar number of dead in an area much smaller than the area affected by the tsunami. Hussein required mass graves to bury a similar number over many years. Where are the graves? Where are the fuckin' wounded? Where are the fuckin' bodies already???

"On the 25th of September my focus was about how to get out of the country," he recalls. "My second focus was to get this information out before the U.S. election."

I wonder why the pundits say it was political?

May I add, "DUH" ?

If it were true, wouldn't it be best if it were revealed before the election? That's hardly indicative of anything.

They decided where to take the samples and couldn't so they took them where they decided they shouldn't. :eyebrow:
Take a national poll of who will win the Supe...Big Game but you can't do in nationally, so do it just in Philly. Yeah that will be accurate. :rolleyes:

You may indeed add "DUH." Only about 1/3 of Iraqi war related deaths occur in hospitals. When checking data from funeral homes or morgues the problem is that these entities do not list whether the dead were combatants or members of the civilian population. Your questions about the reliability of both hospital records and about what the Iraqi government might say about the percentage of death certificates that were for innocent civilians are valid points. This is why the researchers used the technique of having Iraqi surveyers go door to door and ask detailed questions of the respondents. This study was scrupulous in its evaluation techniques to seperate out combatant versus civilian dead.

A major concern has also been whether there has been a rise in infant mortality rates pre and post Saddam's rule and the advent of the war. Many women no longer go to hospitals to give birth due to security reasons and the researchers wished to see what, if any, impact this has had on infant death rates.

Finally, why do you assume that voters of whatever political persuasion would have no interest in a valid estimate of Iraqi civilians killed in the war? Perhaps you are concerned that the researchers' conveying the information that US soldiers who had accidently killed civilians actually went to the families of the deceased and apologized, would have swung voters to the Republican side? Good thing this was not widely reported and Kerry got elected after all. :eyebrow:

The quote doesn't indicate that it wouldn't swing the election. The quote indicates that the researcher's interest was blatantly political, which in turn suggests a political bias to the study.

If I had become convinced that a hidden massacre was going on, my second concern would be notifying the UN or world press in an attempt to stop it. Swaying an election in which both participants had a nearly identical policy to how to further manage Iraq? Low on my priority list.

100,000 in a country of 24,000,000 is 1 in 240. Who would kill that many, and how? Indiscriminate bombing has definitely happened -- mistakes were made -- just not THAT many.

That number of deaths would have been noticed before this guy made his excursion. Iraq is a violent place, sure, but is functioning as a society to the point where it can notice such things. Even the insurgency is sophisticated enough to notice and promote such things. They feed their own media, and once in a while ours, with their own propaganda. Civilian tragedy makes every news feed in the world. It would have been noticed.

And by the way, who risks their life to that level to bring back statistics? Doesn't the bare fact that he made the trip make you suspicious of his numbers?

And hey, on that point... isn't it ironic that his cover was blown multiple times as this blue-eyed westerner goes around collecting information, through what is apparently an unheard-of level of violence, and yet -- through the chaos of 1 in 240 killed -- he makes it out of the country somehow unscathed without protection from anyone but his translators? The mere fact that his head is not separate from his body is evidence contrary to his so-called "findings".

...But only one of whom was directly responsible for the current situation.

The researchers never call these fatalities a "hidden massacre." That is your label, and, interestingly enough, your perception of the study results. The publication of the research findings in the highly prestigous British medical journal, Lancet, is surely one way of attempting to draw attention to the situation by the UN and the world press. Perhaps, the report was met with too many responses such as your own?

Actually the CIA Factbook gives Iraq's 2004 population as over 25,000,000. Are you saying those civilians deaths were carried out on purpose?

I'm sure the Iraqi's noticed it, but that was just propaganda, right? The US military refuses to do civilian body counts, so they were REFUSING to notice it. Obviously, civilian tragedy in this instance gets ignored, since the most reputable study of it in Iraq to date was pretty much ignored in the media at the time it came out. So far as I know, The Chronicle of Education is the only outfit that has pointed this omission out.

This same man risked his life tallying the dead in the civil conflict in Rwanda where his estimates were widely accepted by the UN and the rest of the world. He is an expert in his field. Geologists and seismologists risk their lives and have even been killed studying volcanic activity. No one questions their research, as a result, however.

I'm not sure where you get your "multiple times." He kept an extremely low profile and hired Iraqi citizens to do the actual surveys. Perhaps his survival has something to do with his authenticity as a world renowned social scientist?

It would be a hidden massacre. The percentage population gone would be hundreds of times higher to Iraq than 9/11 was to the US.

They are claiming 183 deaths per day. Assuming a 2:1 injury to death ratio that's 549 people dead or injured per day! And we haven't even mentioned yet that half the country was basically at peace so the killing would have to be kind of concentrated, and impossible not to notice.

In Fallujah we went into full out urban warfare and killed about 800 in a couple of days. The entire resistance is estimated at about 15000.

Why would we kill that number of people? Bad aim?

Here is the Slate article that helps to debunk this crapola

Oh yeah, another reason it was ignored: people, and especially the media, seem to have realized that news items released 2-3 days before the election have a high probability of being bogus because everyone in the world has an interest in swaying the election.

If the Lancet really wanted to do a job of it, they should have published two weeks out. That way even if the numbers are crap, the issue gets water cooler time and some people will believe it and push the election on that basis.

OK, now I've looked at the study. That range is the double-ended 95% confidence interval (excluding Fallujah). That's not so great. Then you get into the problems with methodology, which UT has outlined quite well.

Furthermore, I see no claim in the study that these were civilian deaths. That appears to be someone else's addition.

The study is junk.

From the introduction on page one of the study:

One project has kept a running
estimate of press accounts of the number of Iraqi citizens
killed by coalition forces: at present, the estimated range
is 13000–15 000 (http://www.iraqbodycount.net). Aside
from the likelihood that press accounts are incomplete,
this source does not record deaths that are the indirect
result of the armed conflict. Other sources place the
death toll much higher.14 In a recent BBC article decrying
the lack of a reliable civilian death count from the war in
Iraq, Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch purports that it
will not be possible “to come up with anything better
than a good guess at the final civilian cost”.

In the present setting of insecurity and limited availability
of health information, we undertook a nationwide
survey to estimate mortality during the 14·6 months
before the invasion (Jan 1, 2002, to March 18, 2003) and
to compare it with the period from March 19, 2003, to
the date of the interview, between Sept 8 and 20, 2004.

One hopes that your comprehension of statistics is better than your reading comprehension, especially if your profession requires the use of statistical methods. Frankly, I have no problem with the 95% cl. Maybe you wouldn't either if you actually read the paper.

Nowhere in the study does it say that the mortality counts they measured was limited to civilians. In fact, they explicitly say it was not:

"Many of the Iraqis reportedly killed by US forces could
have been combatants. 28 of 61 killings (46%) attributed
to US forces involved men age 15–60 years, 28 (46%)
were children younger than 15 years, four (7%) were
women, and one was an elderly man. It is not clear if the
greater number of male deaths was attributable to
legitimate targeting of combatants who may have been
disproportionately male, or if this was because men are
more often in public and more likely to be exposed to
danger. For example, seven of 12 (58%) vehicle accident related
fatalities involved men between 15 and 60 years"

No, once again, trying reading the words you yourself have quoted. "Could have been" is not the phrasing one would use to state "explicitly" that these were combatant deaths. In fact, the studied only counted the deaths of those who had resided at home for two months or longer prior to their death. Look at what your quoted segment goes on to say: 46% were children younger than 15 years.

The researchers are actually making the point as politely as possible that the claim that these might be combatant deaths is a dubious one. Look at the very next paragraphs after that quote:

Just why is General Franks leaving the US open to international criticism in this regard? What is he attempting to hide? Could it be 100,000 dead bodies?

It wouldn't be possible to hide 100,000 dead bodies.

Is that so. :eyebrow:

I just don't think its a good idea to accept a conclusion about a single event based solely on statistical evidence. The lack of direct emperical evidence in a case like this is beyond conspicuous. And the margin of error is unacceptably high. And the number is just too damn even. And the timing was funny. And And And

I am not interested in the likelihood of 100,000 fatalities but rather the actualhood of a real body count. Somebody needs to either cough up 100,000 corpses or admit that they pulled the number out of their rectum to provide Kerry some more swing votes.

What's that line from The Manchurian Candidate? I have evidence of 57 documented communists in the state department ...

Same logic that said those aluminum tubes MUST be for weapons of mass destruction. How many people died in your hometown this week? Where are all the dead bodies? Clearly no one has died. The newspaper must have lied.

Do you still believe what the president's spin doctors tell you - or will you finally admit that looting did happen? How many people died even because the hospitals had no equipment and no antibiotics? It must be zero because even the looting did not happen.

UT when are you going to admit that peer reviewed papers provide responsible facts and that the administration constantly lies? We even have these myths about Social Security. The administration spin is 15,000 dead. Nonsense. Same people lied so egregiously as to get us into a war of no merit. The study says 98,000 dead. There is a responsible figure with so much credibility as to appear in The Lancet. Who should we believe - reality or the 'feelings' of UT? Where does the administration put up any facts to dispute this? They cannot and and don't try. That alone is damning evidence.

So where are the weapons of mass destruction? You still believe them to be honest? To say how many have really been killed? And I guess you also see a light at the end of the tunnel? Clearly the White House also must have an exit strategy - or did they invent that also?

The best numbers we have say 98,000 dead - and that the administration is only lying ... again.

And so we took body counts in Vietnam. But when the body counts were summed, one reporter noted that we had killed every N Vietnamese soldier ... three times. But you want body counts. Fine. Just remember, the statistical studies were more accurate. Some instead first learn from history.

Statistics that meet peer review are more accurate than any body count from a war zone. How many died in Rwanda? Clearly they lie because no one counted the half million dead. Rwanda is clearly another scam just like the manned moon landings. Just another way to deny reality. Demand body counts. Then the almighty George Jr must be right.

When the 'powers that be' don't like facts, then they demand the absurd. Its called spin. Your demand for bodies is a classic effort to undercount the dead. Why would you so dishonor such good human beings? Why do you so hate innocent Iraqis?

We have an honest assessment of the dead with a 95% confidence level. Furthermore the assessment met the requirements of The Lancet - that is not trying to cover its political ass. Instead you would believe something that the George Jr administration says? Where is the credibility - and weapons of mass destruction that they invented? 98,000 dead is the honest number. Those who believe Rush Limbaugh types just know that must be wrong. They just know and then make absurd demands. We killed every N Vietnamese soldier three times. The body counts prove it. No wonder you want a body count. Its called denial.

There went your credibility.

So an actual civilian Iraqi body count would produce a figure of 300,000 fatalities. Well I suppose you would then suspend your problems with the accuracy of body counts since it would buttress your dislike for all things W.

Intellectual flatulence and tin-foil-coated logic is no substitute for common sense. Unless, of course, you don't have any.

"Not everyone wants democracy." - tw, two weeks ago

We bow to this remarkable visionary who truly understands how things are.

Actually, most of the senior military leadership were NCO's and Jr Officers in Viet Nam - the war of the body count. They saw firsthand what happens when body counts are a priority. body counts make the headlines, then they take on a life of their own. at some points in the war there were body count expectations, so patrols would go out, pop off their loads and because it was impossible to accurately count the dead in the jungle - they applied a simple formula - X number of rounds multiplied by XX% = # of dead enemies.

as young men they saw the foolishness of such methods and refused to allow it under their command, first in Desert Storm, then Afghanistan, then Iraq.

I know you're being sarcastic but that is a true statement. I'd bet a months pay that Saddam doesn't want it. :biggrin:

I am glad tw escaped his abductors.

Yeah, Bruce? And? (This is a 5 year old American child)

Minor point: The Vietnam body count was about enemy combatants. The controversy in this case is about civilian ones. I don't think our boys would go shoot off rounds in the streets of Baghdad to inflate the counts.

Wow. My friend's kid had to wait until he was 10 to get his own. Outshoots adults at matches

(He had a single shot .22 at age 5 or 6, and I think mom and dad have started his 4 year old brother already.)

The difference being that the latter child is at a shooting range with a bunch of other people shooting at paper targets.*

The prior picture is of a child being indoctrinated to kill the infidel/invader.

*And I'm jealous too, I wish I had somebody with the money to buy me a CAR-15...

Since you cannot prove your point, you instead post irrelevant facts? What is your point? That democracy proves those 98,000 were not killed?

Schrodinger's Cat makes some good points about the reliabiltiy of that study published by The Lancet. UT 'feels' the facts must be wrong. Therefore the facts are wrong? Again, were is the logic?

Its easy to hide 100,000 bodies. They get buried. 25 million people will have no problem burying 100,000 bodies. But statistics - asking those people who died - can count those buried bodies - as the study published in The Lancet has done.

Whether this election was a success isn't decided today, or tomorrow or in 3 months time. It's if the country doesn't colapse into civil war within 6 months of US troops leaving. Of course it looks like they'll be going east not west.

No T, the aluminum tubes are 2.5 years past relevant, and from now on, each time you mention them I will include your quote about Democracy in my following post. Let's have a lesson on shelf-life.

Please keep posting it. For that matter, include a phrase that I owe you an apology. I always enjoy a good joke.

Not everyone wants democracy. Democracy cannot be imposed. If everyone wanted democracy, then democracy would be thriving in places like Hati, Zimbabwe, Vietnam, and Myramar.

You swore those aluminim tubes were for weaspons of mass destruction because you just knew - facts be damned. Same reasoning used to challenge Schrodinger's Cat. You just know he is wrong - which really only insults his thoughtful responses. To just know something - facts be damned - is also called 'intelligent design'.

If you have problems with the 100,000 dead due to America, then put up solid facts that dispute that well researched and peer reviewed citation. As demonstrated previously, even body counts in a war are not as accuratae. Please explain the morality in killing 100,000 Iraqis. Please explain how the looting also did not happen. Please explain what happened to all the phase four planning - necessary so that people do not die.

Once we eliminate those administration lies and the "I know it must be wrong - therefore it is wrong" reasoning, then we are left with a fact. America caused the death of about 98,000 Iraqis.

When asked when US troops can pull out, the administration becomes coy. They don't want US troops out of Iran 1+ years from now. Those troops will be necessary for the invasion of Iran - and to create the instability to justify an invasion of Iran. George Jr administration has declared their objectives quite clearly. They intend to 'fix' the world. They have listed the countries they intend to impose democracy upon. They call it 'moral'. History calls it a 'crusade'.

That's insulting to me. That's not what I was doing here and not what I did with the tubes. I thought what I thought with the tubes because it was the best explanation given the information I had. To be complete about it, at the time, I listed all the information that I had.

But I was wrong!

I often am. I admit this so freely. It was in my user title for a while.

It does not, however, mean that I am wrong each time you bring them up. As proof, each time you do I will bring up something you wrote that you were wrong about. I have many choices, this is only the most recent of them.

The problem is that people end up arguing belief systems. By definition, you can't argue a belief. We have far too little hard data and far too much nebulous, anecdotal reporting in regard to the Iraqi situation. The study in The Lancet is the first one I have seen that uses solid research methodology and has actually been subjected to peer review.

I am not happy to read its results. If Undertoad or Richlevy or anyone else knows of a reliable study which shows a smaller civilian death toll, I would be delighted to see it. The US military seems very proud of its precision weaponery. If US weapons and technology are indeed as precise as claimed, General Franks should be able to firmly assert a minor loss of civilian lives. Instead, he refuses to make any comment either way.

As a scientist, I am left with only the Lancet article to go by.

tw: It is unbelievable, the disjointedness of your posts. Be it the fact that english may not be your first language, your thought processes carry more emotion than is necessary, or any of a host of mental ticks...your thoughts are rambling, disjointed, and serve to slash your credibility. Which is a shame, because you have made good points in the past, fogged by the rest of whatever paragraph they were in.

Shrodinger's Cat: You're relying too much on a single study. The Lancet, although peer reviewed and respected, is not infallible. One single study by one statistician, whatever his methods, does not constitute an entire ironstrong moral argument toward the idea that 100,000 civilians have been killed. The Iraqis don't live in huts and caves; they are documented citizens and records will eventually show how many have gone missing and been killed. As a scientist, you should respect the ideal of holding each and every study up to the light before you form a solid opinion.

Undertoad: Every single thing you have said in this thread, should be taken with a grain of salt. You, along with everyone else here, have offered no cites to any of your statistics (2:1 injured to killed, 1/3 combatants, etc). These are random, random numbers. Everything you've typed appears to be primarily motivated by "feeling" and logic, with no thought to the fact that conventional logic can't possibly apply to a situation where you speculate on a country your government is currently at war with. Like it or not, every statistic you are exposed to has a political bend, everything on the news is calculated. Regardless of what you believe, this sphere of influence DOES affect your conclusions. This is not conspiracy theory jargon, this is the nature of modern journalism and society.

How can you be sure that 100,000 bodies cannot be hidden quickly? Buried in mass graves, burnt, carried off? You also assumed that the study focused on deaths caused by Americans, which is false, unless I'm enormously mistaken. Included in that figure should obviously be civilian deaths as a RESULT of the war, including those caused by insurgents.

Now, personally I believe far less than 100,000 civilians have died. Hell, the researcher hired Iraqis...what stopped them from inflating the figures? How does HIS credibility extend to the Iraqi employees he hired to collect the numbers?


But, what is the point? This conversation breached the realm of debate long ago. I would wager both sides are ironfast in their convictions, regardless of what statistics appear (likely uncited ;) ) in the rest of this thread.

<b>CB:</b> 2:1 injured to killed is a rule of thumb. It's NOT random. In every war we have fought, including this one, the ratio is much higher even - more like three or four injured to one killed.

The paper claimed that most of the deaths were due to violence and most of the violence was coalition air strikes. If you drop a 500-lb bomb on something, the thing it hits will die, as will everything within 20 meters. Within 500 meters there is a chance for death or injury. If you kill 100,000 people with bombs there will be a massive amount of very obvious damage and people will missing limbs and eyes and shrapnel leaving quarts of blood in the streets. People will notice, and report on it.

The paper claimed that most of the people killed were women and children. But bombs simply don't discriminate in this way. This is not violating math and statistics, it is violating common sense. I don't attack it from the perspective of what it takes to create a good study because I'm sure it IS a good study. And I'm 100% certain that we could examine back issues of The Lancet and find studies that were equally well-received and peer-reviewed in great detail... that were completely incorrect.

The truth laid bare
Hypocritical, incompetent, corrupt, liars, thieves and vandals.

The area of Iraq is 438,317 square km.
The population is (1997) 22,219,289 people.(1)

This puts the overall population density at 51 people per square km.

Take into account that half of the country is mostly uninhabited, contrasted with the fact that large numbers of the populace fled urban areas during the war, and you get a populated area of about half of the whole country (2)

22219289 / 219158 = 101 people per square km of inhabited country

So what if you wanted to map 100,000 dead?

100,000 / 219158 = 0.45 people per square km = less than 1 person per 2 square kilometers.

Take Baghdad alone. Population density of 950 people per square km (3)

That means Baghdad is 5900 km (give or take, this is based on a combination of two of the above cites). If 100,000 deaths occured in Baghdad alone, you'd have 17 dead people per square kilometer, obviously clustered in areas that have been bombed.

These statistics are certainly trivial and not properly devised, but they illustrate (to me at least) that you wouldn't have buckets of blood flooding the streets, with 100,000 deaths.

With 950 people per square km, assuming that you killed all of them, in order to kill 100,000 people in Baghdad alone you would have to carpet-bomb 105 square km of Baghdad, or roughly twice the area of Manhattan. Again, I think someone would take notice.