The war on Iraq has made moral cowards of us all
POSTED BY: Ghoulman
UPDATED: Sunday, August 23, 2026 21:35
VIEWED: 11894
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The problem is that with that confidence interval they projected. The figure since beginning of invasion could be anywhere from 8000 to 194000. You can't just pick the median in there and say that's it. The real number is even odds somewhere in there, anywhere.
Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
I looked at the full Lancet article. Despite some objections, the statistics appear to be quite robust. For example, in the reporting period before the invasion, one person died of violence in about 7400 people, while in a (slightly longer) reporting period, 21 people died of violence in about 7800 people. This EXCLUDES Falujah, where an additional 51 people died. (Falujah was excluded because it is a statistical anomaly on shouldn't be projected onto Iraq as a whole). Now, I don't care how you cut those stats... pre-invasion violence stats may have been slightly under-reported, but you could quadruple reported pre-invasion violence deaths and still come up with a 500% increase in deaths due to violence since the invasion.
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Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
But let's assume that you are correct in generlizing that every single male between the ages of 15-60 was an insurgent. What does that say about our popular support in Iraq??
I did not categorize all males 15-60 as insurgents, nor did the Lancet article. I was just pointing out that categorizing all casualties as civilian (as in the Guardian article) is incorrect based on the very research about which they were writing.
Also note that the Lancet used the word "combatant" rather than "insurgent". Combatants would be anyone fighting, which could include members of the former regime's military and paramilitary, and also members of the interum government's military and police forces.
It is interesting how "100,000 deaths" has morphed into "100,000 civilian deaths", and how that morphed again to "100,000 civilians killed by Coalition forces", and then to "The vast majority of dead are women and children, and they were bombed (deliberately targeted using "smart bomb" technology)". I can't find support for any of this in the Lancet article. As an example(analyzing figures from their Table 2), excluding Falluja, the breakdown for violent deaths (from all causes, not just bombing) is men=61%, women/children=29%, elderly=10%. Including Falluja, where urban fighting and bombing have been much more prevelant than the norm (again as noted by the report), its men=52%, women/children=45%, elderly=3%. I'd rather it be 0% across the board, but neither 29% or 45% is a "vast majority".
"Keep the Shiny side up"
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(General comment on this thread)
I appreciate that we're addressing the very
real horrors of war, and the real maiming
and deaths (oh, wait - are we counting maiming and
severe bodily damage? We should be!)
So thank you for putting this information
where folks can see it. Important reality check.
Now. That being said...
Oh oh BABY -- all this
methodology talk!
Sexy stuff ;-)
I'm so proud of our brainiac browncoats :)
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Quote:
Originally posted by firefloozysuzie:
(oh, wait - are we counting maiming and
severe bodily damage? We should be!)
Just deaths. IBC project states that they decided the information available on injuries wasn't detailed enough to accurately determine how many were severe. The Lancet study only looked at deaths, probably also because of the difficulty in quantifying severe vs. non-severe injury based on interviews.
"Keep the Shiny side up"
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Quote:
Originally posted by firefloozysuzie:
Oh oh BABY -- all this
methodology talk!
Sexy stuff ;-)
I'm so proud of our brainiac browncoats :)
100000 is a number from those who's job it is to monitor then give as accurate a figure as possible. This comes from those who have no American agenda.
Disputing figures from the most accurate source possible is an exercise only Americans think is acceptable.
It isn't. In fact, all American sources of information are tainted and considered untrustworthy.
The job of the Neofascists is to "spin" whatever truth about the Bush Junta and thier insanely murderous War against Islam into anything but what is plainly stated - like 100000 dead women and children.
See how the bozos in this thread completely avoid talking about the shame and rage that is missing from our twisted neofascist culture to just shit on what are accurate facts?
The American media, owned by three monster corporations who support the Bush neofascist movement, spins all facts just like the bozos here do. It's a sickness that has spread into every American home. CNN and FOX never define facts and present them but simply repeat over, and over, and over, the spin from the neofascists. A spin that has nothing to do with the facts.
Facts like 100000 dead women and children.
Well, I'm here to express my shame.
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100000 is a number.
It's a number being thrown around b/c of faulty assumptions, leading to faulty sampling methodology, and together with shady interpretations made for really really horrible bad "science".
The real number based on their non-random and ridiculously small sample sizes is something in between 8000 - 194000. But they opted for taking the median and just inflating that figure. The dumbasses in the media who doesn't understand the basic statistics in those figures (let alone the horribly mangled sampling experiment) just regurgitated it for their own aim.
This isn't spin, this is basic statistics and failure of "scientists" to conduct basic sampling and research. This is the kind of stuff that we all hate if it were to be done in something like drug trials. This is manipulation of the results to further your own person aim.
BTW, while the publication is in the Lancet in England; The research is done by a team of Johns Hopkins University in Maryland and led by Les Roberts of -> USA.
Is this no agenda, or non-American agenda?
Quote:
Lancet editor Richard Horton said: "Democratic imperialism has led to more deaths, not fewer. This political and military failure continues to cause scores of casualties among non-combatants."
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This does have something to do with the thread but not necisarily(sp?) with the immediate discussion.
It can't be denied that the media is bias, CNN only came out with the slitghest report of civilian casualties once the war was 'over'. This might not sound as too dramatic but just look at it and you can see the selfcensorship.
However my main point here is something else.
I do think it's possible that a 100,000 poeple were killed during and after the invasion of Iraq. But if Saddam and his sons and whomever after that was allowed to rule would (with about 95% certainty) have killed just as much poeple.
We all know the story of the young boy who's house got hit by a stray bomb and lost his limbs and family in the process. But then again if you look on the internet you can find videoclips of Saddams 'traitors' being executed by having explosives detonate in their anus.
My point is that if we didnt go into Iraq we would have allowed a whole lot of suffering and now we went into Iraq we caused a whole lot of suffering.
I hope I will never be in a position wherein I have to choose between either, but in the meantime I hope to see the true picture and pray for forgiveness if my inaction has caused suffering along the way.
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Apparently *someone* would rather believe that a
compliment paid recently was meant to be some sort of insult. Apparently *someone* must have had one of those
nightmarish childhoods where every compliment was a criticism about to happen.
The point of my post:
Back-and-forth debate about methodology is dry and difficult to
follow for anyone who has not studied methodology and statistics.
I applaud you both for trying to
explain the strengths and limitations of these Iraqi casualty estimates to the rest of us.
I am impressed.
The BOTTOM LINE is that:
Too many Iraqis were killed.
Too many Iraqis were maimed.
Too MANY men, women and children died... because America stormed in to
(how did Bush express it at his press conference this morning?)
Oh...right: "Spread freedom"
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Here's what a sort of layperson's explanation of what Lancet claims to be the result of their study - which the media at large unthinkingly just republish. No, the Lancet article did not purposely distort the truth. The numbers are all right there, their basic methodology is all right there. It's just that the publishers never bothered to examine it or even to look at it carefully. Shame on them.
Here it is:
let say you walk by a bakery and fancies a particular delectable piece of pastry thru the store front, but the price is nowhere to be seen. You send your buddy in to investigate. Your buddy sets up this rather ridiculous experiment to "sample" the customers that happen to be in the store to get their "opinion" on what the price for that piece of pastry is. He comes back and reports that. Well, the price is exactly $250,000.15 (CI: $3.25 - $500,000.00). And you say:
"Holy cow!, $250,000.15"
Then you look at the little thing with in between the parenthesis and you say. "Oh, so you weren't exactly sure from your sampling that it was $250,000.15". It's really something in between $3.25 and $500,000.00.
Then you ask your buddy. "Why d'ya pick $250,000.15?"
"I don't know, I trusted the people who told me the prices close to $250,000.15 more. They just looked more honest, and it is about in the middle"
But you wonder, since there is about 2% chance that it could be any single number in that range.
And why that ridiculous range in the first place?
How can I use this kind of results when it's all over the place?
The answer is, you can't. Any good scientist who get result like this would fail to conclude either way and cannot affirm the original hypothesis.
The answer is, the only good thing that came out from that study is a perfect illustration of why good intentions but cast in flawed studies will result in a failed experiment. This should be a text book case study for a beginning statistics class.
To put it another way, would you give weight to a drug trial where the fatal rate was 0.1% (CI: 0.015% - 20%) That's as high as 1 out of 5, but for some reason they just decided to go with 1 out of 1000. Shrug, it's within the range.
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THANK YOU!
That actually helped a lot.
Made me crave pastries as an unfortunate
side-effect (LOL) but really, now I don't feel
as confused. Mucho gracias.
Susiefloozy
Semi-Informed Layperson
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