The first Lancet study on the number of dead in the Iraq war came out just about two years ago; the authors pioneered a very difficult technique, which relied on direct interviews of Iraqi households, asking about family members who have recently died and how they died. Death reports were documented by official death certificates. At that time, the study estimated that 100,000 Iraqis have died in that war, most of them as the result of actions by coalition forces. Our son Alex reported on that study for This American Life, the public radio show at which he is a producer; he did an excellent job of explaining, clearly and persuasively, the relatively difficult statistical methods that the researchers used.
Last week, the authors of the Lancet study released their follow-up study, which used the same techniques and a larger sample of Iraqi households. Their results, which have been widely reported, indicate that the total Iraqi death toll from the war comes to well over half a million.
The Lancet study has been widely criticized, of course, by apologists for the war. The IBC, the Iraq Body Count organization, is by no means an apologist for the war, but they have become the de facto independent source for body count statistics. Their numbers are compiled from official pronouncements and published news stories; while they are considerably higher than the ridiculously low, and constantly changing, numbers that the administration drops when it pleases them, the IBC numbers are still an order of magnitude smaller than the numbers in the Lancet study. IBC is not pleased with that study, and they’ve issued a press release challenging it. But, on careful reading, the IBC’s criticisms seem to boil down to “I can’t believe it; it can’t be that high!” Lenin, on the blog Lenin’s Tomb, has done a point-by-point analysis of the IBC press release, and summarizes his findings:
The whole thing [i.e. the IBC refutation of the Lancet study] is an enormous and misleading exercise in circularity, a massive raise of the eyebrow, a titanic exercise in obfuscation. They cannot touch the study for methodology, they cannot find anything in it that is badly done: not a single cluster wrongly placed, not a single false extrapolation, not a particle of evidence of any fraudulence or fecklessness. They hazily refer to possible bias, but on the basis of nothing more solid than that this would explain away the uncomfortable implications that they draw. As Daniel Davies points out, the chances of the Lancet authors obtaining the sample they did, if the facts were much closer to what the IBC records, are so low that it would have to be fraud. The IBC cannot and do not make this accusation….
To IBC’s credit, their press release concludes with the telling point that we should not need to know that 655,000 died, that even IBC’s own lower estimates are enough to provide “all the necessary evidence to deem this invasion and occupation an utter failure at all levels.”
Update: Deltoid reports that the Senate has just passed a Congo relief bill that uses, in support of the need for such an effort, a mortality study that was also published in the Lancet and that uses the same cluster analysis technique as the Iraqi death toll study.
