1. Michael Turner responds' to Cooper's poopooing the Lancet study
modeled after standard US Military studies in similar situations
around the world:
<http://marccooper.com/655000-rorschachs/#comment-137313>
http://www.jhsph.edu/publichealthnews/press_releases/2006/burnham_iraq_2006.html
Is a death certificate a “Rorschach Blot”? It seems that 92% of
the households reporting a post-invasion death in the family were
able to produce one.
This study is a Rorschach Blot mainly for people who don’t know a
whole lot about statistics. The way this result is reported — even
on the above-linked page–is yet another indicator of how abysmally
English is still used when talking about statistical study
results. You can’t accurately say that the study says that there
were “at least” 655000 excess deaths when the study itself holds
out a 5% chance that the numbers are less than 400,000 or greater
than 750,000. There’s a difference between “uncertainty” and “open
to any interpretation”, however. If the study’s methodology was
reasonable, there’s only one interpretation: the number of excess
deaths in Iraq greatly exceeds what it was under Saddam.
Now, that might seem incredible to those of us raised on stories
of the harrowing Ba’athist regime. Consider: death rates were
about 5 per 1000 before the invasion. That’s not good. But think
of it in personal terms. Most of us have about 200 names in our
little black books, personal e-mail folders, and extended family.
How many of us should have scratched off one of those names
because the person died some time in the last 3 years? Maybe
something like half of us. If the rate were to quadruple over a
3-year period, we’d notice, of course, but life wouldn’t grind to
halt.
What would make life grind to a halt is fear of going outside lest
you become one of those morgue statistics. And that’s what’s
happening. I read a heart-wrenching story recently in the Int’l
Herald Trib, about kids in Iraq having to abandon their plans to
go to college, and having to cut loose of friends who had become
too radicalized along sectarian lines. I should be weeping tears
for Congolese civil war victims, and Sudanese in refugee camps,
not middle class kids in Baghdad. I guess. But those people in
Congo and Sudan would have had pretty rotten lives anyway, and
mostly for reasons not having to do with our direct involvement.
Dreams are dying in Iraq BECAUSE of the U.S. invasion, an invasion
predicated on lies. The death of human beings on a significant
scale is serious, but such losses can be given meaning given the
right outcome. The death of dreams on a large scale can be far
more serious: it is what led from the Weimar Republic to the Third
Reich. For every person dying unnecessarily in Iraq, the dreams of
ten more may be missing in action. And that would guarantee Iraq a
very grim future indeed.