[lbo-talk] Michael Turner picks apart Cooper's "Rorschach" analogy

Stephen Philion philion at hawaii.edu
Fri Oct 13 21:03:23 PDT 2006


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.



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