http://www.cjrdaily.org/politics/debating_the_body_count_in_ira.php

If it is accepted that Saddamn ‘violently’ killed 500K over time in his regime, what of the increased mortality rates from poor hygiene, inadequate health care along with environmental pollution leaching into the average Iraqi dietary & living space? Are those considered natural or excess deaths. Or will we blame the US for imposing sanctions that led to coarsened living conditions. I’d like to see the Lancet address that, but I won’t hold my breath.

The problem with modeling war deaths is tenous on many levels.
1) Planning for war, we were solemnly caustioned that given SoDamn Insane‘s WMD capabilities, we could experience up to 200K Coalition fatalities, hence the excess number of body bags. I’ll give you 3 guesses on who led the charge on this front in demanding that we prepare for planeloads upon planeloads of returning dead.

2) It was also projected that there would be massive outflux of refugees pouting out of Baghdad and other hotspots into primarily Jordan and to a lesser extent into Syria among other neighboring countries. Along with the flood of humanity, diseases would run rampant and the corresponding death toll. Where are we on that scientific metric?

3) Anbar region has been a hotspot for clashes. So if the Lancet polled 1000 people there and gets high counts of ‘excess’ deaths which more or less correspond to official body counts of clashes. How does that correspond to milder regions? Apparently the Lancet has no qualms about applying the same ratio to those regions. Somehow, I detect a dissonance in applying that ratio to the Kurdish region that is experience high economic growth rates and peace relative or better than most US metropolitian areas. That the Kurds make up what % of the Iraqi population?

4) The anti-American portion of Iraqis are well aware of the media value in ‘exposing’ American collateral damages/deaths. Why aren’t we baraged daily with 40+ deaths at the hands of Americans? Haditha, the cold-blooded rape & murder of a girl and family by soldiers, the missile attack on the ‘wedding’ party and others come to mind. Occam would say what we get reported are pretty much it, hyperbole (the wedding party was all family & friends, not a group of terrorists having a get together) notwithstanding.

5) That the media can’t get out and report all the deaths is pure BS. After all every so often we are treated to live documentations of violent deaths by Reuters, AP and other news outlets where the media just happened to be filming in the immediate vicinity. What, the media can witness live executions by the insurgents, but going out and reporting on actual body counts is too dangerous. Yeah, right and I’ve got a bridge for sale.

6) So if the contention is that bodycount.org’s tally is too low, even a 25% under-reporting is still less than 100K, which by the way is the bottom-range of the Lancet error margin. This is an interesting numbers game. I wonder if I can recreate the formula:
1) Take a hot region, get an average death rate, apply it to the 28 million Iraqis. Call it the high end.
2) Take the bodycount.org number, juice it up by a ‘scientific’ error margin. Call it the low end.
3) Find the median value. Wait for the ‘scientifically’ desginated date of maximum impact before election day to ‘soberly & solemnly’ issue a press release.

Yep, that’s the ticket

The authors made two decisions, neither of which is catastrophic but taken together they destroy randomness of the sample and thereby invalidate the study.

First, they relied on word of mouth to pre-announce the study, and its purpose to households before they arrived at the door:

“By confining the survey to a cluster of houses close to one another it was felt that the benign purpose of the survey would spread quickly by word of mouth among households…”

As I said, this is not necessarily a problem as long as this in no way affects the way a household responds to the questions, invites outside influence, or affects the samples.

Second, they allow households to decline participation. Page 2:

“…or those that refused to participate were passed over until 40 households had been interviewed in all locations.”

OK, now we have a problem. Households can decline participation since they know what is being asked. This may not even be an intentional attempt to skew the results, it may just be that people that did not have any deaths in the last five years felt no reason to talk. It may also be that a local authority was encouraging them not to participate without the knowledge of the survey team. I give the survey team the benefit of the doubt and assume they tried their best to be impartial. (Why do all this work if you suspect the results are invalid!)

This method can be very precise, but it is of vital importance that the sample truly be random. This is difficult enough without a glaring error like this, and given this error the survey is worthless. I do not give the authors the same benefit of the doubt. Only a fool could produce this paper without seeing the flaw.

One piece of data that could help explain how serious this problem was is number of households that refused to participate. With this data we could re-run the analysis assuming there were no deaths in that additional sample. That data is not in the paper.
-jcp-

And I quote: As a first stage of sampling, 50 clusters were selected systematically by Governorate with a population proportional to size approach, on the basis of the 2004 UNDP/Iraqi Ministry of Planning population estimates (table 1). At the second stage of sampling, the Governorate’s constituent administrative units were
listed by population or estimated population, and location(s) were selected randomly proportionate to
population size. The third stage consisted of random selection of a main street within the administrative unit
from a list of all main streets. A residential street was then randomly selected from a list of residential streets
crossing the main street. On the residential street, houses were numbered and a start household was randomly
selected. From this start household, the team proceeded to the adjacent residence until 40 households were
surveyed. For this study, a household was defined as a unit that ate together, and had a separate entrance from the street or a separate apartment entrance. (page 2-Burnham etal. Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional clustere sample survey, Lancet).

Remember the investigators have no idea who lives in any given house or the number of deaths that have occurred in the household. The death certificates only serve as corroboration of the number of deaths elicited verbally during the interview. I guess people could go out and procure death certificates for all sorts of reasons other than someone died.