Debunking 8 anti-war myths #2

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A study released in March of 2003 by a British medical journal, the Lancet, showed that 100,000 civilians had been killed as a result of the US invasion.

To be perfectly frank, it's hard to see how anyone who has even a passing familiarity with statistics could take Lancet's numbers seriously. Fred Kaplan from Slate explains:

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Bingo! What Lancet was in effect saying was that they believed 98,000 civilians died, but they might have been off by roughly 90,000 people or so in either direction.

Moreover, other sources at the time were coming in with numbers that were a tiny fraction of the 98,000 figure that the Lancet settled on. From a New York Times article on the Lancet study:

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"The 100,000 estimate immediately came under attack. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw of Britain questioned the methodology of the study and compared it with an Iraq Health Ministry figure that put civilian fatalities at less than 4,000. Other critics referred to the findings of the Iraq Body Count project, which has constructed a database of war-related civilian deaths from verified news media reports or official sources like hospitals and morgues.

That database recently placed civilian deaths somewhere between 14,429 and 16,579, the range arising largely from uncertainty about whether some victims were civilians or insurgents. But because of its stringent conditions for including deaths in the database, the project has quite explicitly said, ''Our own total is certain to be an underestimate.''

Via GlobalSecurity.org, here's another Iraqi civilian death estimate:

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"On 20 October 2003 the Project on Defense Alternatives estimated that between 10,800 and 15,100 Iraqis were killed in the war. Of these, between 3,200 and 4,300 were noncombatants -- that is: civilians who did not take up arms."

Given all that, how any informed person can buy into Lancet's numbers is simply beyond me.

Source for lie #2 including links.

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Re: Debunking 8 anti-war myths #2

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Imagine reading a poll reporting that George W. Bush will win somewhere between 4 percent and 96 percent of the votes in this Tuesday's election. You would say that this is a useless poll and that something must have gone terribly wrong with the sampling. The same is true of the Lancet article: It's a useless study; something went terribly wrong with the sampling."

Not exactly. Based on what they're saying above, a study that found 95% confidence that Bush would win between 4 and 96 percent of the vote, might then estimate that he would get 50%. Which would be pretty close.

It's probability and statistics, which they have to use because no-one counted the dead. The 95% confidence interval refers to the statistical distribution (whichever distribution they chose) and margin of error. It's important, but the mere fact that the authors of the study used statistics doesn't render their estimation useless.

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So... what number of civilian deaths would you find acceptable, McG? 10,000? 40,000?

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Nice phrasing there Drew. I find none of them acceptable, however I find the numbers from iraqbodycount.com to be the general accepted ones as being CORRECT.

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OK. Current count by iraqbodycount.com at 12:33 CDT is between 22,787 and 25,814.

Myth debunked.

The Bush administration is truly righteous, because civilian deaths have not reached 100,000.

Good work there, McG.

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DrewDad wrote:

OK. Current count by iraqbodycount.com at 12:33 CDT is between 22,787 and 25,814.

Myth debunked.

The Bush administration is truly righteous, because civilian deaths have not reached 100,000.

Good work there, McG.

Perhaps you should do a little research before getting all sarcastic.

Try a search on A2K for how many times the 100,000 number has been used to exagerrate the liberal message.

That's the point of this. To clear up the repeated myths that liberals have been using to make the US seem to be the evil empire when in fact all they are doing is spreading propaganda to the gullible.

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Quote:

To clear up the repeated myths that liberals have been using to make the US seem to be the evil empire when in fact all they are doing is spreading propaganda to the gullible.

Oh how I love to misread things.

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"Spreading propaganda?"

LOL.

Have you read your own posts?

Again, great work McG. You're truly soooo different from those hated liberals.

Remember. Jesus loves you, and shares your hatred of homosexuals.

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FreeDuck wrote:

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To clear up the repeated myths that liberals have been using to make the US seem to be the evil empire when in fact all they are doing is spreading propaganda to the gullible.

Oh how I love to misread things.

Hmmm... well, you know what I meant... Laughing

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I do know what you meant, but I still enjoy reading what you wrote.

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Re: Debunking 8 anti-war myths #2

McGentrix wrote:

A study released in March of 2003 by a British medical journal, the Lancet, showed that 100,000 civilians had been killed as a result of the US invasion.

It's a myth that Lancet did a study?

ROFLMBO.. you need to learn how to use the English language first McG then we can move to statistics.

Now when it comes to statistics it uses % of likelyhood. A nice slieght of hand to try to destroy the stats Lancet used. Something that is 95% likely between 8000-194000 would be 90% likely between 50,000 and 150,000 and 80% likely between 85,000 and 115,000.

The study did show that it was MOST likely that 100,000 were killed in Iraq. The study is about 80% sure that it was close to 100,000. That is clear enough for me to bet on it.

You go on to use figures from iraqbodycount but ignore their statements that their figures are LOWER than actual because they only take confirmed deaths.

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http://chronicle.com/free/2005/01/2005012701n.htm

Quote:

Reassessing the Evidence

The reception of the Iraqi mortality study by scientists has been far friendlier than by the news media.

Scientists say the size of the survey was adequate for extrapolation to the entire country. "That's a classical sample size," says Michael J. Toole, head of the Center for International Health at the Burnet Institute, an Australian research organization. Researchers typically conduct surveys in 30 neighborhoods, so the Iraq study's total of 33 strengthens its conclusions. "I just don't see any evidence of significant exaggeration," he says.

David R. Meddings, a medical officer with the Department of Injuries and Violence Prevention at the World Health Organization, says any such survey will have uncertainty because of extrapolation based on small numbers, and because of the possibility that people gave incorrect information about deaths in their households.

"I don't think the authors ignored that or understated" those factors, he says. "Those cautions I don't believe should be applied any more or any less stringently to a study that looks at a politically sensitive conflict than to a study that looks at a pill for heart disease."

The uncertainty leads to the breadth of the so-called 95-percent confidence interval -- in other words, the 95-percent chance that the number of deaths in Iraq resulting from military activities is between 8,000 and 194,000.

Critics like the Slate writer seized on that range, says Dr. Woodruff, the government epidemiologist. "They thought, 'Well, it's just as likely to be 18,000 as 100,000.' That's not true at all," he says. "The further you get away from 100,000, the probability that the number is true gets much smaller."

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55% of dead Iraqis dead are women and children under 12 years old not to mention 1758 U.S military

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That's interesting Amigo. Where did you come upon the fact that 55% are women and children?

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You want to know my sources do you.Would it matter.No matter what you show the Right wing thell deny it.The'll deny till were standing on a pile of ashes that was our country arguing about the facts. P.S. you live in a great city beautiful in the summer only not long enough.Tocoma sucks

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If you don't share the facts, how can anyone know them? Anyone can make stuff up and post it on an internet chat forum.

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Your right.Damn!It will take to much time to go back and find my source.Next time McGen

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DrewDad wrote:

OK. Current count by iraqbodycount.com at 12:33 CDT is between 22,787 and 25,814.

Myth debunked.

The Bush administration is truly righteous, because civilian deaths have not reached 100,000.

Good work there, McG.

I could be wrong, but you seem to be implying that only zero civilian deaths is acceptable in war.

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Re: Debunking 8 anti-war myths #2

FreeDuck wrote:

Quote:
Imagine reading a poll reporting that George W. Bush will win somewhere between 4 percent and 96 percent of the votes in this Tuesday's election. You would say that this is a useless poll and that something must have gone terribly wrong with the sampling. The same is true of the Lancet article: It's a useless study; something went terribly wrong with the sampling."

Not exactly. Based on what they're saying above, a study that found 95% confidence that Bush would win between 4 and 96 percent of the vote, might then estimate that he would get 50%.

How do you get this result? It doesn't appear to be a confidence interval, since it's not an interval. Please sketch the derivation for me.

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Brandon9000 wrote:

DrewDad wrote:
OK. Current count by iraqbodycount.com at 12:33 CDT is between 22,787 and 25,814.

Myth debunked.

The Bush administration is truly righteous, because civilian deaths have not reached 100,000.

Good work there, McG.

I could be wrong, but you seem to be implying that only zero civilian deaths is acceptable in war.

You are wrong. I was making fun of McGentrix.

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Debunking 8 anti-war myths #2

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