THE US, THE UN AND IRAQ, ELEVENTH THREAD

ican wrote:

We must win and succeed in Iraq, because we Americans will suffer significant losses of our freedoms, if we do not win and succeed in Iraq.

As always ican your full of crap. We didn't lose freedom when we got our butts kicked in Vietnam and we won't if we lose in Iraq. The only way we will lose our freedom is if we let the neo-cons scare us out of our wits and we surrender it to them. If that happens than we deserve to lose our freedom.

...

I don't think you understand Lancet's methodology at all. Here's Jane Galt:

http://www.janegalt.net/archives/009519.html

...

Cycloptichorn

October 17, 2006
From the desk of Jane Galt:


Illegitimate arguments about the Lancet study
Sorry I've been away from my computer lately. Life, y'know.

Anyway, I've been catching up on the Iraqi death count commentary. There are a lot of arguments out there on both sides, many of them bad. I thought I'd highlight some of the problems, starting with my own side:

The study doesn't agree with the Iraq Body Count This is not by itself convincing. The Iraq body count is, +/- 50% to allow for reporting errors and double counting, the bottom bound of the number of dead civilians. I, and others, have argued that the ratio of alleged dead in the Lancet study to the number of dead people counted by the IBC is too high. But the number of dead is, in my opinion, almost certainly substantially higher than the number being recorded by the IBC.

There is something wrong with the statistical method There doesn't seem to be much problem with the analysis. If there is a problem (and obviously I think there is) it's in the data collection.

The death rate for pre-war Iraq is lower than that of the US or other developed countries. The median age of Iraqis is very young; half the population is under the age of 20. Young people who do not have access to drugs and cars die at a low rate. Infants don't, but infant mortality numbers are undoubtedly at least slightly depressed by counting births we would count as live births as stillbirths.

The sample is too small. It doesn't seem particularly small to me. It would be nice if we could interview everyone in Iraq, but not practical. For many of the constituent death rates, the samples are too small--it's unlikely that we could really extrapolate, say, cancer deaths from the Lancet figures. But for the big causes--violent deaths, non-violent deaths, total deaths--the sample seems perfectly adequate.

And from the other side:
It's entirely possible all these people are dying without death certificates, which is why there's no official record of them. The Lancet study alleges there were death certificates for 92% of the people it interviewed. So do other sources from Iraq, which say it's very hard to bury someone in a cemetary without a death certificate. In urban areas, people aren't just tossing Grandpa in the backyard and planting some ornamental hedges over the body.

There is absolutely no passive count which is at all useful in checking this survey I just don't buy it. If 92% of responders produced death certificates, check the government figures. If the central government doesn't have them, the provincial government will, at least according to this Iraqi doctor:
And by the way, most cemeteries in Iraq would not accept a body without a death certificate, unless the bodies are buried in mass graves or backyards without reporting them to health authorities (look at this to understand why), which in this case the government would regard them as ?'missing.' While working in hospitals and health centres in Iraq, it was sometimes my responsibility (when the late-night doctor was unavailable or, in some cases, sleeping) to oversee the checking in of corpses at the hospital and to issue a death certificate indicating the cause of the death. No certificate is issued without a body, and it is required that several copies are kept. IDs of dead people are shredded at the spot and their names are removed from their family's food ration cards. The Ministry of Health should have access to certificates issued throughout the country over the last 3 years. And both the Defense and Interior ministries have their own counts. Now why isn't any independent body looking into that information?

Even if the provincial government doesn't, check the cemetaries. And the hospitals and doctor's offices. If you can't get a good population for the hospital or cemetary (unlikely; this is not London, where you can't swing a cat without hitting a hospital), you can check the ratio of current deaths to pre-war ones, which should display roughly the same pattern as the study.

None of the people questioning the Lancet study have made a serious question about the study; they're just using "gut check incredulity." This betrays the watcher's ignorance of what a "serious question" is. When an active study implies unrealistic levels of error in passive measures, that is a serious question. When someone asks how you could get a good sample if the country really is that chaotic, this is a serious question. When someone says that the numbers disagree with a study performed by the UNDP using similar cluster analysis, which found less than 1/4 the number of deaths as the Lancet surveys, that is a serious question. When someone asks how reliable a non-random sample can be, that is a serious question. For more serious questions see this post

The official Iraqi death counts are wildly off; this has been known for a long time. Not according to the Iraq Body Count, whose data show that the central government's data is pretty close to dead on.
The same methodology is used to estimate deaths in Darfur and the Congo. And your point is . . . ? Most of the people criticising the study, including me, have never cited death figures for the Congo or Darfur, and as with Iraq, I don't think such things can ever be known with any reasonable degree of precision. The eyewitness reports are enough to tell me that something very bad is going on, and the data collection may be useful to indicate the various kinds of bad things that are going on, but in a country with poor recordkeeping where a lot of people have been fleeing violence for a long time, statistics give false precision. Moreover, Congo and Darfur are both much, much, much poorer than Iraq--Sudan has about half the GDP per capita of Iraq, and Congo has about 20% of the per capita income. That means that even before the civil wars screwed everything up, the institutional structures for counting deaths, etc. probably weren't there. This is less of a problem in Iraq, which should make its death-counting apparatus more effective now, leaving a smaller gap between formal and informal counts. Interestingly, relatively wealthy Bosnia (per capita GDP $6,800) is cited by the authors as the exception to the rule that official counts understate deaths.

Why are critics paying more attention to this than to the Darfur figures? For the same reason the commenters are so emotionally invested in refuting them, when they probably wouldn't bother reading a similar study about Darfur: the outcome of Iraq is politically important in America and Europe. The outcome of Darfur (sadly) isn't.

The same methodology is used in polling Polls aren't very accurate, even though pollsters have much, much, much, much, much, much better data on the people they are calling than the Iraqi surveyors. Their saving grace is that we do a lot of them, so that the errors tend to cancel out overt time. Polls also tend to produce the answers that the pollsters would like, which is one of the many reasons that one never puts too much of a weight on any one poll. Perhaps most importantly, polls don't just extrapolate upwards from raw data and gross demographics of age and sex; they massage their raw data considerably using historical data, of which they have a lot. They also have an accurate passive measure--the actual vote--against which to check their predictions frequently, and refine their method. Obviously, the Iraqi surveyors have none of this.

". . . given all the attention that the study has received?-much of it hostile, and much of it from people with agendas?-the authors just don't want to mess with what would happen if they started sharing their data with strangers just now. I certainly can't blame them for wanting to keep a few things close to their chests for the time being." The idea that scientists are somehow immune from sharing their data because . . . there are a lot of people interested in seeing their data, and some of those people want to challenge their conclusions, is ludicrous. That's how science works.


Posted by Jane Galt at October 17, 2006 6:47 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links"); ?>

Cycloptichorn wrote:

ican711nm wrote:

Cycloptichorn wrote:

Ican,

You are appealing to Authority, a logical fallacy.

You too are appealing to authority. Only in your case, you are appealing to a much lesser authority whose report is self contradictory. How about that for a logical falacy?

I still haven't seen Britannica's data or methodology. Without seeing those, I can't make a rational decision about whether or not their figures are accurate.

You made an irrational decision based on a report that is self-contradictory and that describes a polling process that obtains the unverified opinions of people that may or may not constitute a true statistically accurate representation of the Iraqi population.

Therefore, your argument fails due to reliance on a source which cannot be proven to be true or false. You cannot independently judge Lancet's numbers using a source which doesn't provide methodology or data. There is no reason to believe that their casualty numbers are in fact correct, yet you seem to take them as gospel. Most likely, b/c it supports your position better to do so.

It isn't my argument that fails. It is your reasoning that fails. My source does provide data, lots of data for lots of countries--more than 200 countries in its Britannica Book of the Year 2007, section titled, Britannica World Data.

You and I can independently judge the validity of Lancet's data based on the content of its report without resort to any Britannica reference. As I have already explained, Lancet contradicts its own Figure 4 on page 7 with its own well advertised data given on pages 1 and 6 of its report.

You or anyone else can checkout both Britannica's data and its specified sources (e.g., page 852 of Book of the Year 2007) simply by going to a public library and accessing the relevant Britannica Books of the Year--2004, 2005, 2005, and 2006, and 2007.

You do have reason not to believe the Lancet report--that reason is contained in the Lancet report. You do not have any reason not to believe Britannica's data--data they have been supplying for 22 years, originally for more than 160 nations and currently for more than 200 nations.

Whether you like it or not, the total number of deaths in Iraq since the war started cannot possibly be less than the number of "excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war." But Lancet claims otherwise.


Cycloptichorn

Bullsh*t. Crying about a 27-person difference in statistics which number in the hundreds of thousands is ridiculous.

...

I'll trust the word of people who know something about the subject over the half-assed analysis of a senile old man any day.

Cycloptichorn

First, thank you for your very creative and enjoyable concession to me via your personal attack on me: "half-assed analysis of a senile old man."

Second, the difference between Lancet's claim on page 1--or page 6--and Lancet's claim on page 7, Figure 4, is not "a 27-person difference."

Even this "half-assed ... senile old man" can subtract better than that.

Specifically, I am challenging the validity of the Lancet report based on the difference between the 654,965 number on page 1, and the 113,000 sum computed from page 7, Figure 4 (21,000 +35,000+57,000 = 113,000). That's a tad more than 27--wherever in hell you got that number. That difference is: 654,965 - 113,000 = 541,965.

ican wrote:

We must win and succeed in Iraq, because we Americans will suffer significant losses of our freedoms, if we do not win and succeed in Iraq.

As always ican your full of crap. We didn't lose freedom when we got our butts kicked in Vietnam and we won't if we lose in Iraq. The only way we will lose our freedom is if we let the neo-cons scare us out of our wits and we surrender it to them. If that happens than we deserve to lose our freedom.

xingu wrote:

ican wrote:

We must win and succeed in Iraq, because we Americans will suffer significant losses of our freedoms, if we do not win and succeed in Iraq.

As always ican your full of crap. We didn't lose freedom when we got our butts kicked in Vietnam and we won't if we lose in Iraq. The only way we will lose our freedom is if we let the neo-cons scare us out of our wits and we surrender it to them. If that happens than we deserve to lose our freedom.

The North Vietnamese government never declared their objective was to establish a worldwide caliphate.

The North Vietnamese government never declared their objective was to "kill Americans wherever you find them."

The North Vietnamese never attacked America and killed thousands of American civilians.

The North Vietnamese waged war on the South Vietnamese.

Kennedy/Johnson thought that if they won, the North Vietnamese government would help the USSR spred Communism in Southeastern Asia. They did not anticipate that the USSR would collapse before the USSR could do that.

We will lose our freedoms when, instead of defending ourselves, we fail to stop people who try to take those freedoms away from us.

Which freedoms?

McGentrix wrote:

Which freedoms?

Freedom from gov't intrusion into our lives - embodied by the 4th amendment, which none of you really seem to give a damn about.

Cycloptichorn

Cycloptichorn wrote:

McGentrix wrote:

Which freedoms?

Freedom from gov't intrusion into our lives - embodied by the 4th amendment, which none of you really seem to give a damn about.

Cycloptichorn

Gov't intrusion? You guys are against that?! Since when?

You seem to want more and more gov't intrusion every year.

Tell you what Sparky, don't call any terrorists on the telephone and you have nothing to worry about.

Me, I want them listening for terrorists. I want them to find them and kill them. Or at least give them a stern talking to. If and when the Gov't starts using the TSA or Patriot act to start fishing for lesser criminals, that's when it should come to an end. I know you don't want them listening in on your nightly phone sex call, after all you have to pay for it and they are getting it for free, right?

ican711nm wrote:

Cycloptichorn wrote:

ican711nm wrote:

Cycloptichorn wrote:

Ican,

You are appealing to Authority, a logical fallacy.

You too are appealing to authority. Only in your case, you are appealing to a much lesser authority whose report is self contradictory. How about that for a logical falacy?

I still haven't seen Britannica's data or methodology. Without seeing those, I can't make a rational decision about whether or not their figures are accurate.

You made an irrational decision based on a report that is self-contradictory and that describes a polling process that obtains the unverified opinions of people that may or may not constitute a true statistically accurate representation of the Iraqi population.

Therefore, your argument fails due to reliance on a source which cannot be proven to be true or false. You cannot independently judge Lancet's numbers using a source which doesn't provide methodology or data. There is no reason to believe that their casualty numbers are in fact correct, yet you seem to take them as gospel. Most likely, b/c it supports your position better to do so.

It isn't my argument that fails. It is your reasoning that fails. My source does provide data, lots of data for lots of countries--more than 200 countries in its Britannica Book of the Year 2007, section titled, Britannica World Data.

You and I can independently judge the validity of Lancet's data based on the content of its report without resort to any Britannica reference. As I have already explained, Lancet contradicts its own Figure 4 on page 7 with its own well advertised data given on pages 1 and 6 of its report.

You or anyone else can checkout both Britannica's data and its specified sources (e.g., page 852 of Book of the Year 2007) simply by going to a public library and accessing the relevant Britannica Books of the Year--2004, 2005, 2005, and 2006, and 2007.

You do have reason not to believe the Lancet report--that reason is contained in the Lancet report. You do not have any reason not to believe Britannica's data--data they have been supplying for 22 years, originally for more than 160 nations and currently for more than 200 nations.

Whether you like it or not, the total number of deaths in Iraq since the war started cannot possibly be less than the number of "excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war." But Lancet claims otherwise.


Cycloptichorn

Bullsh*t. Crying about a 27-person difference in statistics which number in the hundreds of thousands is ridiculous.

...

I'll trust the word of people who know something about the subject over the half-assed analysis of a senile old man any day.

Cycloptichorn

First, thank you for your very creative and enjoyable concession to me via your personal attack on me: "half-assed analysis of a senile old man."

Second, the difference between Lancet's claim on page 1--or page 6--and Lancet's claim on page 7, Figure 4, is not "a 27-person difference."

Even this "half-assed ... senile old man" can subtract better than that.

Specifically, I am challenging the validity of the Lancet report based on the difference between the 654,965 number on page 1, and the 113,000 sum computed from page 7, Figure 4 (21,000 +35,000+57,000 = 113,000). That's a tad more than 27--wherever in hell you got that number. That difference is: 654,965 - 113,000 = 541,965.

Ican, Jeez.

The numbers on the left aren't the total numbers of dead per violence per year, it's the average number of dead per violence per year for the entire course of the war.

Look at the right side of the graph - deaths per 1000, averaged out over the entire war.

20 deaths per 1000.

20,000 deaths per 1 million.

500,000+ deaths per 26 million.

Like I said - I don't trust your analysis, b/c it isn't particular well thought-out. Instead of looking for 'gimmes' like you have been, you would be better off buying a statistics textbook and a copy of the SPSS software. A few months of study might give you some added credibility.

Cycloptichorn

It's amazing to me that you would consider yourself able to instantly spot gaping flaws that the authors of the article somehow missed, the reviewers in the Lancet journal couldn't understand, and that everyone else who has reviewed the work didn't see either. Such hubris from one who has absolutely zero training is ridiculous.

Cycloptichorn

Cycloptichorn wrote:

It's amazing to me that you would consider yourself able to instantly spot gaping flaws that the authors of the article somehow missed, the reviewers in the Lancet journal couldn't understand, and that everyone else who has reviewed the work didn't see either. Such hubris from one who has absolutely zero training is ridiculous.

Cycloptichorn

You don't know what my training has been. You don't know what work I got paid lots of bucks to do. You don't know what work I even now get paid lots of bucks to do.

However, this time I was slower than I use to be detecting such flaws. Generally it use to take me only a few hours. This Lancet flaw took me a few days to fully uncover. That's 'cause I'm now a "senile old man."

Where's your compassion for a "senile old man"?

McGentrix wrote:

Which freedoms?

Freedom from gov't intrusion into our lives - embodied by the 4th amendment, which none of you really seem to give a damn about.

Cycloptichorn

The Constitution of the United States of America
Effective as of March 4, 1789
...

Article I
Section 8.
...

The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.
...

The Bill of Rights (1791)
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment II
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Amendment III
No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment V
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Cycloptichorn wrote:

McGentrix wrote:

Which freedoms?

Freedom from gov't intrusion into our lives - embodied by the 4th amendment, which none of you really seem to give a damn about.

Cycloptichorn

Quote:

The Constitution of the United States of America
Effective as of March 4, 1789
...

Article I
Section 8.
...

The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.
...

The Bill of Rights (1791)
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment II
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Amendment III
No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment V
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Listening in on my calls to or from outside the USA during a war is not an unreasonable search and seizure.

They also say no to Tancredo and Biden's three state solution too.

With Iraq being such the 800lb. gorilla in the room I think that pretty much eliminates these two guys as who we need to put Iraq to bed.