the 655,000 is debatable. 1 million is an exageration.

still the invasion of iraq has resulted in a tragic loss of life and property.

a useful comparison can be made to the number of iraqi’s killed by saddam’s regime. when the invasion has killed more iraqi’s than saddam hussein then it can be asked if the iraqi’s are really better off.

And the Chomskyite website, Medialens, (whom I agree with on many issues) got it completely wrong in several ways. That was unfortunate, because much of the misinformed mythology that’s emerged over the issue originated with them.

For example, Medialens wrote:

“Whereas the Lancet report estimated around 100,000 civilian deaths in October 2004, IBC reported 17,000 at that time.” http://tinyurl.com/povn9

That’s incorrect in two ways. First, the Lancet study didn’t estimate “civilian” deaths as Medialens claim. Secondly, IBC record only violent deaths, so the comparison should be between 57,600 and 17,000. But even that isn’t comparing like with like, since IBC do not include combatant deaths, whereas the Lancet study does.

Medialens’s criticism’s of IBC were mostly erroneous. For example, they wrote:

“IBC is not primarily an Iraq Body Count, it is not even an Iraq Media Body count, it is an Iraq Western Media Body Count”. http://www.medialens.org/alerts/06/060314_iraq_body_count.php

That’s completely wrong. IBC use non-media sources (eg hospital, morgue and NGO data) and non-Western media sources. They monitor 72 major “non-western” media on a daily basis, along with 120 “western” sources.

Even Medialens’s dichotomy of Western/Non-Western media shows ignorance of how media organisations such as Reuters function in Iraq (for one thing, they rely on Iraqi reporters for data gathering).

Of course, IBC’s incomplete count is often misrepresented by the mainstream media as an “estimate”. Medialens got that part right. But they seem to overlook the fact that the Lancet authors misrepresent IBC in the same way, as is demonstrated by this quote from Burnham/Roberts in a prominent article for Slate magazine:

“President Bush stated that 30,000 ‘more or less’ had died. The president’s estimate roughly matched the estimates of Iraq Body Count, which derives its total by monitoring newspaper reports of violent deaths. Today, IBC estimates there have been 45,000 to 50,000 violent deaths.” http://www.slate.com/id/2154203/

Now, compare that quote from the Lancet authors with one from the London Times (10 Dec 2006): “[IBC] put the number at about 50,000 civilian deaths, although its estimates rely on previously published sources.”

You can appreciate the irony when you realise that IBC were accused (by Medialens supporters) of being “war apologists” for not spending more time contacting the Times to correct this notion of “estimates”.

IBC became a convenient scapegoat in a very unpleasant and misinformed campaign. Of course this had roots in the frustrations people felt over the lack of accountability in the media for the mass slaughter in Iraq. That doesn’t excuse the ineptitude and nastiness which surrounds this issue, but at least its underlying causes are understandable. Sadly, as a result of the hysteria, anyone who criticises the Lancet studies in any way is likely to be labelled “pro-war”.

Taking a break or retiring completely from the debate may be a cop-out. But the reason is simple - to deal with the issues at a level that the subject deserves would take far more time than I have right now.

1. The Lancet 2004 (L1) estimate for violent excess deaths was 57,600. (The publicised figure of 100,000 was for excess deaths by all causes, not just violence). This figure excludes the Anbar governorate.

The Lancet 2006 (L2) data provides an estimate (for the period covered by L1, excluding Anbar) of 112,500 -126,000 violent excess deaths, approximately twice that of L1.

The fact of this serious contradiction between L1 and L2 is little known for two reasons: a) the *violent* deaths figure for L1 wasn’t published in the Lancet paper itself, so few people were aware of it. The source for the figure is Richard Garfield, co-author of L1 (http://www.epic-usa.org/An_Interview_with_EPIC_A.html); b) The Lancet authors presented L1 and L2 as corroborating each other based on figures for deaths by *all* causes. This was somewhat misleading as it conflates violent deaths with non-violent.

2. Contradiction between Burnham and Roberts on MSB. Gilbert Burnham states that there was “an effort to reduce the selection bias that more busy streets would have” (http://tinyurl.com/yltzr8). In other words he concedes that there is such a bias, and claims that the sampling methodology specifically took account of it. Les Roberts, on the other hand, simply dismisses the idea of such bias: “Realize [for MSB to occur], there would have to be both a systematic selection of one kind of street by our process and a radically different rate of death on that kind of street in order to skew our results. We see no evidence of either.” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/6099020.stm). In another interview Roberts was even more dismissive of MSB, declaring that he had “never heard” of such a bias occuring on busy streets, in all his years conducting such surveys (I can’t find the link for this interview, but it should be easy enough for someone with the time to dig up. I remember Roberts’s wording clearly as it struck me as directly contradicting what Burnham said on the issue.

Note, however, that Burnham and Roberts were in agreement over their claim that their sampling methodology was designed to give “each separate house […] an equal chance of being selected”. But they have yet to indicate *HOW* they achieved this (the sampling methodology as published in the original Lancet study certainly wouldn’t achieve it) - despite being asked repeatedly by other reseachers in the field. In other words, their reponse to the MSB criticism has consisted largely of unsupported assertions - they haven’t demonstrated how they randomly selected houses well away from streets intersecting main streets. And clearly the burden of evidence is upon them to do so (especially since Burnham concedes that there is a bias on busy streets).

Here are some useful links (eg to peer-reviewed, and other, papers which criticise the Lancet study. None of these are from Neocon apologists, but from leading experts in the relevant fields:

http://www1.cedat.be/Documents/Working_Papers/CREDWPIraqMortalityJune2007.pdf
http://www.icrc.org/web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/html/review-868-p943
http://www.hicn.org/research_design/rdn2.pdf
http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Standards.pdf
http://www.bepress.com/ucbbiostat/paper237/
http://www.warc.com/LandingPages/Generic/Results.asp?Ref=819
http://www.gdnet.ws/middle.php?oid=237&zone=docs&action=doc&doc=9026
http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Mainstreaming.pdf
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~jewell/lancet061.pdf

Ray, keep up the good work searching daily for any blog that mentions the words Lancet and Iraq and then calling everyone involved a liar.

And MLster, I’m not going to go through every point you made because it would take up too much time - time that I would rather spend on the main focus of this blog which is China. I will however question your first two points and then go no further.

1) Since you have both Lancet reports in front of you, please explain why you believe “L2″ gave twice as many violent deaths as “L1″.

2) When did Les Roberts say he had never heard of main street bias? The only references to this I have seen him make have been to explain why he believes the survey took this into account and how the researchers avoided it.

You don’t need faith in the absolute correctness of the Lancet studies to support the political view that you and I (and millions of others) share on this point.

And when even the two Lancet studies are themselves in complete disagreement on violent deaths (L2 estimates twice as many for the same period as L1), your faith starts to look suspect.

Lancet co-author Burnham has answered some criticisms satisfactorily, but on some issues (including “main street bias” and the discrepancy between L2 and L1 on violent deaths) his responses have been not only woefully inadequate, but have contradicted the responses made by his colleague Les Roberts on the same points (for examples he said that they’d take main street bias into account in the design of the sampling method, whereas Roberts asserted that it wasn’t an issue and that they’d never heard of such a bias).

And there are now at least five peer-reviewed studies which are seriously critical of Lancet 2, but none which corroborate its findings (the ORB poll wasn’t peer-reviewed science).

I think you have to take some of the criticism of the Lancet studies seriously if you don’t want to come across as just another “true believer”.

Yes yes yes, it’s easy to ignore the facts because they don’t fit comfortably with your view of your home nation as benevolent - always the ‘good guys’ - but the truth is that the western imperial nations (US/UK etc etc etc) are all, without exception, totally malignant. Exporting violence with impunity is their bread and butter - without the arms trade none of them would have power, and whether committing the violence themselves or merely supplying the means to commit violence to despots and enemies of democracy around the world, they’re always part of the picture somehow. Quite often it’s the UK’s FCO or the US CIA/NSA handing over intelligence to mercenary groups employed by corporations in old imperial colonies to exploit the local resources and population. This is not the rosy ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ tinted view that most Brits want to see, but it’s the truth.

The Lancet studies BOTH destroy that mythical worldview, but it’s about time people weren’t able to bury their heads anymore and accept responsibility for their governments actions.

If you REALLY wanted to know the truth about the Lancet/Orb studies then you’d read some of Les Burnham’s refutations of the slanders against his work and not use phrases like ‘main street bias’ so easily. Tsk… lazy.

Over 6,000,000 murdered and counting…

Eh, no the study contradicts the 2nd of two JH studies. The 2 JH studies do not corroborate each other to begin with. The 2nd one gets twice as many violent deaths as the first for the same period, and shows non-violent deaths going down while the first one said they went up. The IFHS estimates 150,000 violent deaths while Lancet said 600,000 violent deaths. This is also while the IFHS adds in upward adjustments which Lancet did not, meaning the difference is even greater than appears.

Your link to the Socialist website claims that we are supposed to believe that because IFHS found more non-violent deaths than Lancet did, that this is supposed to somehow make their estimates more alike, literally, claiming we should view apples as oranges, in order to bring about some thing thread of “corroboration” for Lancet.

“Theo, “I don’t think” is not credible refutation”

“Because I say so” is not a credible basis of allegedly “scientific” facts demanding of a “credible refutation”. I don’t believe the Lancet study did the interviews it claims. I don’t believe they viewed death certificates. I don’t believe they “accounted for main street bias”, or anything else. Can you give me a credible reason to believe any of these claims?

“The death certificates were not issued by the central government - they were issued locally. The government, like the entire country, was in such a state of chaos and had so little control of the country it simply did not know how many certificates had been issued at a local level.”

Can you provide any proof for this claim Rob? Or is it just your theory that needs to be true to prevent the obvious conclusion about the Lancet? I don’t believe you have any actual evidence for the claim above, just as there is no actual evidence for the claims of the Lancet study itself.

“The majority of those interviewed for the Lancet survey did just that - show the death certificates.”

Why should I believe they did that? The Lancet survey sent an Iraqi doctor whom nobody knows and who hides himself from journalists and others out to do interviews. He did this with “anonymous” help from others who were supposedly doctors. They were allowed to _destroy_ all the data on where and who they supposedly surveyed so that nobody could actually check to see if they actually did anything they claim, or if any of this was properly randomized. They then handed this absurd data to the US authors who gave it to Lancet who chose to believe anything they said and “review” calculations based on that faith. The basis of these claims is not science. It is faith-based, accepting as science “We say so, and no you can not verify anything we say.”