Guns and Butter Blog

For those still outraged Seattle peaceniks who think that Bush killed 100,000 Iraqis, they ought to read this piece (link courtesy of Keith Pennock at Discovery Institute) on Slate by Fred Kaplan (who opposed the war) that throws cold water on the "100,000 dead Iraqis" myth that will no doubt soon enter the popular consciousness (just like "Cheney pushed for the war to enrich Halliburton" myth). Kaplan writes:

The authors of a peer-reviewed study, conducted by a survey team from Johns Hopkins University, claim that about 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war. Yet a close look at the actual study, published online today by the British medical journal the Lancet, reveals that this number is so loose as to be meaningless.

The report's authors derive this figure by estimating how many Iraqis died in a 14-month period before the U.S. invasion, conducting surveys on how many died in a similar period after the invasion began (more on those surveys later), and subtracting the difference. That difference—the number of "extra" deaths in the post-invasion period—signifies the war's toll. That number is 98,000. But read the passage that cites the calculation more fully:

We estimate there were 98,000 extra deaths (95% CI 8000-194 000) during the post-war period.

Readers who are accustomed to perusing statistical documents know what the set of numbers in the parentheses means. For the other 99.9 percent of you, I'll spell it out in plain English—which, disturbingly, the study never does. It means that the authors are 95 percent confident that the war-caused deaths totaled some number between 8,000 and 194,000. (The number cited in plain language—98,000—is roughly at the halfway point in this absurdly vast range.)

This isn't an estimate. It's a dart board.

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.

And I would argue that there is another significant problem. We don't know exactly what the death rate for Iraqis were BEFORE the war, because so many Iraqis quietly (or not so quietly) disappeared into the night at the hands of Ba'athist goons. These were clearly murdered Iraqis who were not easily accounted for (many Iraqi skeletons are still being dug up in countless mass graves).

The real story about "Iraqi deaths" should be about just how many hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions, died at the hands of a brutal Saddam Hussein dictatorship and how the rest of the world, particularly the United Nations and a number of European countries, sat by while collecting blood bribes from Saddam through the now thoroughly discredited "UN Oil for Food" scandal. That's the real tragedy and atrocity that the mainstream media continue to ignore.