Study: 100,000 Excess Civilian Iraqi Deaths Since War

[Aerich]

I kinda feel like that too, Gab, but Righteous Indignation by non-Americans is arguably worth nothing to the people who make the decisions. It's out of your hands, my hands, and the hands of everyone on this forum.

It'll stay that way until public reaction in the US of A reaches Vietnam levels (not likely anytime soon) and forces the administration to pull out. Alternatively, Kerry seems less committed to staying in Iraq than Bush, and he may pull out (if elected). That's part of the reason why the upcoming election is so important regarding future American foreign policy.

[Chewbacca]

I am glad for a discussion the accuracy of survey itself. The seemingly small sample size, the huge causuality numbers and the TIMING of the report's release made me somewhat skeptical, especially consdering the highest estimate I heard previously, from the Iraq Body Count site, (which cross-references media reports to achieve it's estimate) was in the 15,000 range. In addition, even the authors of the report admit the difficulty of conducting such a survey considering the challenging circumstances on the ground.

Thanks Lucern, for putting the sample size in perspective from a statistics standpoint and I agree that even if the margin of error is greater than the 5%, this report warrants further investigation.

Considering how we were sold a safer, more precise type of warfare- full of "smart" weapons and low collateral damage. If it turns out these official pre-war stated estimates were more wrong than some of the far-left's estimates of hundreds of thousands civilian deaths than certainly the dcotrine of pre-emptive war deserves even more skepticism from the people, our elected representatives, and the media.

[shamrock_uk]

Isn't the word 'collateral damage' just chillingly easy to use?....

As for the stats, having done a bit myself at uni, Lucern is correct in that 1,000 is a very reasonable size for a sample providing the base is good enough to extrapolate from. In the UK virtually every survey and poll you hear in the news is done by conducting a survey of 1,000 households so if you compare Iraq's population of 24 million with the UK's 60 million it's probably quite accurate.

[Aerich]

For me, the freaky term is "pre-emptive war." The dividing line between it and "aggression" is quite thin, and depends a lot on judgment and reliability of intelligence sources.

And re: the sample size - just because a similar size sample is done elsewhere doesn't mean it is accurate. It merely means that those statistics are just as (non?) accurate as the other ones we use.

[Lucern]

You have a point Aerich, and I've got a healthy dose of skepticism about these numbers from a statistical standpoint as well. The 1000 respondents is pretty standard, as it allows you to run any hypothesis-testing tool, assuming the respondents are sufficiently random. However, this is only data collection - and one variable at that. There's no hypothesis here, and more respondents never hurt any data. I make this distinction because if they ran some sort of hypothesis test, we'd see if it was statistically significant. There's no way to see if the number collected is accurate with one survey since there's nothing to test it with.

Their random GPS coordinate system was creative, and I don't think it would create any problems in choosing a random sample. It sounds like the methodological equivalent of a plant biologist spinning in a field and throwing a ring to count the abundance of plant species. The more throws you do, of course, the better off your data is. You're also going to run into problems collecting it. Where the ring bounces off of bushes and trees, I'm sure the researchers ran across empty houses or uncooperative inhabitants.

One of those random points, by the way, was apparently Faluja (sp?). If they inferred their sample to the whole of Iraq even with 1 of 30 regions being Faluja, that might give them a skew to the upper numbers of casualties. It's probably a fair one though, since it's been bombed so consistently. The opposite would be true of a tiny village near Kuwait or something that hasn't seen much action, but I'm not positive about the specifics of the survey.

My point - I hope this is only the first of several studies. It could be valid, especially among 4 or 5 studies. If they give similar results, then we'll know they're accurate, or that all have the same flaw in their methods.

I was surprised that this kind of survey was even going on in Iraq.

[Timber Loftis]

Note that under any system of nomenclature I've seen, an "insurgent" or a "terrorist" would aslo be classified as a "civilian."

What defines a death as being excess?

According to some here, the planet is over populated with humans and thus any human death should be a reason to cheer.... [img]smile.gif[/img]

[Donut]

Originally posted by Aerich: I kinda feel like that too, Gab, but Righteous Indignation by non-Americans is arguably worth nothing to the people who make the decisions. It's out of your hands, my hands, and the hands of everyone on this forum.

Fair enough. But given that Tony Blair is the person who takes the decision to send British forces into war we should at least be able to voice our concerns.

[Aerich]

Originally posted by Donut: quote: Originally posted by Aerich: I kinda feel like that too, Gab, but Righteous Indignation by non-Americans is arguably worth nothing to the people who make the decisions. It's out of your hands, my hands, and the hands of everyone on this forum.

Fair enough. But given that Tony Blair is the person who takes the decision to send British forces into war we should at least be able to voice our concerns. [/QUOTE]Yep, go ahead, Donut. My intention there was not to say that we SHOULDN'T voice our concerns - it was just to say that we cannot reasonably expect to get anywhere by shouting about them. I've gone past the voicing-of-concerns stage and moved on to the resigned stage. I have to admit, that post was also an attempt to derail the possibility of a flaming reply by a Bush/Iraq war supporter to Gab's strongly-worded post.

Perhaps it would have been more accurate to say that "RI directed at the American administration by non-Americans is arguably worth nothing to the people who make the decisions in the American context."

RI by British citizens and members of the EU IS arguably worth something to Blair. Bush has shown little or no signs of concern about what the rest of the world thinks, so the comment was actually aimed at him.

[Azred]

I shall restate a point I have made both here and elsewhere before: if the insurgents in Iraq were to put down their weapons and quit disrupting the rebuilding of their own country then we would be gone relatively quickly. Each and every death, whether American, Iraqi, British, Spanish, etc. may be blamed on the insurgents and the insurgents only.