Reply #29: Hysterical?

[Briar]

Or is it just that most Americans are in a state of permanent denial - like the former British squaddy on the BBC last night who remarked that he had always seen the British Empire as a good thing and felt hurt when the Egyptians campaigned to get us out of their country?

Good article here:

More Deadly Than Saddam
by Gwynne Dyer


...

The most striking thing in the study, in terms of credibility, is that the prewar death rate in Iraq for the period January 2002-March 2003, as calculated from their evidence, was 5.5 per thousand per year. That is virtually identical to the U.S. government estimate of the death rate in Iraq for the same period. Then, from the same evidence, they calculate that the death rate since the invasion has been 13.3 per thousand per year. The difference between the prewar and postwar death rates over a period of 40 months is 655,000 deaths.

More precisely, the deaths reported by the 12,801 people surveyed, when extrapolated to the entire country, indicates a range of between 426,369 and 793,663 excess deaths -- but the sample is big enough that there is a 95 percent certainty that the true figure is within that range. What the Johns Hopkins team have done in Iraq is more rigorous version of the technique that is used to calculate deaths in southern Sudan and the eastern Congo. To reject it, you must either reject the whole discipline of statistics, or you must question the professional integrity of those doing the survey.

The study, which was largely financed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for International Studies, has been reviewed by four independent experts. One of them, Paul Bolton of Boston University, called the methodology "excellent" and said it was standard procedure in a wide range of studies he has worked on: "You can't be sure of the exact number, but you can be quite sure that you are in the right ballpark."

This is not a political smear job. Johns Hopkins University, Boston University and MIT are not fly-by-night institutions, and people who work there have academic reputations to protect. The Lancet, founded 182 years ago, is one of the oldest and most respected medical journals in the world. These numbers are real. So what do they mean?

...

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1016-20.htm


(They mean, among other things, that Coalition air strikes have killed some 75,000 Iraqis since the start of the illegal invasion and occupation.)