Lancet Revisited

The sineman had a sign up regarding the Lancet study on Iraqi deaths a couple of weeks ago. Today he posted it online.



While it's true that President Bush disputed the study's findings, he was not the only person to do so. After the study was released I expected the sineman to write about this and so I "presponded" after doing a tad of research.

Since that time, further discussion has taken place and other people and insitutions have weighed in. BBC, Huge gaps between Iraq death estimates. BBC, Lancet Iraq survey methodology under fire. Iraq Body Count, Reality checks: some responses to the latest Lancet estimates.

I'm sure the sineman was, perhaps until now, a fan of the IBC group. Their analysis is perhaps the most interesting:

If they were true, they would need to be the result of a combination of the following factors:

• incompetence and/or fraud on a truly massive scale by Iraqi officials in hospitals and ministries, on a local, regional and national level, perfectly coordinated from the moment the occupation began;


• bizarre and self-destructive behaviour on the part of all but a small minority of 800,000 injured, mostly non-combatant, Iraqis;


• the utter failure of local or external agencies to notice and respond to a decimation of the adult male population in key urban areas;


• an abject failure of the media, Iraqi as well as international, to observe that Coalition-caused events of the scale they reported during the three-week invasion in 2003 have been occurring every month for over a year.

Followed by this sober paragraph:

We would hope that, before accepting such extreme notions, serious consideration is given to the possibility that the population estimates derived from the Lancet study are flawed. The most likely source of such a flaw is some bias in the sampling methodology such that violent deaths were vastly over-represented in the sample. The precise potential nature of such bias is not clear at this point (it could, for example, involve problems in the application of a statistical method originally designed for studying the spread of disease in a population to direct and ongoing violence-related phenomena). But to dismiss the possibility of such bias out of hand is surely both irresponsible and unwise.

A question sineman's readers should be asking themselves at this point is: Why doesn't he present any of this information?