Iraq war again

[sunsite]

Does anyone notice the Iraq war anylonger or has it sort of become just a permanent background noise in world politics? I note that some sources say 100,000 Iraqis have been killed in the US led war and we know of about 1,150 US soldiers killed, 5,000 wounded. Does this war have an end in sight? Does it have a purpose even? Will the US keep it's conquest and have to continue to kill Iraqis to keep it? Myself, I see no end in sight and no plan by Bush to do anything about it but keep killing. What do our European friends think about the US going on for years and years with a war in the MiddleEast?
sunsite

[DruidSmith]

The war plan DID only take a few days. Problem was we didn't (and still don't) have a plan of WHAT NEXT. Suppose we could have been like the Israelis, and just bomb anything we don't like and damn the consequences. Or we could adopt the Zarqawi plan and just kidnap random Arabs and Muslims and behead them until we get our way. We live in a really, really sick world.

I don't know where you get this notion of Christianity being a newcomer to this game- Christians have tried in various ways to forcibly and violently impose their will on others for over a milennium... just as have Muslims. It's just that this facade of secularism in the Western world has kept it less obvious.

[DruidSmith]

Niquie, I don't think I was talking down to you. Perhaps we disagree on definitions. The pure military part DID only take a few days. I am referring to US military versus Iraq military, and they capitulated quickly. Our military leaders had an excellent plan against an armed and uniformed military and excecuted it well. But THEN WHAT?

THIS SITUATION NOW is NOT a military situation, it is an unholy f*ckup. It is WHAT NEXT that I was referring to, that we did not and still do not have a plan of what we are doing.

So where do I get the notion christianity is so old? Evidently I have no idea what you are referring to. I was referring to the entire machine. Perhaps you were referring to the "Christian Right" machine in the US. But there were plenty of vicious Christian machines prior to these last 50 years (I trace this whole Christian Conservative thing back to the McCarthy era)- plenty of persecution, Protestants versus Catholics during and after the Reformation- and prior to that the Crusades, and all that?

King, Emperor, and other political leader throughout the last 1500 years or so, all one after another used "Christianity" as the club to wield to keep power over the masses and to justify war against their neighbor. THAT easily goes back every bit as long as Islam has existed.

Islam has been around since the 6th century- a line of my ancestry goes back to the Umayyad caliphs, so I am well aware of the Islamic timeline. But I consider also that by the time of Islamic expansion, the New Testament had been compiled and codified into its current form and the organized Christian church was already in widespread use as a political tool, as opposed to a spiritual tool it was originally intended to be. I may be alone in my notions of how the politics are intertwined and deeply rooted in Christianity throughout history, but I hope this clarifies how I feel about the situation.

[homerandjethroswede]

christianity was a jewish sect so it is the oldest or at least a very old religion

they were called nazarenes

Originally posted by Niquie
NOTHING took just a few days. If you don't believe me, well, 10 more Marines died just today. I don't know where you get this notion that somehow, this war really did last only a few days. What the hell do you think we are doing now, and HAVE been doing since we got there. Playing footsie?

And where do you get the notion that Christianity is so old? It isn't. It's a newcomer to religion. And where do you get the notion that I don't know the evils Christianity has imposed on the rest of the world?

Please don't talk down to me.

[homerandjethroswede]

http://www.bartleby.com/67/250.html


http://www.faithnet.org.uk/KS3/christianity.htm

[homerandjethroswede]

i was against the war or how it was done and all the bombing but to think all those foriergn terrorists came to fallujah and made killing rooms is unreal,, if they came to your town and did that and made life a living hell i wonder if you would want troops to come.. or should all the people just move to baghdad?

[homerandjethroswede]

http://antiwar.com/

[DruidSmith]

Originally posted by homerandjethroswede
christianity was a jewish sect so it is the oldest or at least a very old religion

they were called nazarenes

Christ reshaped Jewish thought, and this was of course the basis for Christianity. On the other hand, Islam has some elements drawn from both Judaism and Christianity as well. As far as oldest religion, that's debatable- The Jews consider their religion the world's oldest- but then again so do the Hindus. Jewish religion in its early origins was contemporaneous with Babylonian and other cultures of the time, and draws some of its elements from these as well as prior Sumerian culture, so it may be arguably true.

[homerandjethroswede]

do you know what a sect is? christianty was a jewish sect ,, fact

[homerandjethroswede]

http://store.levitt.com/cgi-bin/perl...R_ID=!ORDERID!


How Can a Gentile Be Saved?
Qty: #GEN, $3 (booklet), Qty: #GEN@, $4 (cassette)
As a Jew, Zola is constantly asked, “How did you get saved?,” as though Jewish salvation is hard to find in Scripture. In this thought-provoking Bible study, Zola turns the tables by asking, “How can a Gentile be saved?” An interesting, unique look at the grafting in of the Gentiles to God’s plan.

[rolimandoli]

Mr. Bush is able to (re)conquer any town in Iraq. He can bomb anyone anywhere anytime. But all he can achieve by this is to increase the hate of Iraqis against the occupation.

It is time for him to get sane and turn to the United Nations and ask for help to tidy up the mess he created.

Roli



[Edited by rolimandoli on 12th November 2004 at 07:18]

[Marmaduke]

Originally posted by homerandjethroswede
i was against the war or how it was done and all the bombing but to think all those foriergn terrorists came to fallujah and made killing rooms is unreal,, if they came to your town and did that and made life a living hell i wonder if you would want troops to come.. or should all the people just move to baghdad?

Firstly 'all those foreign terrorists' is another myth perpetrated by the coalition as it defends their complete inability to secure the boarders of Iraq, as if it took a genius to recognise that the war would not act as a magnet for such terrorists. I recall time and time again listening to Pengaon briefing after Pentagon briefing where they seemed to suggest that all Iraq's problems lay at the feet of 'foreign terrorists', rather than an insurgency of Iraqis against the illegal occupation of their land. In fact, the 'fly paper' argument was one actually put forward by some commentators (it will attract such foreign terrorists where thay can be more easily killed than if they remained at large in the world- oblivious to the absurdity this makes for the original justification of the war, that Iraq was already such a habour for terrorism). Yet, if you read accounts from Iraqis and those reporters that (1) can speak Arabic and (2) are not functioning as PR executives for the military, it seems that the number of foreign terrorists seems remarkablylow for the amount of damage they are supposed to be committing- the US only have about 25 in custody at the moment.

I find your statement "to think all those foriergn terrorists came to fallujah and made killing rooms is unreal" confusing. I am not defending the barbarity of such people, but given that over 100,000 Iraqis have been killed of which nearly 50% are women and children, why you find the killing rooms so abhorent yet remain mute on the larger consquences of the war is baffling to say the least. The beheading of contractor is appaling, but no less the slaughter of so many innocent civilians at a distance so that the world can remain insulated for the effects of this bankrupt policy. How would you feel if some country invaded your house and bombed it from 30,000 with the statement 'this is hardcore'. This might be a better point to ponder first before contemplating the other- it was after-all, a consequence of the war that such attrocities have taken place, it seems your objection to war is founded little more on 'it is nasty' than any moral opposition.

[DruidSmith]

Roli, Mr. Bush firmly believes he has been handed a mandate to go ahead do whatever he wants with even greater zeal. He feels he second only to God in this world, and as we speak is probably working on how to rig that election as well.

You may think this is a good time to pause and reconsider, but I think Bush thinks this is a good time to ratchet things up even further. I doubt he even has a smidgen of care what Iraqis or the UN think of him. We won't have any semblance of sanity for at least four more years.

Before the talk here was about how the US created the monsters that are people like Bin Laden and Zarqawi- now we can talk about the monster that Bin Laden, Zarqawi, the Christian Right and the American election process have created with Bush. They may have thought the US administration was evil before- but now they will know the US administration is evil.

Jasper- morality? "icky"? Does it matter if a terrorist throws a molotov cocktail or if a jet drops a bomb from 30,000 feet? Does it matter if it is an occupying army blowing up dozens of people in the name of "restoring order" or a "freedom fighter" blowing up dozens of people in the name of "restoring order"? It doesn't but people like to keep drawing those lines.

[Cowshoes]

100,000 Iraqis killed? Maybe not.

http://www.slate.msn.com/id/2108887/


100,000 Dead—or 8,000

How many Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war?

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Friday, Oct. 29, 2004, at 3:49 PM PT


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.

The problem is, ultimately, not with the scholars who conducted the study; they did the best they could under the circumstances. The problem is the circumstances. It's hard to conduct reliable, random surveys—and to extrapolate meaningful data from the results of those surveys—in the chaotic, restrictive environment of war.

However, these scholars are responsible for the hype surrounding the study. Gilbert Burnham, one of the co-authors, told the International Herald Tribune (for a story reprinted in today's New York Times), "We're quite sure that the estimate of 100,000 is a conservative estimate." Yet the text of the study reveals this is simply untrue. Burnham should have said, "We're not quite sure what our estimate means. Assuming our model is accurate, the actual death toll might be 100,000, or it might be somewhere between 92,000 lower and 94,000 higher than that number."

Not a meaty headline, but truer to the findings of his own study.

Here's how the Johns Hopkins team—which, for the record, was led by Dr. Les Roberts of the university's Bloomberg School of Public Health—went about its work. They randomly selected 33 neighborhoods across Iraq—equal-sized population "clusters"—and, this past September, set out to interview 30 households in each. They asked how many people in each household died, of what causes, during the 14 months before the U.S. invasion—and how many died, of what, in the 17 months since the war began. They then took the results of their random sample and extrapolated them to the entire country, assuming that their 33 clusters were perfectly representative of all Iraq.

This is a time-honored technique for many epidemiological studies, but those conducting them have to take great care that the way they select the neighborhoods is truly random (which, as most poll-watchers of any sort know, is difficult under the easiest of circumstances). There's a further complication when studying the results of war, especially a war fought mainly by precision bombs dropped from the air: The damage is not randomly distributed; it's very heavily concentrated in a few areas.

The Johns Hopkins team had to confront this problem. One of the 33 clusters they selected happened to be in Fallujah, one of the most heavily bombed and shelled cities in all Iraq. Was it legitimate to extrapolate from a sample that included such an extreme case? More awkward yet, it turned out, two-thirds of all the violent deaths that the team recorded took place in the Fallujah cluster. They settled the dilemma by issuing two sets of figures—one with Fallujah, the other without. The estimate of 98,000 deaths is the extrapolation from the set that does not include Fallujah. What's the extrapolation for the set that does include Fallujah? They don't exactly say. Fallujah was nearly unique; it's impossible to figure out how to extrapolate from it. A question does arise, though: Is this difficulty a result of some peculiarity about the fighting in Fallujah? Or is it a result of some peculiarity in the survey's methodology?

There were other problems. The survey team simply could not visit some of the randomly chosen clusters; the roads were blocked off, in some cases by coalition checkpoints. So the team picked other, more accessible areas that had received similar amounts of damage. But it's unclear how they made this calculation. In any case, the detour destroyed the survey's randomness; the results are inherently tainted. In other cases, the team didn't find enough people in a cluster to interview, so they expanded the survey to an adjoining cluster. Again, at that point, the survey was no longer random, and so the results are suspect.

Beth Osborne Daponte, senior research scholar at Yale University's Institution for Social and Policy Studies, put the point diplomatically after reading the Lancet article this morning and discussing it with me in a phone conversation: "It attests to the difficulty of doing this sort of survey work during a war. … No one can come up with any credible estimates yet, at least not through the sorts of methods used here."

The study, though, does have a fundamental flaw that has nothing to do with the limits imposed by wartime—and this flaw suggests that, within the study's wide range of possible casualty estimates, the real number tends more toward the lower end of the scale. In order to gauge the risk of death brought on by the war, the researchers first had to measure the risk of death in Iraq before the war. Based on their survey of how many people in the sampled households died before the war, they calculated that the mortality rate in prewar Iraq was 5 deaths per 1,000 people per year. The mortality rate after the war started—not including Fallujah—was 7.9 deaths per 1,000 people per year. In short, the risk of death in Iraq since the war is 58 percent higher (7.9 divided by 5 = 1.58) than it was before the war.

But there are two problems with this calculation. First, Daponte (who has studied Iraqi population figures for many years) questions the finding that prewar mortality was 5 deaths per 1,000. According to quite comprehensive data collected by the United Nations, Iraq's mortality rate from 1980-85 was 8.1 per 1,000. From 1985-90, the years leading up to the 1991 Gulf War, the rate declined to 6.8 per 1,000. After '91, the numbers are murkier, but clearly they went up. Whatever they were in 2002, they were almost certainly higher than 5 per 1,000. In other words, the wartime mortality rate—if it is 7.9 per 1,000—probably does not exceed the peacetime rate by as much as the Johns Hopkins team assumes.

The second problem with the calculation goes back to the problem cited at the top of this article—the margin of error. Here is the relevant passage from the study: "The risk of death is 1.5-fold (1.1 – 2.3) higher after the invasion." Those mysterious numbers in the parentheses mean the authors are 95 percent confident that the risk of death now is between 1.1 and 2.3 times higher than it was before the invasion—in other words, as little as 10 percent higher or as much as 130 percent higher. Again, the math is too vague to be useful.

There is one group out there counting civilian casualties in a way that's tangible, specific, and very useful—a team of mainly British researchers, led by Hamit Dardagan and John Sloboda, called Iraq Body Count. They have kept a running total of civilian deaths, derived entirely from press reports. Their count is triple fact-checked; their database is itemized and fastidiously sourced; and they take great pains to separate civilian from combatant casualties (for instance, last Tuesday, the group released a report estimating that, of the 800 Iraqis killed in last April's siege of Fallujah, 572 to 616 of them were civilians, at least 308 of them women and children).

The IBC estimates that between 14,181 and 16,312 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war—about half of them since the battlefield phase of the war ended last May. The group also notes that these figures are probably on the low side, since some deaths must have taken place outside the media's purview.

So, let's call it 15,000 or—allowing for deaths that the press didn't report—20,000 or 25,000, maybe 30,000 Iraqi civilians killed in a pre-emptive war waged (according to the latest rationale) on their behalf. That's a number more solidly rooted in reality than the Hopkins figure—and, given that fact, no less shocking.

[Marmaduke]

Hello Cow, how is the Edward Said going- not keeping you awake too much I hope !

It is an interesting article you post here. I have read some criticism of the article that appeared in The Lancet and Kaplan is right to draw attention to some of the methodology, but I don’t really think his explanation here is as uncritical or as reasoned as it appears at first sight. I am not suggesting that we not look carefully at the methodology of the study and the conclusions that is presents- there have been previous examples of discredited medical research (or at least subject to question) in the past, and I am sure The Lancet is no exception, but Kaplan’s own analysis is no less objective and suffers from several fundamental flaws which suggests he does not really understand the statistical methodology he claims to critique.

He seems to a priori object to the magnitude of the casualties and seeks to draw attention to his perceived flaws in order to support his prior judgements, and there are several indicators to this in his Slate article.

I have noticed that many others have picked up on this article (mostly on the Right) in discrediting the article, while from those I have read, often appear to be even more ignorant of statistics than Kaplan (who at least credits the work being done by the Iraq Body Count project.

For example, Kaplan finds that it ‘disturbing’ that the report does not explain fully what the confidence interval means (where he states that the reports shows that the number of deaths could lie anywhere between 8,000 and 194,000. The simple reason for this ‘omission’ is that most readers of the report will know exactly what a confidence interval means, and that to suggest, as does Kaplan, that the outer parameters (8,000- 194,000) are make the report little better than a ‘dart board’ shows an ignorance of the statistical meaning of this figure and the subsequent result (where the mean figure of about 98,000) is then derived.

The confidence interval represents the upper and lower bounds for the level of confidence, in this case, the standard 95%. If one plots a graph over this range, it will be show the common Guassian curve (the one we all know as ‘The Bell shaped curve’). The authors then take the mid point (98,000 deaths) as the most probable figure. This is standard practice in almost all statistical surveys (his comparison with counting election results is absurd in the extreme as there were only two choices available in the first place- excluding Nadar, and such techniques are not used in this way in voter surveys anyway). This procedure is Mathematically sound (this has been known only for a few hundred years) and is the technique commonly used in Epidemiological studies and in drug trials.

If the technique was apparently so obviously flawed, one might wonder why none of the peer reviewers noticed it ? In fact this technique has been applied in other ‘war’ zones particularly in the former Yugoslavia. Kaplan prefers the technique used by Iraq Body Count one wonders if he would favour opinion polls where the percentage of support for a presidential candidate was based on the number of individual reports they receive in the mainstream press ?). Many such deaths are never reported in mainstream press, and given the lack of reporters in Iraq in the first place- this method seems the more suspect.

In fact, when both methods were compared (with the increase in fatalities over time) they showed a significant correlation (some noted in the report) which had their been significant flaws in the methodology would have been unlikely to occur.

Kaplan also takes issue with the reports prior calculation of the number of fatalities prior to the war, yet one of the reports own authors has done significant research into the mortality rates in Iraq in the 1990s. To use another studies statistics obtained by a different methodology could be more misleading than computing the statistics from scratch. In fact, this is one the major flaws in Kaplan’s argument. By using other studies that indicate a higher mortality rate, would bring the headline figure down. Yet we know that before the war there was little opportunity to obtain independently verifiable statistics given the tight control exercised by Saddam, yet this more inaccurate method is the one favoured by Kaplan ? Why does he prefer a less accurate method of computing a baseline figure in this example, yet criticise the article for it’s own methodological ‘sloppiness ?’ It seems he wants it both ways.

Finally, Kaplan is not a statistician, and this is his biggest flaw. He is right to draw attention to the problems posed in calculating the number of fatalities- something that would not be news to a reader of the article, yet nowhere in his analysis is there any computation of what statistical errors these would lead to. Could they be wrong by 10%, 20% 75% as a result, we are never told- yet have to take his listing of the reports own caveats as being sufficient to cast significant doubt on the results. Surely a case of someone presenting a complex statistical issue in over simplistic terms that then justifies his own argument ?

I am sure there are errors in this figure, and I doubt we will ever really know the true result, but Kaplan’s analysis is far less certain and convincing than the report he seeks to criticise. What become apparent as one reads his analysis is that he finds the figures ‘incredulous’ and this is the driving motivation behind his critique, not one informed by a sufficient understanding of the issues and methods that he seeks to justify.

It is common practice in such Scientific journals to submit such criticisms to the editor, again probably subject to peer review, and it remains to be seen if he feels he can subject his own analysis to such scrutiny (of course, that is not to say he should not have published his own misgivings in The Slate). This would at least lead to a proper debate and clarification on the nature of such analysis- as it stands in Kaplan’s article, there is a long way to go before I suspect will reach this point.