(no subject)

[pmb]

Y'know, we could have just given every Iraqi citizen $37 336.58 and we'd still be ahead by 3,000 american lives and 500,000 iraqi lives. A trillion is a very large number. I bet that, for a flat rate of 37k per capita, we could have gotten the entire Iraqi army to overthrow Saddam all on their own.

Or, as an alternate view, you and I and everyone we know in this country has paid or will pay 4,000 dollars each for this useless war.

Comments

[snailprincess.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was annoyed at how dismissive people were of that number. Basically everything I heard was 'that's way too high, it couldn't possibly be true' but pretty much no one presented any evidence or arguments to discredit it.

President Bush even dismissed it saying 'their methods have been widely discredited' and left it at that. Of course as near as I could tell they used the standard method for identifying death rates after large disasters.

It's possible they've overestimated somehow; I remember thinking their estimate for the death rate prior to the war seemed awfully low. But I'm guessing that wouldn't throw their data off by more than a factor of 2 or 3. And even if their estimate was 3 times too high, that's still 200,000 civilians, which is like 4 times the 'official' numbers.

The rate at which that story was buried and ignored was really frustrating to me. There was no actual discussion, people just dismissed it because they didn't want it to be true.

[drinkywinky.livejournal.com]

One time, I went to the doctor and got some test results which essentially said my temperature, heart rate and breathing were fine, but my blood pressure was 0. I don't know enough about the doctor's methodology to know what went wrong, but it's obvious something did because the number is such an outlier.

Same thing here. With 11k deaths/month, the number of injuries should be higher, the morgues should have been overflowing since day 1, and estimates from other sources should not be off by a factor of 10. People should be equally dismissive of any estimate around 5k total.

[snailprincess.livejournal.com]

You anology is painfully flawed. You have a great deal of first hand knowledge of your body's temperature, as well as a pretty good method for estimating it. You have NO real information about deaths in Iraq other than ridiculous estimates given by the administration. It's pretty much a given that the administration in underestimating deaths, given they are essentially counting up deaths that get covered in the news.

Also, the methodologies used in the study are the same ones used to arrive at casualty estimates for other disasters. So, to use anology (painfully flawed though it is) if a doctor was testing the temperatures of 10 people in a row, and only your temperature came up as 0, you wouldn't be so quick to discount it. You would at least look into it to determine what was going on. If further test also read your temperature as 0, you'd have to start reconsidering your preconceived notions.

The point is, no one really knew what the casualty rates were. We're all just sitting here watching the news and seeing what they report. But when a study comes out that challenges what we WANT to be true we discount it completely without thought or analysis. By many accounts the morgues have been overflowing and most deaths go unreported. Also, what Peter says is true, bodies are continually being discovered and the administration has said that if they can't determine who killed them, they don't count them in their official body count.