(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

[mbrubeck.livejournal.com]

"I do disagree with the 500k Iraqi deaths. That's over 11k deaths a month, every month since the invasion. I know where the number comes from, but it is too high to believe."

It boggles my mind that someone would make such a blatant argument from personal incredulity, especially when the person's own gut feelings are not informed by first-hand knowledge, while they're arguing against British epidemiologists and Iraqi surveyors who personally visited thousands of Iraqi households to interview family members and record death certificates.

Question: Without looking it up, what's the population of Iraq?

If you didn't guess between 25 and 30 million, then you don't even have the most basic information to determine what is or isn't a believable death rate. Iraq is not a small country. It has about 100 major cities and towns. 11,000 deaths is about 100 excess deaths per month in each of these towns. Is that so surprising, when 100 can die in a single day in Baghdad without much comment?

Question: What was the crude death rate in Iraq in the years immediately before the invasion?

Answer: At least 11,000 deaths per month (according to US government and independent academic sources). Hard to believe? Well, that just shows you that your ability to "believe" mortality rates needs adjustment. 11,000 deaths per month in Iraq is an annual death rate of only about 5/1000. The United States has an annual death rate of 8.26/1000. (Countries like the U.S. with aging populations typically have higher crude death rates than countries like Iraq with much younger populations.) Over 200,000 people die per month in the U.S. Do you find that surprising? It doesn't matter. It's true.

This has nothing to do with whether I support the invasion of Iraq. I'm just trying to show that gut feelings are lousy substitutes for empirical data. In response to your other arguments, morgues in some areas are overflowing, and the medical reporting infrastructure has broken down (so even when death certificates are issued locally, as they were for the majority of deaths in the Lancet papers, they are not reported centrally). Comparing an epidemiology survey to "passive" methods that only count reported deaths is silly: In nearly every war and large-scale disaster, passive reporting undercounts deaths by a factor of at least 5. Yes, the Lancet studies should be compared with other, independent studies for confirmation—but you can't compare raw numbers between studies measuring completely different things. (I'm not aware, for instance, of any non-passive study of injuries that measured over the same time period and population of either of the Lancet papers.)

Finally, compare your "belief" in the study to that of someone living in Iraq.