http://economist.com/agenda/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5405046

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20060103/news_mz1e3hirsch.html

1. For your incorrect claims about infant mortality, see here.

2. Falluja was specifically excluded, as an outlier, in their statistical analysis, so the number of deaths there is irrelevant to their conclusion.

3. The 95% confidence interval is wide, but it definitely excludes zero. You might have thought that there was some chance that stopping Saddam’s killing machine might have had a salutory effect on civilian death rates.

I could go on and rebut the rest of your points. But, as I said, others have already done so.

If the US had known that Stalin was about to get the A-bomb in 1949 and would help the North Koreans to fight the US you could only imagine what could have happened. But as it turned out, Stalin did not do foolish things with his nukes. Also, it was McArthur who wanted to use nukes against China and the Soviet Union.

The US want their program to be scrapped. At first they didn’t want Iran to have any nuclear technology at all. Europe just wants to avoid a repeat of the diplomatic problems with the US they had at the time of the Iraq war.

I’m not at all comfortable with Iran having nukes. But the way to stop Iran from getting nukes is to keep Iran in the NPT. If we punish Iran for doing things they are allowed to do (enrich uranium under IAEA inspections regime), just because they might in the future pull out of the NPT (and enrich uranium without IEAE supervision to make a bomb), Iran will just leave the NPT right now.

Also, even if Iran would agree with the demands to scrap their enrichment program, we would still need to verify that they aren’t enriching uranium in secret. To do that we would need to have a tough inspections regime. There is little chance the Iranians would agree with that.

Iraq was a police state. Periodic mass killings is standard procedure. Look at the history of the People Republic of China or the Soviet Union or even Syria. It is completely unrealistic to suppose that if Saddam or his sons Uday and Cusay had retained power that they would not have had to put down an uprising over the next 40 years.

Moreover, I did not include the 500,000 death due to the Iran-Iraq war.

Lastly, you’re the one who is unadvisedly using death count as measure of quality of life. According to that standard, if Saddam Hussein had taken over the United States, outlawed private cars, thus reduced traffic deaths by 40,000, American would be a better place. Provided, of course, that Saddam tortured or otherwise killed no more that 39,999 people.

Even using your crude measure of quality of life (in which freedom has no value), you are wrong.

But the Lancet article is thoroughly unconvincing. Here’s what’s wrong with it.

1. Methodology

They surveyed Iraqi households to determine how many household members:
(a) died in the 1.5 years before the start of the U.S. liberation, and
(b) how many died in the 1.5 years after.
They argue that (b) — (a) = 100,000.

Pre-war Estimate 4 x Too Low

Lancet estimate of pre-war infant death rate: 29 per 1000
UNICEF 2002 estimate of infant death rate: 108 per 1000

Lancet survey: 988 households
UNICEF survey: 24,000 households

[Saddam had responded to U.N. sanctions against Iraq with rationing programs that were effectively killing children.]

Post-War Estimate Too High

Consider Lancet survey in Falujah (before U.S. cleanup operations in Nov 2004)

30 households surveyed containing 240 people reporting 52 deaths.
Reported cause of death: violence by Americans
Reported victims: mostly women and children.
Death rate = 52/240 = 216 per 1000.
Estimated deaths in Falujah (pop 285,000) = 285K x 0.216 = 61 K.

U.S. soldiers would have had to have killed 61,000 civilians, mostly women and children, in Falujah alone, before U.S. operations there in Nov 2004. Not credible.

This vastly exceeds estimates of civilian deaths during U.S. operations in Falujah in Nov 2004.

Why didn’t civilians flee, as they did when U.S. operations in Falujah commenced?

How could 60,000 people (mostly women and children) have been killed without reducing Falujah to rubble?

If 60,000 were killed, more must have been wounded. Assuming 5 were wounded for every 1 killed, then 300,000 people were wounded. More than Faljuha’s population. Why wasn’t this noticed?

The same methods used to obtain the clearly erroneous Falujah results were used throughout selected regions of Iraq.

2. Lack of Corroborating Evidence

The Lancet team was reluctant to ask for proof of adult death and did not ask for proof of children’s deaths.

“Interviewers were initially reluctant to ask to see death certificates because this might have implied they did not believe the respondents, perhaps triggering violence. Thus, a compromise was reached for which interviewers would attempt to confirm at least two deaths per cluster.”

A “cluster” = 30 households. Only 2 reported deaths needed to be confirmed for 30 households. Pretty low standard. Especially given their admission of the presence of violent emotions in those surveyed. Wouldn’t an interviewee liable to attack an interviewer be at least as liable to lie to him?

3. Statistically Insignificant Conclusion

The Lancet authors’ conclusion:

95% Confidence Interval of increased deaths: 8,000 to 194,000.

They are 95% confident that between 8,000 and 194,000 additional deaths occurred. Apply this standard to other areas:

We are 95% sure that you have between 8 months and 194 months (16 years) left to live.

We are 95% sure that you’ll have to pay between $8,000 and $194,000 for that condo.

We are 95% sure that your salary raise will be between 8% and 194%.

We are 95% sure that we have enough fuel onboard to fly between 80 miles and 1940 miles.

This huge confidence interval merely reflects the statistical insignificance of their result. It short, it’s garbage.

4. Authors Are Admittedly Anti-War

“I was opposed to the war and I still think that the war was a bad idea, but I think that our science has transcended our perspectives,” Les Roberts, lead author.

5. Common Sense

Why did no reporter break the career-making story of 30,000 to 60,000 women and children being killed by U.S. troops in the Falujah region?

If 100,000 people were killed between in the 18 months before the Lancet article (Sep 2004), it means over 180 people died each day. Where were the tens of thousands of funerals and associated demonstrations that normally follow Muslim deaths caused directly or indirectly by infidels?

Rumored Koran Desecration ==> massive protest marches. Kill 100,000 Muslims ==> negligible protest marches.

It is possible that the authors were attempting, with the aid of the Lancet editors, to influence the U.S. election scheduled to occur within a week after the release of their article?

Is it possible that researcher bias could, intentionally or unintentionally, have altered the result of this study by, for example, limiting post-war surveys to known hotspots, failing to corroborate deaths, and underestimating pre-war deaths by a factor of 4?

And you ask why everybody (no, not just the US) wants that program to be scrapped? OK. Since you are evidently comfortable with madmen having nukes, there’s evidently no point to discussing this further with you.

The relevant question to ask is how many people more are dying as a result of the invasion. So, you estimate the death rate as it would be now had Iraq not been invaded and you compare that with the actual death rate.

Unless you have strong evidence that Saddam was about to gas the Kurds again or start another war with Iran, your figures are just propaganda.

Why?

Why did Greece want Macedonia to change their National Flag? Why are the holy cites in Jerusalem such a difficult diplomatic issue? Why did Ethiopia fight a war with Eritrea over a piece of barren wasteland?

So, unless the US finds ‘’smoking gun evidence” of an Iranian nuclear weapons program, arguments like ”Iran’s nuke program doesn’t make economic sense etc.” do not show that Iran wants to make nukes.

And you could just as well use similar arguments to show that a nuclear weapons program doesn’t make economic sense for Iran. Chemical and biological weapons are much cheaper and faster to produce and weaponize…

Like I wrote in an earlier posting, no country in the world would sign away their rights easily. In this case, because the US (Iran’s enemy) is behind the drive to stop Iran from enriching uranium, it has zero chance of succeeding.