Casualties in Iraq: My Bad 

Casualties in Iraq: My Bad

I'm such an avid reader of Slate, I pretty much bought an article that claimed to critique some statistical analysis, but was itself misinformed.

(Daniel Davies at Crooked Timber; link via Jesse Walker, Hit and Run.)

Summary: the figure of 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths caused directly or indirectly by the American invasion is probably accurate, or on the low side. Davies starts with the Fred Kaplan piece that impressed me:

The confidence interval describes a range of values which are "consistent" with the model. But it doesn't mean that all values within the confidence interval are equally likely, so you can just pick one. In particular, the most likely values are the ones in the centre of a symmetrical confidence interval. The single most likely value is, in fact, the central estimate of 98,000 excess deaths. Furthermore, as I pointed out in my original CT post, the truly shocking thing is that, wide as the confidence interval is, it does not include zero. You would expect to get a sample like this fewer than 2.5 times out of a hundred if the true number of excess deaths was less than zero (that is, if the war had made things better rather than worse).


There is also a defence of the "cluster sampling" here.

What I am still waiting for is some kind of honest comparison of premature Iraqi deaths before and after the invasion. Before: we used to hear about malnutrition and starvation. After: we are talking about gunfire and explosions. But what's the real comparison?

Meanwhile, the BBC is also saying that more Iraqi civilians were killed by Coalition forces than by insurgents in the six months from July 2004. This article repeats the usual mantra that total Iraqi civilian casualties since the invasion can only be estimated, and may be anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000. Er, I don't think 100,000 is the high end, and I don't think 10,000 is even roughly as likely as 100,000. This article itself says 3,000 were killed just in this six-month period. There were surely many civilians killed during the invasion, er, proper.

UPDATE: Fix one mistake, report another. The BBC has now retracted its claims about casualties during the last six months of 2004. Link via lnstapundit.

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