Hitchens on the Lancet Study

I am just going to excerpt a little more than two paragraphs (Don't you like articles that actually have multi-sentence paragraphs?)--obviously this is a must-read:

. . . I see no reason in principle why anyone who endorsed the liberation of Iraq, and who opposes the death squads of the Baathist/jihadist "insurgency," should want or need to argue that the casualty figures are any lower. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that they are correct. We then enter an area of evidence and reasoning where epidemiologists are not the experts.

If the cause of all this death is "the war," does that mean that the coalition has killed nearly 700,000 Iraqis? Of course it means nothing of the sort. Indeed, if you look more closely, you will see that less than one-third of the surplus deaths are attributed, even by this study, to "Allied" military action. Grant if you wish that this figure is likely to be more exact, since at least the coalition fights in uniform and issues regular statistics. That leaves, according to the Lancet, a pile of corpses nearly half a million high. Here, the cause of death becomes suddenly less precisely identifiable. We are told that 24 percent of the violent deaths were caused by "other" actors, and 45 percent of them by "unknown" ones. If there is any method of distinguishing between the "other" and the "unknown," we are not told of it.

Make the assumption that some percentage of those killed by the coalition are the sort of people who have been blowing up mosques, beheading captives on video, detonating rush-hour car bombs, destroying pipelines, murdering aid workers, bombing the headquarters of the United Nations, and inciting ethnic and sectarian warfare. Make the allowance for the number of bystanders and innocents who lost their lives in the combat against these fanatics (one or two, alas, in the single case of the precision bombing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, just to take one instance). But who is to say how many people were saved from being murdered by the fact that the murderers were killed first?

Leaving aside Hitchens' point about the new numbers and the lethality of the insurgency, what about all the other wars? If epidemiological methods yield such higher numbers than normal methods of counting war-victims, have we been constantly underestimating war-dead all this time? And all the fancy mathematics of the Lancet study rest on a foundation of field-work. There isn't any real way to peer-review the field-work without actually getting out into the field. And those who are already in the field don't seem to buy the numbers from the Lancet study.

Tags: Iraq, statistics, Iraq War, Hitchens, Lancet Study