Well, this is silly. It turns out that the editor of The Lancet is -- get this! -- opposed to the Iraq War! No! And because he gave voice to those opinions, Jane Galt thinks he's "sowed doubts" about the study. Which I guess is true. Of course, it would also mean that I can no longer take seriously anything Jane writes on economics, because she's committed to a particular economic and political vision that I don't share. And she should no longer read me, as I've got my own biases. It's a pity because her doubts on the study are, I think, valid, even if I don't agree with them. Her attempts to discredit it by attacking the Journal's editor for holding opinions aren't. As for the substantive analysis, I'll stick with the arguments of Daniel Davies, who's actually dug into the study and returned impressed:
The results speak for themselves. There was a sample of 12,801 individuals in 1,849 households, in 47 geographical locations. That is a big sample, not a small one...And the results were shocking. In the 18 months before the invasion, the sample reported 82 deaths, two of them from violence. In the 39 months since the invasion, the sample households had seen 547 deaths, 300 of them from violence. The death rate expressed as deaths per 1,000 per year had gone up from 5.5 to 13.3.
Talk of confidence intervals becomes frankly irrelevant at this point. If you want to pick a figure for the precise number of excess deaths, then (1.33% - 0.55%) x 26,000,000 x 3.25 = 659,000 is as good as any, multiplying out the difference between the death rates by the population of Iraq and the time since the invasion. But we're interested in the qualitative conclusion here.
That qualitative conclusion is this: things have got worse, and they have got a lot worse, not a little bit worse. Whatever detailed criticisms one might make of the methodology of the study (and I have searched assiduously for the last two years, with the assistance of a lot of partisans of the Iraq war who have tried to pick holes in the study, and not found any), the numbers are too big. If you go out and ask 12,000 people whether a family member has died and get reports of 300 deaths from violence, then that is not consistent with there being only 60,000 deaths from violence in a country of 26 million. It is not even nearly consistent.
There may indeed be perfectly reasonable criticisms of the study. One of them is not that the editor of The Lancet disagrees with The Iraq War, or believes the conclusions of his journal's research.
