Lies, damned lies, and Gwynne Dyer

Andrew Bolt, in Australia's Herald Sun, writes yet another damning refutation of that bogus "study" from The Lancet, which says the Americans have killed 100,000 civilians in Iraq:

Its researchers interviewed 7868 Iraqis in 988 households in 33 neighbourhoods around Iraq, allegedly chosen randomly, and asked who in the house had died in the 14 months before the invasion and who in the 18 months after.

They then figured out the death rate before the invasion and the (allegedly higher) one after.

They then concluded there had been 100,000 extra Iraqi deaths since the invasion – by applying the difference in the two rates to all Iraq's 24 million people.

But this meant the researchers had to get two things right that they seem instead to have got wrong – the death rates both before and after the invasion.

Why are these figures important? Because a low death rate before the war, and a high one after, would allow the researchers to "prove" the war was costing many thousands of lives.

And bingo. According to the survey, Iraqis before the war were dying at the rate of just five in 1000 people each year. The death rate among infants was around the average for the region – about 29 in 1000.

But what evidence we have tells us these pre-war death rates were actually much higher. Dated United Nations figures suggest the overall death rate was well over seven in every 1000 – or close to, if not higher than, the present rate of 7.9 in every 1000 that the Lancet survey suggests.

But even more persuasive are 2002 figures from UNICEF, which in a much bigger survey of 24,000 households found the infant mortality rate in Iraq before the war was actually a tragic 108 deaths per 1000 infants.

This is more than three times higher than the Lancet survey claims was the case – and double what even the survey claims is the infant mortality rate today.

How could the anti-war activists forget? Remember, before the war, anti-American propagandists such as John Pilger denouncing this "genocide" of Iraqi children and blaming it on the United Nations sanctions demanded by those evil Americans?

We know now, in fact, that Saddam Hussein, with the help of corrupt officials in the UN, France, Russia and China, had stolen more than $US20 billion of oil money meant to feed his people and pay for their medicines, and malnutrition in his shattered economy was rife.

All that, thank God, has changed for the better since the liberation.

Sadly, the "100,000 dead" figure has already taken hold among those who opposed the war, and nothing is going to stop them from using it. Gwynne Dyer, not surprisingly, takes it one step further. As Bolt notes, the Lancet authors say they are 95% confident that the number of Iraqi civilian deaths is somewhere between 8,000 and 194,000.

In a recent column I cannot find online, but which appeared in the Corner Brook Western Star on Monday, Dyer describes the Lancet findings this way:

[American military tactics] have the side-effect of killing large numbers of Iraqi civilians. A survey of 33 randomly selected Iraqi neighbourhoods conducted in September by the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and published online by the British medical journal "The Lancet" late last month concluded that there have been between 100,000 and 200,000 "excess deaths" among Iraqi civilians since the March, 2003 invasion, and that most of these deaths were due to American air strikes in civilian areas. [emphasis added]

Dyer plucks the "200,000" figure out of his ass, and conveniently forgets to mention that the very same survey said the death toll was just as likely to be 8,000 as 194,000. That he would use the highest possible figure proves he must have seen the survey results in detail, but he deliberately leaves out the figures which would work against his argument.

Gwynne Dyer, the only world-affairs columnist in my local paper, is a dishonest liar. No other description is appropriate.

Update: Tim Lambert says Bolt doesn't know what he's talking about. And one longtime supporter of this blog - who supported the war, and agrees that Gwynne Dyer is an ass - tells me Bolt's methodology is all wrong. He also notes that, while 8,000 and 194,000 are possibly the correct casualty figures under the survey's findings, but that a number in the middle of the range - like 100,000 - is more likely to be correct.

In light of all this, I'd have to agree that Bolt's conclusions are incorrect. But I remain skeptical of the Lancet study's findings - and I still stand by what I wrote about Gwynne Dyer.

Posted by damian at November 24, 2004 07:44 AM