I guarantee you that if it ever becomes necessary to talk about the barbarism of the Arabs, K-Lo & Co. will be the first to site this study as evidence that the Iraqi people are unworthy of our generosity -- just as they did a 180 on the sanctions and claimed that our economic embargo was another reason to go to war (i.e. it would save lives in the long run).

Man's a poor deluded bubble,
Wand'ring in a mist of lies,
Seeing false, or seeing double,
Who would trust to such weak eyes?
Yet presuming on his senses,
On he goes most wond'rous wise:
Doubts of truth, believes pretences;
Lost in error, lives and dies.

-- Robert Dodsley

I think this is a story of critical importance and if you find any authoritative refutation of the study please let us know.

So far, in the "this is BS" camp I've heard Bush, Casey, Cordesman, and O'Hanlon -- but not a single scientist. Cordesman always shills for the Pentagon and O'Hanlon (Princeton PhD no less -- obviously we hand out those things too easily) is famous for his Winter 2003 prediction that the "A quagmire in Iraq seems extremely unlikely... This will not be another Vietnam."

Isn't the "Voice of the Expert" something to behold!

The NYT agrees because they publish O'Hanlon regularly.

Bernard,

I agree with you about the importance of this study.I don't go to a lot of blogs rather as time has gone by I have chosen only a few that I visit mostly because of the quality of the various blogs. But as a little experiment I roamed around a little bit and I was surprised to see quite a few blogs that are strangely silent on this new report by Johns Hopskins. Now there was nothing scientific about my modest little quest and I did not visit that many but I would have thought that I would see a lot of these bloggers raising bloody hell over this.

Last night I did a little thought experiment, I thought about all the people I have been close to and how I felt when they died and multiplied it by 650,000 but my mind just short circuited and I did not sleep very well. I recall seeing the clock at three AM, four, and 5 AM so I am a bit fuzzy right now.

Kudos to Jonathan for really looking at this and taking the time to post these informative links.

The fantasy world exists right up until reality bends them over and forcefully gives them an enema.

Well, I'm a scientist, married to a social scientist, and their methodology looks valid to me. That gives a horrible conclusion. By all means, go read the study, it is not long, and it is mostly understandable.

No interviewers died or were injured during the survey.

I reckon the 101st Keyboard Kommandos survived the survey, too.

Agreed, Rob: Kudos to Jonathan for his posts on that topic.

The moral implications are terrifying. It was not so long ago that we debated who killed the most people in the 20th c. Hitler, Mao, Stalin, etc.?
The fun part about it is that we played prosecutor not defense attorney.

Now we're facing the likely possibility that we've become the biggest killers of the 21st century.

The study puts the number of Iraqis killed by Coalition Forces (by bullets/bombs) at over 200K, which exceeds the latest estimates on the death toll in Darfur.

So we are number 1.

There are 4 ways to react to that:

1. We're NOT no.1 -- but then we need a refutation. It's put up or shut up time.

2. We're 1 -- and it makes up for our losses in the Ryder cup, the America's Cup, Flushing Meadows, etc. America back on top.
It's an amusing take on it but the humorous effect lasts about one nanosecond.

3. Who gives a damn? We didn't lose sleep over 3 million terminated Vietnamese, so give me a break.

4. We go to bed thinking of ourselves as giant pieces of stinking shit.

That's the choice.

Now we're facing the likely possibility that we've become the biggest killers of the 21st century.

Given the fact we're only six years in I think that's more than a possibility.

Cal said

"if it ever becomes necessary to talk about the barbarism of the Arabs, K-Lo & Co. will be the first to site this study as evidence that the Iraqi people are unworthy..."

I remember when the looting broke out in the major Iraqi cities, and the US soldiers just stood around and watched. Sundry no-good liberals said that the administration had been warned this would happen but didn't listen. I couldn't help but think we were watching the first trial in a giant, grisly behavioral experiment, in which the US public, the US soldiers in the streets, and the Iraqis themselves, were being conditioned to believe they were savage.

And when I watched the coverage of Katrina's aftermath and the second great lackadaisical response by the neocons, I wondered if that was on purpose too, to encourage some white viewers to feel disgust, and help stoke the fires for a race war at home.

Gerlasco appeared on This American Life to explain himself -- as part of a show devoted to the original report. Go to thislife.org, episode no. 300 from 10/28/05.

Once again proof that we have to go to shows run by parodists and anecdotists (not just TDS and TCR--Harry Shearer's show counts too) for real news. Good explanation of bell curves and the like.

"Then you will all live happily ever after, right up to the point you finally destroy America"

And then you wonder why I've said before Jonathan, that THEY are "Terminally Stupid" - and all that means behind it. I KNOW it seems BOTH counterintuitive, AND somewhat psychotic (to some people) what I am about to say next, but I've felt this for many years, and continue to do so, more now than ever: there are a MILLION ways to die, and the physical is but one. So it is time to kill THEM in every way, BUT the physical. And this time, wipe them out; every last one of them.

The only way I see to do that is to engage THEM in TRUE intellectual discussion, phrased in simpleton, cloaked in faux christianity. Once we get a few small facts into their heads, it'll be like Luke Skywalker in Star Wars - one tiny piece of reality in the right place, and their tiny little heads will explode.

Or at least, in MY dreams, that's how it works. :-D:-p
Your results may vary. Expect eight to twelve years for shipping and arrival of your new reality. REG. PAT. PEND. This method of social change may not be duplicated or rebroadcast without the express written consent of Major League Baseball. Tip your waitress, and try the veal. Thanks for playing, please drive through.

AND whatever you do... don't forget who is truly responsible for this mess (THEY are), and who the rest of the world sees as responsible (ALL of us, in the U.S.).

We've got a lot of cleanup to do. So with elections coming, let's get this right THIS time.

And remember - let's be CAREFUL out there...

And Bush has two more years in which to start wars with North Korea and Iran so it is not over yet nor is it over in Iraq. In a recent speech Bush claimed to have tried diplomacy with Iraq despite the fact that all of us were here on planet Earth and know that is simply not true.

The whole country seems to be in denial like a person who has just been told they have terminal cancer and have only a short time to live. We do not seem to be able to face the harsh truth of the scope of this tragedy which means we are not even close to facing our terrible failure as a nation much less putting a stop to this insanity.

I think we could add one more item to Bernard's list which would be we blame someone else as Bush has been doing recently.

It is a long, long fall to the depths of Hell, our descent has just begun and there is no return ticket.

"He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder."

-- Albert Einstein

Jonathan Jonathan Jonathan, you need to read the Stutts Alum weekly better, dude! It is well known that K-Lo's favorite congressional aid is Wesley Wackly -- you remember, Stutts of '98? The one who was busted for that blackface routine at the Deke house? I thought he went a little far with that, but it was soooo hilarious!

Anyway, you know the Wack doesn't google for his information, unless it is about free porn sites. You don't think he is down there congressionally aiding to be looking at some pinhead medical report in Britain that they are going to bury in the C section of the Washington Post anyway - he's got serious K street business to attend to. Dude, you really have been missing the gold rush! If you'd get rid of these lefty leanings, you, as a proud Stutts alum, could easily be inserting yourself into the steal of the century. Like Wack likes to say, D.C. is WACK! Our guy was supposedly in the loop in that deal with Ney and those Long Island, uh, 'garbage disposers' that helped set Gus Boulis 'straight' - as in straight with his toes in the air - on the SunCruz thingy -- which is so like Goodfellas. You know how Wack was crazy about the gangsta fad. And at the moment I hear he's looking around for somebody who can seriously delete instamessaging for his congressman, so if you hear of anybody, call him up, do him a favor.

As for Iraq - Wack's cooled down on that considerably, now that the reconstruction money rush is over. What's the fuckin' point, he likes to say. Wack always did have a good eye for when one party was over and the other was just beginning. He's hoping this N.Korea threat is like going to kickstart a lot of those super Rumsfeld projects, all technoheavy, expensive, and (here's the beauty) perfectly useless, but sure to attract the odd extra hundred billion dollars.

In fact, once Wack switches over to some K street partnership for good, he's going to spend a little and get that 'forged diploma' problem he's having with the school settled.

Expand on which? The No interviewers died... remark is a direct quote from the survey. To read it, and see how they balanced the problems of obtaining statistical goodness (getting a truly random sample) against the problems of not getting shot, just to get some information -- it makes me appreciate my desk job, let me tell you. For example, not using GPS receivers, so as to not look like a spy or someone calling in air strikes. For example, interviewing multiple adjacent neighbors, so that once they have explained themselves to the first one, they can get introduced to the next one, reducing their chances of getting shot. For example, not re-probing people who refused to participate in an attempt to see if they were like the participants, or not -- again, why increase your exposure, the response rate was pretty high.

The only thing that strikes me as anything like a problem is that their method of interviewing adjacent households in randomly chosen neighborhoods might make their data a little "lumpy" -- that is, person A's experience and person B's experience are more likely to be correlated if they are neighbors. They may have addressed that in the paper -- that sort of analysis is beyond me. But, even so, that's nitpicking -- mostly it expands the likely range of numbers a little bit, because the lumpiness is unbiased (either street fighting did, or did not, occur on this street -- that sort of thing).

Aha -- I did see one likely-relevant question raised elsewhere. It's possible that their methodology favored more urban areas, which would in turn (if you accept the reasonable hypothesis that these are more violent) bias the number upwards. See http://scienceblogs.com/authority/2006/10/the_iraq_study_-_how_good_is_i.php . Someone with better statistical skills than me could maybe take a stab at this, and you could also get sort of a bound of the effect (if any) if you knew how much of Iraq's population was urban, vs rural. But, even granting that, the likely number remains huge, and much larger than official estimates.

So, you read it, and maybe you quibble about whether it was really 400,000 or 650,000 (which to me is both tasteless and immoral, it distracts from the fact that we probably killed a huge number of people, for no just cause that I can perceive), the study looks mostly solid, I see no evidence of intentional bias, I see nothing of similar credibility contradicting it, and where it can be compared with other similar data, it is consistent. It is (literally) a good bet that we killed more people than the lower bounds that they provide. I try not to use profanity online, wouldn't want to be obscene or appear unprofessional, but there's really nothing I can say that exceeds, in obscenity or repulsiveness, "we killed half a million people for nothing". (And I guess I must preemptively reply, no, it wasn't American bullets and bombs that caused all those deaths -- but if a governor pardoned every last prisoner and sent all the police on a one-month boat cruise, who would get the blame for the resulting crime wave?)

Re "...how on earth could this Capitol Hill staffer be unaware of this? ...
"Well, you've obviously never constructed an all-encompassing fantasy world."

The plausibility quotient required for politicians in general and for the words of, and in defense of, Administrations in Washington has been declining for decades, till about 15 years ago it hit about 15 percent and in recent years it got down to nearly zero.

At the present time it stands at ZERO. Look what the Chairman of the Republican National Committee, Ken Mehlman, said on national television last week:

"The fact is, what Denny Hastert did is something that we haven’t seen done in thirty years in this town in Washington DC, and that is he said to a member of congress, either you go or we’re going to make you go. That happened the moment that Denny Hastert found out about this."

Glen Greenwald (www.glenngreenwald.blogspot.com) has the account, and he quotes former RNC Chair Ed Gillepse repeating the same story: "As the father of a 16-year-old son, I appreciate him going to Mark Foley and saying, 'You either resign or you’re going to be expelled.'"

Greenwald: "This story is complete fiction. It never happened. It was just made up by Republican operatives in order to defend Denny Hastert and make him look like some sort of hard-nosed, no-nonsense tough guy who took extraordinary steps against Mark Foley. But there is no doubt that this never happened, and anyone who is saying that it did is, by definition, lying -- and is lying clearly and demonstrably....It simply did not happen.

And look at What Bush said about Abu Ghraib at his press conference the other day. It was regretable, he said, but those responsible have been punished and America has cleaned up its act.

Zero.