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Infoseeker
Joined: 06 Feb 2003
Location: Lurking somewhere near Seoul
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 Posted: Wed Sep 14, 2005 9:32 pm Post subject: Is the Bush administration mad? |
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Ignorance and abdication that amounts to madness
By John Berger
All political leaders sometimes parry with the truth, but with Bush the disconnections are systematic
As a consequence of the catastrophe that occurred in New Orleans, people in the US and throughout the world have started to re-examine the record of the present leaders of the first world superpower. A shift in opinion has taken place almost overnight. History, throwing us all back into our seats, suddenly opened its throttle.
Katrina - everyone refers to the hurricane by her name as if she were some kind of avatar - revealed that there is dire and increasing poverty in the US, that black people are typically treated as unwanted second-class citizens, that the systematic cutting of government investment in public institutions has produced widespread social disequilibrium and destitution (40 million Americans live without any aid if they fall ill), that the so-called war against terrorism is creating administrative chaos, and that within and against all this, voices of protest are being raised loud and clear.
All this though was evident before Katrina to those living it, and to those who wanted to know. What she changed was that the media were there for once, showing what was actually happening, and the fury of those to whom it was happening. With her terrible gesture she wiped the opaque screens clean for a little while.
In some gnomic way the as-yet-innumerable dead on the Gulf coast spoke not for but with the 100,000 Iraqis who have died as a consequence of the ongoing disastrous and criminal war. Time and again in the US press, Katrina and Iraq are being mentioned together. Yet Katrina was regular. She belonged to the familiar weather conditions which affect the Gulf of Mexico. She was not hiding in Afghanistan. And merciless as she was, she did not belong to any axis of evil. She was simply a natural threat to American lives and property, and she was heading for Louisiana.
It was in the self-interest (as well as the national interest) of the president and his chosen colleagues to meet the challenge she threw down, to foresee the needs of her victims and to reduce the ensuing pain and panic to the minimum possible. If they, the government, happened to fail to do this, they would be able to blame nobody else, and they themselves would be blamed. A child could foresee this. And they failed utterly. Their failure was technical, political and emotional. "Stuff happens," murmurs Donald Rumsfeld.
Is it possible that this administration is mad? Let us try to define the variant of madness, for it may be that it has never occurred before. It has very little to do, for example, with Nero when he fiddled while Rome burned. Any madness, however, implies a severe disconnection with reality, or, to put it more precisely, with the existent.
The variant we are considering touches upon the relationship between fear and confidence, between being threatened and being supreme. There is no negotiation between the two. Their "madness" operates like a switch which turns one off and the other on. And what is grave about this is that it is in the long periods of negotiating between fear and confidence that the existent is normally surveyed and observed in its multitudinous complexity. It is there that one learns about what one is facing.
Five days after Katrina had struck, when President Bush finally visited the devastated city, he astounded journalists by saying: "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." On the same day, in the wrecked small town of Biloxi, the president's flying visit was preceded by a team who quickly cleared the rubble and corpses from the route his cortege would take. Two hours later the team vanished, leaving everything else in the town exactly as it was.
The calculations of the present US government are closely related to the global interests of the corporations, and what has been termed the survival of the richest, who today also vacillate abruptly between fear and confidence.
The lobbyist Grover Norquist, who is a talking head for corporate interests and to whom Bush and co listened when planning their tax reforms for the benefit of the rich, is on record as saying: "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."
All political leaders sometimes parry with the truth, but here the disconnections are systematic and crop up not only in their announcements but in their every strategic calculation. Hence their ineptness. Their operation in Afghanistan failed, their war in Iraq has been won (as the saying goes) by Iran, Katrina was allowed to produce the worst natural disaster in US history, and terrorist activities are increasing.
An ignorance about most of what exists, and an abdication from the very minimum of what can be expected of government - are we not approaching disconnections which amount to what can be called madness when found in the minds of those who believe they can rule the planet? |
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Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee
Joined: 25 May 2003
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| Posted: Wed Sep 14, 2005 10:35 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
| In some gnomic way the as-yet-innumerable dead on the Gulf coast spoke not for but with the 100,000 Iraqis who have died as a consequence of the ongoing disastrous and criminal war. Time and again in the US press, Katrina and Iraq are being mentioned together. Yet Katrina was regular. She belonged to the familiar weather conditions which affect the Gulf of Mexico. She was not hiding in Afghanistan. And merciless as she was, she did not belong to any axis of evil. She was simply a natural threat to American lives and property, and she was heading for Louisiana. |
Debunked
http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3352814
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Counting the casualties
Nov 4th 2004
From The Economist print edition
AP
A statistically based study claims that many more Iraqis have died in the conflict than previous estimates indicated
THE American armed forces have long stated that they do not keep track of how many people have been killed in the current conflict in Iraq and, furthermore, that determining such a number is impossible. Not everybody agrees. Adding up the number of civilians reported killed in confirmed press accounts yields a figure of around 15,000. But even that is likely to be an underestimate, for not every death gets reported. The question is, how much of an underestimate?
A study published on October 29th in the Lancet, a British medical journal, suggests the death toll is quite a lot higher than the newspaper reports suggest. The centre of its estimated range of death tolls—the most probable number according to the data collected and the statistics used—is almost 100,000. And even though the limits of that range are very wide, from 8,000 to 194,000, the study concludes with 90% certainty that more than 40,000 Iraqis have died.
Numbers, numbers, numbers
This is an extraordinary claim, and so requires extraordinary evidence. Is the methodology used by Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, in Baltimore, and his colleagues, sound enough for reliable conclusions to be drawn from it?
The bedrock on which the study is founded is the same as that on which opinion polls are built: random sampling. Selecting even a small number of individuals randomly from a large population allows you to say things about the whole population. Think of a jar containing a million marbles, half of them red and half blue. Choose even 100 of these marbles at random and it is very, very unlikely that all of them would be red. In fact, the results would be very close to 50 of each colour.
The best sort of random sampling is one that picks individuals out directly. This is not possible in Iraq because no reliable census data exist. For this reason, Dr Roberts used a technique called clustering, which has been employed extensively in other situations where census data are lacking, such as studying infectious disease in poor countries.
Clustering works by picking out a number of neighbourhoods at random—33 in this case—and then surveying all the individuals in that neighbourhood. The neighbourhoods were picked by choosing towns in Iraq at random (the chance that a town would be picked was proportional to its population) and then, in a given town, using GPS—the global positioning system—to select a neighbourhood at random within the town. Starting from the GPS-selected grid reference, the researchers then visited the nearest 30 households.
In each household, the interviewers (all Iraqis fluent in English as well as Arabic) asked about births and deaths that had occurred since January 1st 2002 among people who had lived in the house for more than two months. They also recorded the sexes and ages of people now living in the house. If a death was reported, they recorded the date, cause and circumstances. Their deductions about the number of deaths caused by the war were then made by comparing the aggregate death rates before and after March 18th 2003.
They interviewed a total of 7,868 people in 988 households. But the relevant sample size for many purposes—for instance, measuring the uncertainty of the analysis—is 33, the number of clusters. That is because the data from individuals within a given cluster are highly correlated. Statistically, 33 is a relatively small sample (though it is the best that could be obtained by a small number of investigators in a country at war). That is the reason for the large range around the central value of 98,000, and is one reason why that figure might be wrong. (Though if this is the case, the true value is as likely to be larger than 98,000 as it is to be smaller.) It does not, however, mean, as some commentators have argued in response to this study, that figures of 8,000 or 194,000 are as likely as one of 98,000. Quite the contrary. The farther one goes from 98,000, the less likely the figure is.
The second reason the figure might be wrong is if there are mistakes in the analysis, and the whole exercise is thus unreliable. Nan Laird, a professor of biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health, who was not involved with the study, says that she believes both the analysis and the data-gathering techniques used by Dr Roberts to be sound. She points out the possibility of ��recall bias��—people may have reported more deaths more recently because they did not recall earlier ones. However, because most people do not forget about the death of a family member, she thinks that this effect, if present, would be small. Arthur Dempster, also a professor of statistics at Harvard, though in a different department from Dr Laird, agrees that the methodology in both design and analysis is at the standard professional level. However, he raises the concern that because violence can be very localised, a sample of 33 clusters really might be too small to be representative.
This concern is highlighted by the case of one cluster which, as the luck of the draw had it, ended up being in the war-torn city of Fallujah. This cluster had many more deaths, and many more violent deaths, than any of the others. For this reason, the researchers omitted it from their analysis—the estimate of 98,000 was made without including the Fallujah data. If it had been included, that estimate would have been significantly higher.
The Fallujah data-point highlights how the variable distribution of deaths in a war can make it difficult to make estimates. But Scott Zeger, the head of the department of biostatistics at Johns Hopkins, who performed the statistical analysis in the study, points out that clustered sampling is the rule rather than the exception in public-health studies, and that the patterns of deaths caused by epidemics are also very variable by location.
The study can be both lauded and criticised for the fact that it takes into account a general rise in deaths, and not just that directly caused by violence. Of the increase in deaths (omitting Fallujah) reported by the study, roughly 60% is due directly to violence, while the rest is due to a slight increase in accidents, disease and infant mortality. However, these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt because the more detailed the data—on causes of death, for instance, rather than death as a whole—the less statistical significance can be ascribed to them.
So the discrepancy between the Lancet estimate and the aggregated press reports is not as large as it seems at first. The Lancet figure implies that 60,000 people have been killed by violence, including insurgents, while the aggregated press reports give a figure of 15,000, counting only civilians. Nonetheless, Dr Roberts points out that press reports are a ��passive-surveillance system��. Reporters do not actively go out to many random areas and see if anyone has been killed in a violent attack, but wait for reports to come in. And, Dr Roberts says, passive-surveillance systems tend to undercount mortality. For instance, when he was head of health policy for the International Rescue Committee in the Congo, in 2001, he found that only 7% of meningitis deaths in an outbreak were recorded by the IRC's passive system.
The study is not perfect. But then it does not claim to be. The way forward is to duplicate the Lancet study independently, and at a larger scale. Josef Stalin once claimed that a single death is a tragedy, but a million deaths a mere statistic. Such cynicism should not be allowed to prevail, especially in a conflict in which many more lives are at stake. Iraq seems to be a case where more statistics are sorely needed.
Copyright © 2005 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved. |
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8679662/site/newsweek/
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More pernicious still is the now-famous Lancet report, ( "Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey" at http://www.thelancet.com/ journals/lancet/article/ PIIS0140673604174412/abstract) which the respected British medical journal billed as "the first scientific study of the effects of this war on Iraqi civilians." Produced by epidemiologists and public-health professionals and based on a hastily taken field survey in various locations in Iraq led by Johns Hopkins' School of Public Health researcher Les Roberts, this peer-reviewed article purported to show that 98,000 more Iraqis died in the 18 months after the war, based on death rates in the same areas in the year before the war. Further, the leading cause of death was violence, and Iraqis (other than those in Falluja) were 1.5 times more likely to die after the invasion, than before it. Few of the news reports on this study, however, noted what even the study itself did: that the margin of error for these statistics renders them practically meaningless. In the case of the death toll of an additional 98,000 persons, the authors call this a "conservative estimate" based on the data, but also report a 95 percent Confidence Interval (CI), of from 8,000 to 194,000, essentially a range of error. In other words, there is a 95 percent chance that the excess deaths were between 8,000 and 194,000. And the CI or Confidence Interval was 95 percent that the risk of death had increased by from 1.1 times to 2.3 times after the invasion; 1.5 times being a midpoint— again, a range that renders it meaningless. That CI was so broad simply because the survey's sample was relatively small. As one of the report's peer reviewers, Sheila Bird, wrote in a comment in The Lancet, "Wide uncertainty qualifies the central estimate of 98000 excess deaths, so that the survey results are consistent (just) with the true excess being as low as 8000 or as high as 194000." But she goes on to say that outside data and expert opinion make the 98,000 figure more likely, citing specifically the data from (where else?) Iraq Body Count.
Again this is before even considering whether those killed might have been civilians or civilian-dressed insurgents. The Lancet report does confirm for instance, that, "Many of the Iraqis reportedly killed by U.S. forces could have been combatants." And it added "it is not clear if the greater number of male deaths was attributable to legitimate targeting of combatants who may have been disproportionately male, or if this was because men are more often in public." Take another much-cited study, by the group CIVIC headed by anti-war activist Marla Ruzika, who was herself killed in Iraq by a suicide bomber (a detail not usually mentioned in the many anti-war websites that laud her work). CIVIC's field surveys counted 1,573 men killed compared to 493 women in the first 150 days of the war — and 95 percent of them died in the first two weeks.
All of these reports are far too politically motivated for their researchers to use their own data fairly. The Lancet for instance took the unusual step of posting its study on its Web site in advance of publication, on Oct. 29, 2004, clearly in order to be disseminated in advance of the U.S. elections—as the journal even implicitly acknowledges. In a way, the U.S. administration has itself to blame. The military has refused to issue estimates of Iraqis killed in military operations—as Gen. Tommy Franks famously declared, "we don't do body counts." (Mindful no doubt of how in the Vietnam War, U.S. body counts of Viet Cong dead at some point exceeded the country's population.) And when there have been killings of civilians by U.S. troops, military investigations have typically been whitewashes, usually with no effort even made to interview Iraqi eyewitnesses. This was the case, for instance, in a military review of the aerial bombing of a wedding party in Qaim, Iraq, on May 19, 2004. Survivors interviewed by journalists included some of the wedding musicians and numerous relatives of the bride and groom, who both were among the 40 dead. The military insists to this day that they hit an insurgent staging area out in the desert, based on "actionable intelligence", and it concluded its investigation without having interviewed any of the Iraqi eyewitnesses. Small wonder so many people are willing to believe the nonsense being peddled by anti-war statisticians about the human cost of this awful war. |
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
Besides it is not criminal cause Saddam Hussein never gave up his war.
And Saddam Hussein killed 300,000 - not including the war with Iran and in his first 20 years and he or his sons would have done similiar over the next 50 years.
Any humanitarian argument against the war isn't just weak it is very weak. |
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