PJ Media

Not Fooled:

1. People would’ve died from other causes (not directly related to war) since 2003 – Saddam has left hundreds of thousands of bodies in mass graves over the years – you would have to subtract that from the total.

They did – the number 550,000 refers to EXCESS deaths above the number that would have occurred had the mortality rate before the war stayed the same.

Not Fooled:

If the mortality rate in the U.S. is over 8, how can it be under 6 in a country with near-third-world conditions?

Because mortality rates depend on age distribution. You get very few deaths when the population is young. And after all the wars…Iraq’s population is VERY YOUNG – a median age of under 20 compared to the mid 30′s for the US.

According to the CIA World Factbook the estimated 2006 mortality rates (deaths/1000 people) are

Iran 5.5

US 8.26

Iran’s median age is 24.

Not Fooled:

The sample size is suspect – I’ve already covered that. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the areas surveyed were “cherry-picked” to provide data to support the premise.

Sample sizes are never ‘suspect’ – but can be too small to give much of interest. The paper contains a nice example. They redid the calculations for the same period as the first study and found 112,000 deaths and a 98% certainty that the number of deaths would be greater than 69,000. With the smaller sample size of the first study they found the most likely value was 100,000 deaths and that there was 98% chance that the true value was above 8,000. The second result isn’t ‘less right’ but it’s less interesting.

There is no evidence to support your cherry-picking claim.