The random political thoughts thread (Part Deux)

[Alex]

If someone issued a study saying that the sun is green, it would be possible to dismiss it without having seen it. I'm sure General Casey has a metric assload of statistics about what is going on in Iraq and if everything he has contradicts this study as ridiculously high I'm sure he is confident in rejecting its results. Doesn't mean he is right.

I find the claim that there are death certificates for almost all of these 600,000 excess violent deaths to be hard to swallow. If they existed then the passive surveillance methods should not be missing approximately 6 out of every 7 of them because they'd be moving through regulatory channels. Maybe not in the outlying provinces (which are also the more settled provinces) but in Bagdhad where a quarter of the popluation is and is the center of violence.

I haven't read the details yet. But I know that there were significant methodological problems with the first report they did (primarily in skewed sampling) and wonder if they were addressed in this second round. Also, I wonder if they address the fact that either the last two years have seen a massive upswing or the first study was way off (implying methodolical problems that, unless corrected for, could still be in the place).

I also tend to be wary of research that has a political goal in mind at the beginning rather than the end. Doesn't mean it is wrong and the technical points need to be addressed rather than the motivations, but it raises concerns.