I am more confident in the NEJM study, but mainly because it is much larger. The method they used to estimate deaths-due-to-violence in the 10% of clusters not visited due to security concerns is a little worrisome but probably works. I still don’t see anything particularly wrong with the Lancet 2 study, if one is willing to assume that it is not just massively fraudulent.

Links:
http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/journals/lancet/s0140673606694919.pdf
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/NEJMsa0707782

Instead of discussing al-Qaeda tactics (which thankfully people like Michael Yon have exposed) which have resulted in scores of gruesome deaths, (including the beheading and mutilation of children), the libs pimp stories like abu-Gharib and convict Marines without a trial (Haditha), while painting the entire Armed Forces with a sadistic, murderous brush (see Murtha and Obama’s comments). When the detritus is cleared and the truth emerges, sadly, very few in the press are there to reconcile the stories and set the record straight. How many papers and magazines have talked about the insurgents that were among those killed at Haditha and the conflicting rules of engagement regarding suspected insurgent hideouts that sadly played a part in the death of Iraqis there? Very few, and none of them are there when our soldiers are greeted warmly and Iraqis come forward with intelligence that results in al-Qaeda deaths. Only when the news is unavoidable and big - like the death of Zarqawi - do the papers grudgingly do the obligatory ‘a bad guy is dead’ piece.

How about something simple like lying under oath or misleading prosecutors? Scooter Libby was convicted, yet Valerie Plame - despite documents that show she lied and *did* recommend her husband for the Niger job and wasn’t under secret cover - is a celebrated darling of the left, her lies to Congress excused, no conviction in sight. (Ken Timmerman’s book “Shadow Warriors” is a great expose of numerous incidents like this).

The right has to get better at getting the truth out and stop letting the left define the game and news.

The venture capitalist funds twenty ventures hoping that half will produce some technology that can be sold and one will be seriously profitable. Soros may be funding lots of efforts in the hope that one is the big one.

Muckrakers of all stripes need to follow this guy’s spoor, wherever it leads.

It seems likely that large numbers of small children in Iraq were dying because of poor water supplies. But would such deathgs be accurately recorded, especially in rural areas? How have such deaths been affected by the work done on water and sewage since the invasion?

What is the figure given by the coalition forces for the number of insurgents killed? Presumably the rest of the violent deaths were caused by Iraqis and foreign Arabs. Some at least of these have been the same Baathists who were responsible for mass graves before 2003.

What are the figures for deaths in traffic accidents since 2003 and before 2003? The number of cars in Iraq has greatly increased since the invasion.

John’s “clarification” is anything but definitive and as I point out, raises a helluva lot of questions about this man’s integrity.

Read that Journal article for some absolutely devastating discoveries about how this study was carried out. How anyone can conclude that this was anything except scientific fakery in pursuit of a political goal is beyond me.

I am not going to take the time to discuss this - as I say in the article the numbers are painful enough without having to resort to the kind of chicanery Roberts et al did. But you are correct in making the distinction between the NEJM and Lancet studies as far as what the material covered. I never should have included the NEJM study as a comparative to the Lancet study.

Having said that, the one thing that stands out in Lancet that is debunked by the NEJM is the number of violent deaths. Lancet 1 placed the blame on “mostly US air strikes” as a cause of violent death. The pitifully small number of combat sorties (as pointed out by numerous milbloggers at the time) as well as the limited use of helicopters would seem to put the lie to that statistic.

No matter. Read the Journal article and come back and tell me how confident you are in the Lancet 2 findings.

I was about to add that the Lancet 2 and NEJM studies attempted to measure different things, as is evident from their titles, and the major disagreement is in number of violence-related deaths, not excess deaths.
“Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional
cluster sample survey”
“Violence-Related Mortality in Iraq from 2002 to 2006″

The Open Society Institute had no role whatsoever in the origination, conduct, or findings of the survey.

The new survey by the Iraqi Ministry of Health shows 400,000 excess deaths, 150,000 by violence, since the U.S. invasion. Their numbers are probably low for violence, but the larger point remains—all surveys (Lancet 1 and 2, Iraq Health Ministry, and Opinion Business Research) show hundreds of thousands dead. The 4.5 million displaced, the 500,000 new widows, etc., underscore this catastrophe. We are trying to measure and understand it.