'Nother Solent

More about that Lancet study.

[This post has had material gradually added to it as I thought of new things to say.]

Via this post by Squander Two I found this post by John B of Shot by Both Sides, which is followed by extensive debate in the comments.

Here's my reason for thinking the Lancet Study [out of date link now updated] over-counted. (For convenience I will talk about the oft-quoted headline figure of 100,000 excess deaths, though of course the study itself had a very wide range of possible figures.) Why the devil should a war in which the side making the running, in this case the Americans, had every motive to minimise civilian casualties, kill at a higher rate than wars where the dominant side either did not give a fig for civilian well-being or actively sought to kill civilians? A killing rate in Iraq comparable to Darfur (this article discusses the difficulties of counting deaths in that conflict), or to the Dutch Hongerwinter of 1944? It doesn't seem likely. Furthermore I am not often one to enthuse about the ability of a command economy to keep people fed and sheltered, but it seems crazy to me to suppose that the vast sums of effort and money the Americans put into rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure had so little effect.

And here's my take on what actually happened to make the study show figures as high as it did: (1) I think some of the interviewees falsely claimed to have lost relatives as a result of the war in the hope of getting compensation. (2) I think some of the interviewees exaggerated their indirect losses in order to feel important, to gain the psychological payoff of being hard done by, to restore their pride, and to pay out the Americans for defeating them in war. (This bundle of motives could be shared by those who felt that the American invasion was a good thing, as well as those who thought it was a bad thing.)

To you who are gearing up to call me overly harsh, or even racist, in these assumptions about the Iraqi interviewees, stow it. I describe human behaviour, not exclusively Iraqi behaviour. Times are hard in Iraq. All can agree on that. The atmosphere in any country at war, or just after a war, has something of Harry Lime's Vienna about it. Deals and scams abound, as people who in happier times could have let the current of orthodox renumerative activity carry them along learn new stratagems to snatch or scavenge scarce resources. (Angling for compensation and exaggeration for political purposes aren't exactly unknown in the rich, safe West either, and with far less excuse.) Iraqis have heard of, and perhaps observed, this strange Western habit of giving money to victims of war. One does not have to assume the slightest impropriety on the part of the study designers or interviewers to find it plausible that a certain proportion of respondents will say, "Ah yes, my sister's poor babe was stillborn. No, we did not report it. What would have been the point in all that chaos? We dared not leave the house at that time. We buried her in the garden." Some will say that because it is true. That should always be remembered. But some will also say it because, who knows, it might pay off ¹ - and what are these researchers going to do to check, start digging the lawn?

Moving on from the discussion of what the facts are to the discussion of who has moral authority to speculate about them ... what you have to remember is that John B likes to tease. That's why his blog has the address it has. ("http://www.stalinism.com"; to me "http://www.hitlerism.com" would be only slightly more offensive.) His blog is miles better, and his attitudes miles more humane, than the URL suggests, but he is out to rattle a few cages. That's why he said,

"If you don't accept that the 100,000 number from the Lancet study on Iraq war causalties represents a probable lower bound (given its exclusion of Falluja, where we appear to have killed everyone) on the number of Iraqis who died in the 18 months following the war and otherwise wouldn't have died in the 18 months following the war, and you do not have a PhD in a statistical discipline, then you are an ignorant bigot."

At first I thought this sarcasm, particularly given the bit about Fallujah, but apparently he means it, though, as I said, I am sure he also intends to provoke. OK, I'll bite. Science, particularly social science and medicine is full of the most elegant and mathematically self-consistent results subverted by human hope, fear, malice, cupidity, humour ² or general slipperiness. William Broad and Nicholas Wade's book "Betrayers of the Truth" lists some of them. It is mis-titled, being as illuminating about self-deception and gullibility as about outright fraud and deceit.

And another thing. We know the authors of the study are a long way from the ideal of scientific impartiality because of the way they rushed it out to appear before the US election. Bad form, old boy. We also know they, or at least one of them, Roberts, is deceiving us or (more likely) deceiving himself because he made the absurd claim that the rush job wasn't intended to influence the result of the election one way or another. Does anyone believe that?

ADDED LATER: Here's my earlier post on the study from back when it came out.

¹ ADDED LATER STILL: When I made up that little scenario I was thinking of this passage from the summary:

"When violent deaths were attributed to a faction in the conflict or to criminal forces, no further investigation into the death was made to respect the privacy of the family and for the safety of the interviewers. The deceased had to be living in the household at the time of death and for more than 2 months before to be considered a household death.

Within clusters, an attempt was made to confirm at least two reported non-infant deaths by asking to see the death certificate. Interviewers were initially reluctant to ask to see death certificates because this might have implied they did not believe the respondents, perhaps triggering violence. Thus, a compromise was reached for which interviewers would attempt to confirm at least two deaths per cluster. Confirmation was sought to ensure that a large fraction of the reported deaths were not fabrications. Death certificates usually did not exist for infant deaths and asking for such certificates would probably inflate the fraction of respondents who could not confirm reported deaths. The death certificates were requested at the end of the interview so that respondents did not know that confirmation would be sought as they reported deaths."

² Anyone know if it's true or myth that an anthropologist - Margaret Mead? - once claimed that some South Seas islanders did not know that sex led to babies, citing as evidence the fact that certain islanders had solemnly told her that her theory of conception must be wrong - for had not that woman there given birth last month even though her husband had been away on a sea voyage for two years?

It's GO!

Good point from the EU Serf:

I always thought that NGO meant Non Governmental Organisation. How come any of them get money from the state?

"We cannot control guns and we don't have to, either,"

writes Michael Coren in the Toronto Sun. "What we have to control is the decaying social fabric of North America and our headlong, happy rush into an ethical vacuum."

I'm not sure I entirely agree with his uncompromisingly conservative prescription. But I agree with the diagnosis, and not just for North America.

Talking of which, I read a surprising report in the Scotsman about Michael Howard. Howard has long been a hate-figure for British shooters for his role, as Home Secretary in John Major's government, in bringing in the firearms legislation after Dunblane. (He proposed banning most handguns, the incoming Labour government banned all of them.) Howard now says it all went too far. The Gun Control Network disagreed, and defended the ban: "That’s not to be complacent but it does mean that if you take action as we did after Dunblane, it does have an effect." It does indeed.

Dutch speed cameras are no joke.

Johan P. Bakker of Brighton, MI, writes:

I enjoy your blog, every day. And I agree that the photo captions which you mentioned from the blog 'Dutch Report' leave something to be desired.

But, for the Dutch reader, it is well-worth the effort to click through from 'Dutch Report' to the full coverage of this on the website 'flitservice.nl', which is dedicated to resisting the over-zealous enforcement of speed limits in all the various and wonderful ways in which that is done in the Netherlands.

'Traject controlle' - literally, 'journey watching' - is a different kind of system in that it does not catch speeding motorists at a single location by measuring instantaneous speed, but rather by identifying vehicles at various locations at various times and then calculating how fast they must have driven to get from one point to the other.

The full report shows that this was an organized action in which the control and processor units for this system at various locations were all destroyed at more-or-less the same time, and destroyed with a vengeance. The captions in the flitservice.nl report are much, much funnier, I assure you . . .

I'm guessing from this that Mr Bakker is a Dutch speaker. I was interested - academically, constable, academically - to hear more from him about this dinstinctly Orwellian control system and the apparently highly organised act of sabotage that laid it low (temporarily, no doubt). In several different ways I suspect Holland today gives you a foretaste of Britain tomorrow.

However I must correct one misapprehension. I found the captions as written in "Dutch Report" hilarious! The tone starts off sounding like what an earnest young police recruit or a junior reporter for the local paper would write in his notebook when attending his very first crime scene, and then slides into open mockery. I assumed that the author wrote them in that way in order to raise a laugh. But I could easily be wrong: humour across national boundaries is a tricky thing.

Not meant for the likes of us.

Via EU Serf I found this post from a Dutch blog called "Dutch Report." The subject is the European Constitution:

1) Never vote in favor for something that is going to change a lot of things, but which nobody can explain to you.

2) Never vote for a constitution that you cannot understand. Because that is not a constitution meant for you.

Staying with "Dutch Report," I must say that I found the captions to the pictures of non-functioning car surveillance cameras in this post most helpful and informative.

In the words of Crocodile Dundee...

"That's not a demonstration ... THIS is a demonstration."

In the sunset of his years.

Iain Murray argues that the fact that Tony Blair gave in to Opposition demands that the Prevention of Terrorism Bill be renewed every year - a "sunset clause in all but name" - shows that Blair has lost his mastery of Parliament.

Equally important is that Michael Howard seems to be getting back his principles.

Two peculiar institutions.

My regular correspondent ARC writes with some...

...reflections on the essay by Lee Harris about the 'peculiar institution' of Palestinian terrorism that you linked to.

Apart from its title, which prompts some thoughts, I'm not so impressed with it. Harris is much concerned about 'the impossible being the immoral'. Quite apart from the fundamental philosophical issue, who decides what is impossible?

- Firstly, some people's idea of the possible is as narrow as a piece of paper seen end-on. In 1940, there were those on both left and right (the people's convention crowd, Lord Halifax momentarily, etc.) who thought Churchill was being very unrealistic in ignoring Hitler's peace offer. Such cross-party stupidity has been common in our history: "Who is there mad enough to expect that we shall be able to drive the French out of the Peninsula?", asked leading Whig Sir William Fremantle in the house of commons in early 1811. The kind of answer he got may by judged by (Tory) Lord Liverpool's letter to Wellington, "Your chances of success are considered here by all persons, military as well as civil, so improbable, that I could not recommend any attempt at what might be called desperate resistance." (King George III was almost the sole exception; he may of course have been the 'mad enough' person Fremantle had in mind)

- Secondly, the blatantly impossible can happen. When the emperor Hadrian decided that ethnic cleansing would effect a final solution of the Jewish problem back in the second century, he must have felt sure that the prophecy of their survival and ultimate return was utterly ludicrous.

I did not find this example as persuasive as the first two, owing to the long timescale. Consideration of the reasons for what ARC calls the "two-millenia staying power of the Jews" takes us outside the ordinary run of history and into the realms of religious delusion according to some observers and divinely-appointed destiny according to others. It would be a foolhardy politician who presumed to make policy on the grounds that his cause had parallels with matters arising from the Covenant of Abraham. However "the ordinary run of history" offers many other examples of results so startling that they could almost be called impossible. ARC continues:

The idea that an achievable goal is necessary to making a war just has certainly been advanced before. It has always seemed to me to reflect a confusion of means and ends. Neither a wrong war, nor a wrong way of war, are made right by being used for an achievable end.

There are two propositions: (1) an achievable goal is necessary to making a war just; and (2) a wrong war, or a wrong way of war, can be made right by being used for an achievable end. I am more inclined to agree with (1) than (2), though I take note of ARC's argument that people will disagree, and, indeed, lie, about what is truly achievable. (Which is one reason why we now see anti-racists, who would have laughed to scorn those justifications for the British Empire that said the natives had not yet achieved a cultural level sufficient for independence, trotting out lines about how the Iraqis have not yet achieved a cultural level sufficient for democracy. The best tactic to ensure democracy is not achieved is to say that it is unachievable.) "Achievability" and "necessity" don't have parallel status when it comes to justifying wars, but both matter, and with both it is difficult to tell the true version from the false.

Descending a little from these high concepts, ARC then responds to this line of mine:

> Southern slaverowners and Palestinian terrorists both wowed
> the foreign girls with their brooding, tragic, sexy, dangerous,
> gun-totin' ways.

He says:

The South did reject intifada. At Appomatox, the idea of continuing the war guerrilla-style was put to Lee who replied that the soldiers "would be under no discipline ... The country would be full of lawless bands in every part, and a state of society would ensue from which it would take the country years to recover." That state can be studied in the Palestinian areas today. Would the left ever admit that the people they love to hate were better than the people they love to excuse?

I was aware that General Lee refused to pursue a guerilla war, in part from conversation with ARC. It is one of the many principled acts that made Lee a leader worthy of a better cause. My point was more limited: simply that part of the appeal of Palestinian terrorists, at least to some women, is sex appeal. Some women like dangerous men.

UPDATE: ARC, having telephoned my husband to ask him a question about something else entirely, was roped in by me to explain further about that Hadrian example. He recast his argument as something like this: "If one is looking for an argument to dissuade a Palestinian from terrorism, the argument 'it is impossible for you to regain the land you feel is yours' will certainly not work. Such a person is likely to be more aware than most that the Jews held on for two thousand years until the impossible became possible. Although ARC himself might doubt that the Palestinians would do the same, a Palestinian, particularly one motivated by religion, would not doubt. Better (on several levels) to stick to unassailable arguments of principle: terrorism is wrong."

I wanted to give a wider airing

to the eighteenth comment to this Samizdata piece by Brian Micklethwait, mostly, to be honest, because the comment is by me.

Jim, I read some way in to that "Counting Chickens Before* They Hatch" piece before semi-giving up and skimming the rest. Unimpressive, you may say, but we're talking 76 pages of highly mathematical text here.

OK, it looked a closely reasoned and serious piece of work. I agreed with its argument that different types of aid (emergency / long term / short term) must be disaggregated and that each type needs different assessment periods. But I don't intend to surrender my deep scepticism about whether most government aid works yet. Nor will I accept the idea that I should wait until I know what a regression analysis is before I dare comment.

For one thing, I'm pretty sure that there are equally mathematical and serious papers giving other messages. Indeed, they are mentioned.

More fundamentally, I think that "Counting Chickens when they hatch" suffers from something almost all aid literature also suffers from: not seeing the woods for the trees.

While it did try to compare what did happen to what would have happened without aid, by bringing in regional growth comparators etc., what I want to do is to ask what would have happened if this entire vast movement had not taken place? What if the whole mindset of Africa as recipient, Africa as pauper, Africa as guilt-sink, Africa as playground of anti-colonialist, nationalist and socialist dreams; this mindset confirmed by a billion separate interactions, had not got off the ground?

What if Africa had been like Taiwan?
I think you get a much richer Africa.

I can see that this is essentially unverifiable. I can't help that. But Taiwan is richer than the Sudan, when it wasn't fifty years ago.

*Actually it's "when they hatch" not "before they hatch." I did get the title right further down the page.

The great twelfth century rabbi Maimonides ranked eight types of giving in order of virtue. One could construct a ladder of international aid on the same lines. "UN-to-dictator, no strings attached" aid would be worst but I am not decided on the other internal rankings.

My Micklethwait links always come in flocks. Here's an earlier post dealing with why people had good reason to be more generous with money to help victims of the tsunami than with other causes. Aid that is intended to help the recipient to self-sufficiency may well be nobler than short-term aid, but the devil, especially when dealing with nations rather than individuals, lies in defining what actions will lead to self-sufficiency. Or what self-sufficiency actually is. God rest the souls of the myriad Africans and Asians who died demonstrating that tariff barriers and import substitution were the wrong way to go.

UPDATE: By the way, Jim replies later in those Samizdata comments.

Why, thanks, guys!

Over at Political Site of the Day I am, er, it.

In the company of Insta-fave Ann Althouse, no less, and other blogs and websites of left and right.