Thread by @Michael_Spagat

1/N Hi. This is worth a blog post which I'll do when I can clear some time.

But, briefly, I agree with many of the sentiments expressed in the @CharlesPPierce and also in the @nytimes piece that it's based upon.

2/N We should reflect on the impact of the Iraq war, including the human impact and there has been little of this marking the 15th anniversary of the invasion.

3/N I recommend this reflection in particular from @iraqbodycount , an organization I have worked with closely:

tinyurl.com/y996qyv5

4. But the 1 million figure is not credible. It originated from a poll conducted by @ORB_Int but there is no longer any trace of on the ORB International web cite. (But I archived the information they released at the time and would be happy to share with anyone who wants it)

5. I critiqued their findings together with @joshdibc here:

tinyurl.com/ya3ax7af

6. Although there were many problems the main thing was that they had a series of polls in which they asked people about deaths of FAMILY members, i.e., parents, children, brothers, sisters, cousins, etc.

7. There is no easy way to estimate the number of people killed off of such data because deaths can be reported by many households within a single family. So ORB conducted one poll in which they (supposedly) switched to asking people about killed HOUSEHOLD members.

8. But the results varied dramatically by region. In some regions the number of reported deaths dropped sharply as it should because households are much smaller than families.

9. But in one region the results were basically flat as the question changed from family to household and (as I recall) back again to family in the next poll.

10. These regions accounted for most of the estimate.

11. We don't know issue was intentional or accidental. (Did someone intentional manipulate the question to drive up the numbers or did the wrong question make accidentally make it into the field work. But the results are definitely not valid.

Josh and I then had an exchange of letters with Jonny Heald of ORB in the journal. I think it would be fair to say that Heald embarrassed himself:

tinyurl.com/yceny6he

I do think the number of violent deaths is well into the hundreds of thousands:

tinyurl.com/yctpcubw

But I don't think it's helpful to make up fake numbers to condemn the war any more than I think it's useful to make up fake conspiracies about Donald Trump. We should just stick to the facts.