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Comment by ygk8 | Hacker News Reader

What's funny is that you cite one survey when there are many surveys, with estimates wildly different from each other, while calling my rhetoric slanted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

The two highest estimates, if you read their Wikipedia entries, are heavily criticized by peer reviewers.

The actual death rates according to the CIA World Factbook, just to give you a comparison:

USA: http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?c=us&v=26

Iraq: http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?c=iz&v=26

Iraq isn't a war zone as many of you who have never visited might think.

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This is exactly the kind of shit I'm talking about. What exactly is the methodology behind the CIA's death rates? Oh wait, they don't give one. I wonder why. Perhaps because many/most of their statistics are complete bullshit. Here is the comment I wrote about their 'literacy statistics' just a couple days ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2961076

The same death rate figures are cited by UNICEF:

http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/usa_statistics.html#78

http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/iraq_statistics.html#78

The World Bank lists the same figures too:

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.CDRT.IN

Wikipedia also has the same death rate numbers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_United_States#D...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Iraq#Death_rate

And not a single one of the links you've just given are actually sources. Those figures come from the UN, but again no methodology is given. Are these figures actually independent and unbiased? We don't know. But we do know is that just last week the US ambassador to the UN said that the UN can't even issue so much as a press statement with the US agreement.

http://turtlebay.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/08/16/susan_ri...

http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/Excel-Data/mortality.htm

It took a bit of digging, but here's a document on how the UN estimates mortality: http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/adultmort/Comp...

You're sort of taking the quote from the US ambassador to the UN out of context. The US ambassador to the UN said that the UN Security Council can't even issue so much as a press release without US agreement. Never mind that this may just have been hyperbole, but it would make sense that the UN Security Council may have trouble doing things without the backing of the world's most powerful military. It says nothing, really, about what the UN as a whole, or the body who forms the mortality statistics specifically, is capable of doing or not doing without US backing.

Fair point about the UN, but I think that isn't actually the methodology behind the mortality estimates. That's just an overview of different ways the UN gives for estimating mortality, but it doesn't actually provide any information on which of these (if any) the UN is using for each of the actual mortality statistics they list.

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