How many Iraqis have died as a direct result of the US invasion and occupation?

An unnecessary war based on an unmitigated lie. ONE would be too many.

from their random sample because it was too dangerous for even them. I seem to remember them saying that 800,000 is their best guess, but 650,000 is the number that their results best defend.

But, he'll be making a "decision" soon to ensure that more are brought to "democracy" via the morgues.

I think the Lancet study is probably the best approximation, but what does it mean to vote on what the reality of a situation is?

Lot of deaths since then.

Don

That said, I think the Lancet study's a few months out of date. I'd suspect 700,000+

... with an uncertainty of about 300,000. That means their high range estimate is only sort of represented here. And if we assume (for no justifiable reason) that the rate of deaths has been linear, the mean would be about 800,000 and the high nearly 1.2 MILLION!

sweet.

And people here are touting for pres candidates who supported the IWR ....

They should be grateful they still have a job...

The toll will climb. How many currently alive will die from war-related causes that do not get logged officially. The death toll will be in the millions. Already is if you count the last 16 years of naked aggression. Straight through man.

Answering back

Much of the above is either arbitrary, or needs urgent rectification. For example:
• The choice of method is anything but controversial. In theory, representative household surveys are always a better approach than body counts, which, as Burnham et al. point out in their interesting discussion, have always turned out to significantly under-estimate true death tolls. There's nothing wrong about estimation per se, so long as one provides a confidence range (which in this case we have); provided that the sample size is reasonable (it is), the only risk is to incur in some error unrelated to sample size (bias), such as, for example, systematically interviewing households that were particularly affected by violence, or getting distorted information from interviewees.

• The Lancet survey does not perform "extrapolation" from a small sample, as the British government claims. It estimates a death rate, and merely applies it to the time period, and population, within which that death rate was measured - a statistically transparent procedure, given that the survey covered the entire country with the exception of two Governorates.

• It is not the case that every point in the confidence interval range is equally likely. In fact, assuming that there was little bias, the true death toll is much more likely to be close to the point estimate (655,000) than to the lower (393,000) and upper (943,000) bounds of the confidence range. It isn't a dartboard.

http://www.alertnet.org/thefacts/reliefresources/116066724942.htm