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| 5/16 |
| 2005/6/20-21 [Politics/Foreign/MiddleEast/Iraq] UID:38205 Activity:high |
6/20 Curiosity got the best of me, and I read the Lancet study, too. It's
quite thorough, undeceptive, and straightforward. Responding to
emarkp's post (http://csua.com/?entry=38170
RE: Confidence Intervals. (1)Assuming a normal(it's not, it's
skewed), there's a 90% certainty there were over 40k dead, 85%
certainty over 51k dead, 75% certainty over 68k dead. (2) this CI
DOES NOT INCLUDE Falluja. The author's purposely excluded a huge
outlier, and the most violent region in all of Iraq in order to form
a conservative estimate. (3) the author's are plainly honest about
the difficulties inherent in this kind of war-time study. (4)
Furthermore, this study estimated the number dead at the time of the
study. Extrapolating to today yields: 90%: 65, 85%: 82k, 75% 108k.
Think about that: lowest quadrile = 108k dead. Not including Falluja.
RE: death certificates: Out of 142 deaths, 78 certificates were
asked for, and 63 provided(81%). Additionally, "When households
could not produce the death certificate, interviewers felt in all
cases that the explanation offered was reasonable"
RE: non-war violent crime. That's part of the point of the study.
war-related conditions cause an increase in overall violent crime,
including murder, faction in-fighting, etc.
RE: the cluster analysis: "Because the probability that clusters
would be assigned to any given Governorate was proportional to the
population size in both phases of the assignment, the sample remained
a random national sample. This clumping of clusters was likely to
increase the sum of the variance between mortality estimates
of clusters and thus reduce the precision of the national
mortality estimate." So yes, confidence intervals get bigger. That
was a call they had to make, to reduce researcher risk. But it's
still a random sample. -nivra
\_ Thsi is ordinarily true, but I would be curious to see some
\_ This is ordinarily true, but I would be curious to see some
pre-Saddam data. Naturally, I doubt we could find something like
that. -- ilyas
\_ The study actually recorded pre-Saddam data. Pre-Saddam death
rates were 5.0(3.7,6.3)/1000/yr, Post-Saddam data were
12.3(1.4-23.2)/1000/yr. -nivra
\_ You are telling me that during Saddam's tenure Iraq had a lower
death rate than the United States? -- ilyas
\_ So is the CIA:
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/iz.html
\_ I don't think it's true, myself. -- ilyas
\_ Why not? Look at the population age breakdowns.
\_ Why not? Because it simply doesn't make sense.
Almost every cause of death is more sereve the
less developed you are. I also think certain
types of deaths are simply not reported. I would
also like to note that your typical 'hellhole
middle eastern arab states' all have extremely
low death rates for some reason. It's very
suspicious. -- ilyas
\_ It's even better than that. Post-invasion,
excluding Falluja, the Iraqi mortality rate is
7.9 per 1000 people. According to the CIA
World Factbook, the estimated 2005 mortality
rate in the US is 8.25 per 1000.
\_ The slate article cites UN data as saying:
"Iraq's mortality rate from 1980-85 was 8.1 per
1,000. From 1985-90, the years leading up to
the 1991 Gulf War, the rate declined to 6.8 per
1,000. After '91, the numbers are murkier, but
clearly they went up. Whatever they were in
2002, they were almost certainly higher than 5
per 1,000. In other words, the wartime
mortality rate--if it is 7.9 per
1,000--probably does not exceed the peacetime
rate by as much as the Johns Hopkins team
assumes." -emarkp
\_ I think it's incredibly shocking if true.
Saudi Arabia death rates are apparently
2.62/1k. Anybody want to comment on why
this might be? Has anybody plotted if
the population growth matches birth/death
figures in the Middle East? -- ilyas
\_ Better diet and more exercise?
\_ I have no idea but I have come to view
the US as a weird place... in many areas
we're not much better off than the 3rd
world places. Iraq was nowhere near as
fucked up as some 3rd world places...
people are relatively educated and so
forth, they have infrastructure. What is
the US death rate among young men in
ghettos? I'm playing GTA: San Andreas
right now and based on this research,
large crowds of people regularly get
shot or run over in downtown areas.
\_ It's not just the US, the Middle East
rates are much lower than those of the
entire industrialized West. I think
it smells of your good ol'fashioned
Soviet-era underreporting. -- ilyas
\_ Look at the age structure of the
populations. I'm pretty sure
80-90 year old Americans are going
to have a higher death rate than
young people in third world
countries. Middle eastern
countries mostly have very young
populations.
\_ I love how this quote exposes Kaplan's
hackery. Well, gee pre-Invasion is
"certainly higher" than what the methods
in the study indicate. The _logical_
conclusion is that the study's methodology
is conservative and under-estimates actual
death rate. Of course, Kaplan doesn't
understand the definition of "unclear,"
so I'm just expecting too much of him, I
guess. -nivra
\_ His assertion that the numbers "clearly
went up" is weak, yes. But weren't we
getting complaints from the world about
how the sanctions were killing Iraqis?
Isn't it reasonable to guess that the
pre-2001 mortality rate was at least 6.8?
\_ sure. -nivra
\_ That data is pre-invasion, not pre-Saddam, and it is from the
same study (they asked people about deaths in the period
before and after invasion). -emarkp
\_ Yes. I had assumed ilyas meant "When Saddam Was Ousted,"
by "Saddam".
\_ Yeah, that's what I meant. -- ilyas
=======
>>>>>>> Your Changes Above
RE: the cluster analysis: "Because the probability that clusters
would be assigned to any given Governorate was proportional to the
population size in both phases of the assignment, the sample remained
a random national sample." -nivra
\_ Could you post a link to the actual study, please? Thanks.
\_ It's changed since the slate article. Here's the URL
(registration required, but bugmenot has a login):
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673604174412/fulltext
\_ /csua/tmp/~nivra/lancet.pdf
\- does your asessment of iraq wildly change whether the casualty count
is 50k or 100k? i mean it is ok to invade a country on false
premises, if it only leads to "1 vietnam" [usa deaths = 50k]
worth of deaths ... but at 2V, they really ought to have done
better?
\_ my assessment? No. Iraq is massively fucked up, regardless. -nivra
\_ my assessment? No. Iraq's massively fucked up, regardless. -nivra
\- i meant to sort of just throw it out there. i think the
these kinds of reactions shore up the claim if there were
no pix out of abu graib, it would have been a total non-
story. instead of a lot of people being outraged, probably
at least half the country would have had the "you have to
break some eggs to make an omlette" type attitude. what was
amazing and depressing is the rush limbaugh types not taking
a hard line about what goes on in war but these flip comments
about frat hazing and such. anyway, now i am getting
depressed again.
\_ I brought this up before,
\_ I brought this up before, what went on in AG is the same
kind of shit that goes on in American prisons. Why is
so much attention paid to this one incident? Don't
American citizens incarcerated in our prisons deserve
more humane treatment? -- ilyas
\- that is not what i am saying. i am more contrasting
the comments about gitmo [no pix, only stories and
the "what do you epxect, it is a club med?] type
reaction. and certainly there is evidence of beatings
and such in american prisons, but i dont think guards
wipe their asses with the mexican flag, or tell
or dress up black inmates in hooded klan outfits.
\_ So you think psych torture is uniquely worse than
physical torture? Btw, it's not just 'beatings'
that go on in US prisons. -- ilyas
\- are you deliberately being difficult or
is this your natural mode of thought? this
subthread is no longer worth my time.
\_ Note that this subthread is about as long as my
initial post which was deleted because it was
too long. -emarkp
\_ Look dumbass, a *single* post is easily
moved to another location. There is not
a simple way to move an enitre thread
composed of short responses. In the
Iliad thrad, nobody cut and pasted
the wikipedia article on "aspect".
If they had, that would have been deleted
with a request to leave a pointer.
A pointer to a sloda file or a URL are
functionally the same. Do you have some
persecution complex or is it a full on
messiah complex?
\_ "So I'm glad we could agree that the Lancet study was a pile of
crap." -emarkp
Why the big disparity in perceptions?
\_ The Lancet study is a pile of crap the same way I feel the Bible
is a pile of crap. Did you even fucking graduate from Berkeley?
\_ "It's quite thorough, undeceptive, and straightforward."
-nivra
\_ But wrong. Their methodology punches a lot of holes in a
random sampling, and the results aren't valid. -emarkp
\_ So I guess there is a genuine disparity in perceptions
then (as opposed to a political/fake disparity).
\_ What part of "... the sample remained a random
national sample" do you not understand? You read the
study... tell me what these "holes in random sampling"
are. Don't regurgitate Kaplan, b/c he's full of shit.
The authors are clear on both the methodology and the
impacts of the methodology: "This clumping of clusters
was likely to increase the sum of the variance
between mortality estimates of clusters and thus
reduce the precision of the national mortality
estimate. We deemed this acceptable since it reduced
travel by a third." Certainly, it affected the
precision of the estimate, but not the accuracy.
That's one of the main reasons for the large CI. -nivra
\_ They reassigned random locations to other
governorates that were chosen non-randomly. That
means they are no longer random. Yes, they tried to
"match" governorates but you /can't do that/ or you
bias the data--not just the variance. -emarkp
\_ Did you understand the methodology? The
reassignment _did_ occur randomly. Yes, it
decreases statistical power, but No, it did not
compromise randomness. cf. wolfram link below.
\_ No, they did /not/ reassign them randomly. The
chose a paired governorate and randomly chose
between the two. The choice of pairs was /not/
random. -emarkp
\_ Neither are the initial governates. Duh.
It wouldn't make a difference if they
paired all the fucking country up. Again,
look into the wolfram link if you don't
understand. The pairing screws with
precision, not accuracy. -nivra
\_ ??? The paper says: "We obtained January,
2003, population estimates for each of
Iraq.s 18 Governorates from the Ministry
of Health. No attempt was made to adjust
these numbers for recent displacement or
immigration. We assigned 33 clusters to
Governorates via systematic equal-step
sampling from a randomly selected start."
How is that not random for the initial
selection? -emarkp
\_ The clusters are random, the
governates are not. 18 governates
already assigned by M. of Health.
The authors simply collapsed 18 into
12, then proceeded randomly. -nivra
\_ Sure, but the clusters were
assigned to the governorates at
random. I don't see a problem with
that. It's the non-random
substitution of governorates that
is a problem. -emarkp
You're ok with: _/
P1 = P(cluster_init|population_governates)
They did:
P2 = P(cluster_sampled|population_governates,P1)
Why are you ok with P1 and not ok with P2? (reformatted) -nivra
\_ Ah. I'll have to think about that more carefully. That
does suggest a problem in my reasoning. -emarkp
precision, not accuracy.
you're ok with: P1 = P(cluster_init|population_governates) _/
They did: P2 = P(cluster_sampled|population_governates,P1)
Why are you ok with P1 and not ok with P2?
\_ It's widely known that conditioning on an extra thing can
reverse any inequality among probabilities. This
phenomenon even has a name in statistics. This may be
what is giving you pause. -- ilyas
\_ It's not surprising that people who agree with the motivations of
the war doubt the study while people who disagree trust it. I'm
distrustful of statistical correlative studies in general because
they're so hard to get right and so easy to make bad assumptions.
The Lancet study was a bit cavalier with adjustments to the
sampling. To the authors' credit, they did make effort to
decrease possible effects of adjusting the sampling, but I don't
think it was sufficient. -emarkp
\_ Shrug. Random individuals on the net don't make a big diff to
me. nivra and emarkp saying two opposite things means
something.
\_ Why were death certificates not asked for in 64 out of 142 deaths?
Instead of 63 death certificates out of 78 requested, shouldn't it
be 63 certificates out of 142 deaths (44%)?
\_ no. They only asked for death certificates 78 times. emarkp's op
has the relevant quote. It was a methodolical decision, but still
connsistent with random sampling. -nivra
\_ RE: the clustering. Asserting that changing the sampling doesn't
lose randomness doesn't make it so. They can't use the clustering
as a representative sample just as if the pairs of governorates are
exactly equal.
\_ they don't just assert. They show how they changed the sampling,
and if you understood basic probability, you would understand
that it doesn't change the randomness of the sample. Here, a
stats refresher: http://csua.org/u/cfp (mathworld) -nivra
stats refresher: http://csua.org/u/cfp (mathworld)
\_ No, they did /not/ reassign them randomly. The chose a paired
governorate and randomly chose between the two. The choice of
pairs was /not/ random. -emarkp
\_ see above. precision not accuracy. -nivra
\_ see above. precision not accuracy.
RE: non-war violent crime. Why is that part of the study? Did they
check what crime was like here in the US before and after the
invasion? Was there any correlation?
\_ this has to do with what? The estimate of the number dead
is an estimate of total dead, regardless of prior death-rate.
Furthermore, you don't think the stoppage of electricity, water,
food, etc. could have affected non-violent death rates?
food, etc. could have affected non-violent death rates? -nivra
RE: Confidence Intervals. Without seeing their inputs, I don't
trust the results. Especially when they're just dumping the data
into software developed by "Save the Children". -emarkp
\_ Firstly, they used two different data packages, and results
concurred. Secondly, this is exactly what it comes down to:
you don't "trust" the results. You have no background in
epidemiological studies and are not familiar with software or
terminology, yet you don't trust the results from methodologies
that are clearly described, checked by two presumably standard
statistical packages published in The Lancet. That shows the
underlying reason for the "disparity in opinion".
underlying reason for the "disparity in opinion". -nivra
\_ Yes, the study claims that they compared the "Save the
Children" results with EpiInfo. They don't provide their
source data however so it's pretty much impossible to check
their results. -emarkp
\_ Firstly, the software was not called "Save the Children."
The software was designed to measure death-rates on what
I presume was a project paid for by "Save the Children."
Secondly, they do show source data. They provided all
raw numbers. If you distrust the results, go find other
epidemiological software and run it yourself. I happen
to trust editorial boards of major scientific journals
to trust epidemiological results that the authors ran
on two different statistical packages.-nivra
on two different statistical packages.
\_ I used to trust them more. I was convinced by the
"hockey stick" that global warming was correlated with
human industrial activity. Then someone put random
data into the same analysis engine and the hockeystick
appeared with that data as well. So much for that
trust. -emarkp
\_ Fine. That means the heart of your opinion resides
blatant mistrust of the editorial board of first-
rate medical journal. Finally, something we agree
on. -nivra
\_ No, the reason to investigate is my distrust of
what appeared to be a politically motivated study
and a distrust of /all/ statistical correlation
studies. The heart of my opinion is based on what
I read in the study itself. -emarkp
\_ mistrust of "correlation equals causation" is
reasonable. The authors make no such claim.
In fact, the 98k has nothing to do with either
correlation or causation. It's a simple
extrapolation of the death count based on a
statistical sample -nivra
\_ Neither did the hockey-stick claim it. It
was an extrapolation of global temperatures
based on a sample. And it has been entirely
busted. -emarkp
\_ So your argument is: Hockey stick
extrapolation incorrect. Therefore,
Iraq casualty extrapolation incorrect.
Sounds reasonable to me. -nivra
\_ Take emarkp's post: Of the 6 points he made, 3 were blatantly
invalid: (3) undermines his point, (4) is a non-point, (5)
reflects a failure to understand the study, 2 were directly
addressed in the study: (2) & (6) as quoted above. That leaves
the CI criticism (1), which is a valid criticism of the
"repeated talking point," and not of the "study," since both
times the study used the 98k number, it was immediately followed
by the 95% CI. Furthermore, the CI still reflects a 75%
certainty that there were over 68k dead in Iraq at the time of
the study. -nivra
\_ The very wide CI indicates a severe weakness of the study. Your
assertion that my points are invalid doesn't make it so. -emarkp
\_ At least Kaplan wasn't dense enough to make this argument.
The CI shows the inherent difficulties in war-related
epidemiological studies. It's not a "weakness of the study."
He, at least, understand the difference between the study
and the security situation in Iraq. The CI, if anything,
shows the integrity of the study - it accurately reflects
the difficulty of obtaining a precise estimate. -nivra
\_ Amend my comment to "weakness of selecting any one value"
as the mortality. -emarkp
\_ The study quotes "98k" twice; both times immediately
followed by the CI. Well, gee, what value do
researchers normally choose? How about a mean? -nivra
the difficulty of obtaining a precise estimate. |
| 5/16 |
|
| csua.com/?entry=38170 In particular: - the "100,000 dead" number comes from a 95% conficence interval spanning 8,000 to 194,000. Thus, a compromise was reached for which interviewers would attempt to confirm at least two deaths per cluster." Interviewers also believed that in the Iraqi culture it was unlikely for respondents to fabricate deaths. "It is possible that deaths were not reported, because families might wish to conceal the death or because neonatal deaths might go without mention." This suggests that violent crime was mixed in with war-related deaths. com/id/2108887 that criticizes the study points right to the biggest problem: the cluster reassignments: "During September, 2004, many roads were not under the control of the Government of Iraq or coalition forces. Local police checkpoints were perceived by team members as target identification screens for rebel groups. To lessen risks to investigators, we sought to minimise travel distances and the number of Governorates to visit, while still sampling from all regions of the country. Like all statistial analyses, the results can be hugely varied depending on methodology. I see the Lancet study as seriously flawed and the claim of 100,000 extra dead invalid. The report did not claim that all 100k were killed by American action, on the contrary, many were known to have died due to the unstable security situation. If the study is so flawed, why doesn't anyone else do one to debunk it. We know the Pentagon has its own numbers, why don't they release them? com/id/2108887 Lancet, reveal s that this number is so loose as to be meaningless. The r eport's authors derive this figure by estimating how many Iraqis die d i n a 14-month period before the US invasion, conducting surveys on h ow m any died in a similar period after the invasion began (more on those sur veys later), and subtracting the difference. That differencethe num ber of "extra" deaths in the post-invasion periodsignifies the war's to ll. But read the passage that cites the calculati on more fully: We estimate there were 98,000 extra deaths (95% CI 8000-194 000) during the post-wa r period. Readers who are accustomed to perusing statistical documents k now what th e set of numbers in the parentheses means. It means that the authors are 95 percent confident that the war-caused deaths totaled som e number between 8,000 and 194,000. Imagine reading a poll reporting tha t George W Bush will win somewhere b etween 4 percent and 96 percent of the votes in this Tuesday's election. You would say that this is a usele ss poll and that something must have gone terribly wrong with the sampli ng. The same is true of the Lancet ar ticle: It's a useless study; The p roblem is, ultimately, not with the scholars who conducted the study ; I t's hard to conduct reliable, random surveysand to e xtrapolate meaningf ul data from the results of those surveysin the chao tic, restrictive en vironment of war. However, these scholars are responsible for the hype s urrounding the stud y Gilbert Burnham, one of the co-authors, told the I nternational Herald Tribune (for a story reprinted in today's New York T imes), "We're quite sure that the estimate of 100,000 is a conservative estimate." Yet the text of the study reveals this is simply untrue. Burn ham should have sai d, "We're not quite sure what our estimate means. As suming our model is accurate, the actual death toll might be 100,000, or it might be somewhe re between 92,000 lower and 94,000 higher than that number." Not a meaty headline, but truer to the findings of his own stu dy. Here's how the Johns Hopkins teamwhich, for the record, was led by D r L es Roberts of the university's Bloomberg School of Public Healthwen t ab out its work. They randomly selected 33 neighborhoods across Iraqeq ual- sized population "clusters"and, this past September, set out to int ervi ew 30 households in each. They asked how many people in each househ old d ied, of what causes, during the 14 months before the US invasionan d h ow many died, of what, in the 17 months since the war began. They th en t ook the results of their random sample and extrapolated them to the enti re country, assuming that their 33 clusters were perfectly represe ntativ e of all Iraq. This is a time-honored technique for many epidemio logical studies, but th ose conducting them have to take great care that the way they select the neighborhoods is truly random (which, as most p oll-watchers of any sort know, is difficult under the easiest of circums tances). There's a furth er complication when studying the results of wa r, especially a war fough t mainly by precision bombs dropped from the a ir: The damage is not rand omly distributed; One of the 33 cluste rs the y selected happened to be in Fallujah, one of the most heavily bom bed a nd shelled cities in all Iraq. Was it legitimate to extrapolate fro m a sample that included such an extreme case? More awkward yet, it turn ed out, two-thirds of all the violent deaths that the team recorded took pl ace in the Fallujah cluster. They settled the dilemma by issuing two set s of figuresone with Fallujah, the other without. The estimate of 98 ,00 0 deaths is the extrapolation from the set that does not include Fall uj ah. What's the extrapolation for the set that does include Fallujah? it' s impossible to fi gure out how to extrapolate from it. A question does arise, though: Is t his difficulty a result of some peculiarity about th e fighting in Falluj ah? Or is it a result of some peculiarity in the su rvey's methodology? The survey team simply could not visit some of the r andomly chosen clusters; the roads were blocked off, in some cases by co alition checkpoints. So the team picked other, more accessible are as th at had received similar amounts of damage. In any case, the detour destr oyed the survey's randomness; In other cases, the team didn't find enoug h people in a cluster to interview, so they expanded t he survey to an a djoining cluster. Again, at that point, the survey was no longer random, and so the results are suspect. Beth Osborne Daponte, senior research s cholar at Yale University's Instit ution for Social and Policy Studies, put the point diplomatically after reading the Lancet article this morni ng and discussing it with me in a p hone conversation: "It attests to th e difficulty of doing this sort of s urvey work during a war. No one can come up with any credible estimate s yet, at least not through the sort s of methods used here." The study, though, does have a fundamental flaw that has nothing to do wi th the limits imposed by wartimeand this flaw suggests that, within the study's wide range of possible casualty estim ates, the real number tend s more toward the lower end of the scale. In order to gauge the risk of death brought on by the war, the researchers first had to measure the ri sk of death in Iraq before the war. First, D aponte (who has studied Iraqi population figures for many years) questio ns the finding that prewar mortality was 5 deaths per 1,000. According t o quite compreh ensive data collected by the United Nations, Iraq's mort ality rate from 1980-85 was 81 per 1,000. From 1985-90, the years leadin g up to the 199 1 Gulf War, the rate declined to 68 per 1,000. After '91 , the numbers a re murkier, but clearly they went up. Whatever they were in 2002, they w ere almost certainly higher than 5 per 1,000. In other words, the wartim e mortality rateif it is 79 per 1,000probably does not exceed the pea cetime rate by as much as the Johns Hopkins team assumes . The second problem with the calculation goes back to the problem cited at the top of this articlethe margin of error. Those mysterious numbers in the parentheses mean the a uthors are 95 percent confident that the risk of death now is between 1 1 and 23 times higher than it was before the invasionin other words, a s little as 10 percent higher or as much a s 130 percent higher. report estimating that, of the 800 Iraqis killed i n last April's siege of Fallujah, 572 to 616 of them were civilians, at least 3 08 of them women and children). The IBC estimates that between 1 4,181 and 16,312 Iraqi civilians have die d a... |
| www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/iz.html Field Listing Formerly part of the Ottoman Empire, Iraq was occupied by Britain during the course of World War I; in 1920, it was declared a League of Nations mandate under UK administration. In stages over the next dozen years, Ir aq attained its independence as a kingdom in 1932. A "republic" was proc laimed in 1958, but in actuality a series of military strongmen ruled th e country, the latest was SADDAM Husayn. Territorial disputes with Iran led to an inconclusive and costly eight-year war (1980-88). In August 19 90, Iraq seized Kuwait, but was expelled by US-led, UN coalition forces during the Gulf War of January-February 1991. Following Kuwait's liberat ion, the UN Security Council (UNSC) required Iraq to scrap all weapons o f mass destruction and long-range missiles and to allow UN verification inspections. Continued Iraqi noncompliance with UNSC resolutions over a period of 12 years resulted in the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and the ouster of the SADDAM Husayn regime. Coalition forces remain in Iraq, helping to restore degraded infrastructure and facilitating the es tablishment of a freely elected government, while simultaneously dealing with a robust insurgency. The Coalition Provisional Authority transferr ed sovereignty to the Iraqi Interim Government (IG) in June 2004. Iraqis voted on 30 January 2005 to elect a 275-member Transitional National As sembly that will draft a permanent constitution and pave the way for new national elections at the end of 2005. Field Listing government water control projects have drained most of the inhabited mars h areas east of An Nasiriyah by drying up or diverting the feeder stream s and rivers; a once sizable population of Marsh Arabs, who inhabited th ese areas for thousands of years, has been displaced; furthermore, the d estruction of the natural habitat poses serious threats to the area's wi ldlife populations; development of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers system contingent upon agreements with upstream riparian Turkey; Field Listing chief of state: Iraqi Transitional Government (ITG) President Jalal TALAB ANI (since 6 April 2005); Deputy Presidents Adil Abd AL-MAHDI and Ghazi al-Ujayl al-YAWR (since 6 April 2005); note - the President and Deputy P residents comprise the Presidency Council) head of government: Iraqi Transitional Government (ITG) Prime Minister Ib rahim al-JAFARI (since April 2005); Field Listing an insurgency against the Iraqi Interim Government and Coalition forces i s primarily concentrated in Baghdad and in areas west and north of the c apital; Field Listing three equal horizontal bands of red (top), white, and black with three gr een five-pointed stars in a horizontal line centered in the white band; the phrase ALLAHU AKBAR (God is Great) in green Arabic script - Allahu t o the right of the middle star and Akbar to the left of the middle star - was added in January 1991 during the Persian Gulf crisis; similar to t he flag of Syria, which has two stars but no script, Yemen, which has a plain white band, and that of Egypt which has a gold Eagle of Saladin ce ntered in the white band; Field Listing Iraq's economy is dominated by the oil sector, which has traditionally pr ovided about 95% of foreign exchange earnings. Iraq's seizure of Kuwait in August 1990, subsequent international economic sanctions, and damage from military action by an international coalition beginning in January 1991 drastically reduced economic activity. Although government policies supporting large military and internal security forces and allocating r esources to key supporters of the regime hurt the economy, implementatio n of the UN's oil-for-food program beginning in December 1996 helped imp rove conditions for the average Iraqi citizen. Iraq was allowed to expor t limited amounts of oil in exchange for food, medicine, and some infras tructure spare parts. In December 1999, the UN Security Council authoriz ed Iraq to export under the program as much oil as required to meet huma nitarian needs. The drop in GDP in 2001-02 was largely the result of the global economic slowdown and lower oil prices. Per capita food imports increased significantly, while medical supplies and health care services steadily improved. Per capita output and living standards were still we ll below the pre-1991 level, but any estimates have a wide range of erro r The military victory of the US-led coalition in March-April 2003 resu lted in the shutdown of much of the central economic administrative stru cture. Although a comparatively small amount of capital plant was damage d during the hostilities, looting, insurgent attacks, and sabotage have undermined efforts to rebuild the economy. Despite continuing political uncertainty, the Iraqi Interim Government (IG) has founded the instituti ons needed to implement economic policy, and has successfully concluded a debt reduction agreement with the Paris Club. The high percentage gain estimated for GDP in 2004 is the result of starting from a low base. Field Listing general assessment: the 2003 war severely disrupted telecommunications th roughout Iraq including international connections; USAID is overseeing t he repair of switching capability and the construction of mobile and sat ellite communication facilities domestic: repairs to switches and lines destroyed in the recent fighting continue, but sabotage remains a problem; cellular service is expected t o be in place within two years international: country code - 964; satellite earth stations - 2 Intelsat (1 Atlantic Ocean and 1 Indian Ocean), 1 Intersputnik (Atlantic Ocean re gion), and 1 Arabsat (inoperative); coaxial cable and microwave radio re lay to Jordan, Kuwait, Syria, and Turkey; Field Listing coalition forces assist Iraqis in monitoring boundary security; Iraq's la ck of a maritime boundary with Iran prompts jurisdiction disputes beyond the mouth of the Shatt al Arab in the Persian Gulf; |
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