02/01/08 – Allan Hyde – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, and our guest today is Alan Hyde.
He's the director of Opinion Research Business, ORB, in the United Kingdom, has 20 years' experience doing polling and surveys in 50-plus countries, and is behind the new study from Opinion Research Business, which claims that as many as a million Iraqis have died violent deaths since the American invasion in March of 2003.
Welcome to the show, Alan.
Hi there, Scott.
It's good to have you on.
This is terrible news, if it's right.
I guess, first of all, could you tell us a little bit about your 20 years' experience, and why people ought to understand that you are a professional here and not an anti-war activist?
Well, yes, my research career started a little more than 20 years ago, when I undertook a postgraduate course in social research methods.
So I've always been interested in what people think, really, on a number of issues.
I then ended up in commercial market research, working for the Gallup poll, the UK Gallup, and working for a company like Gallup and a couple of others, you get an opportunity to work on a huge variety of projects.
Some of them are strictly commercial, looking at products and advertising.
Some of them, like the current one, have got a far more serious side to them, looking at society and what happens in societies when you have a significant event.
And one of those was looking at Eastern Europe in the early 90s, what people thought about their society when communist rule collapsed.
And I now find myself looking at data from Iraq.
Okay, now, you guys put out a study in September, and I was trying to get you on the show then.
And the woman I was talking to there at your office, eventually, after three or four days of going back and forth, said, well, actually, they've decided to go back and complete the study to add more research to the study, and they don't want to comment until then.
So let me ask you why it is that you guys decided that your study in September, which came up with almost the exact same numbers, why you thought that wasn't good enough, why you decided to go back to Iraq and collect more information.
Okay, well, with all research, you could improve.
Our research is based on, as nearly every opinion poll is, in fact, every opinion poll is, a sample of people.
You obviously can't interview everybody that lives in a country to get a census and get the definitive answer.
So you have to do a sample.
And when we released the first figures, we got an awful lot of interest, including from you and your colleagues.
And what we thought we would do, given the level of interest, we thought there'd be some, but we were actually very surprised about the sort of global nature of the interest.
We thought, well, let's just be sure about this and increase the range of the survey.
And what we did especially was to go into some more rural areas in Iraq, because people were saying, and it was a valid point, that we may simply be reflecting what's happening in the more urban areas, and they may or may not have had a higher incidence of violent deaths and casualties.
So we thought, well, let's test it.
So we boosted our research, took in more rural areas.
Hence, we've got a bigger sample size and some slightly revised figures.
And how much difference did it make going in and getting a larger sample and a more rural sample?
Essentially, not very much.
One of the things about this research is that you take percentage figures from the survey.
And we've now got just over 2,400 households involved in our sample.
But what happens is, if you extrapolate a percentage to many millions, clearly only a 1% difference in your initial figure, if you extrapolate it using millions, you get some quite big shifts in numbers.
When we first published, we said it might be about 1.2 million.
With the rural interviews, we've got a slightly reduced figure.
The mid-range figure we're putting out is 1.033 million.
So we've revised it down a little.
But the essential point is that it's still an incredibly large, incredibly sad number.
Well, now, you can't, in a situation like this where the country is in such chaos, it must put some limitations on your ability to collect the data.
I wonder if when you're doing statistical surveys and samples like this, if you try to take into account other factors such as, well, how many death certificates do we have?
How many people have been buried at the local cemeteries?
And those kinds of things that may or may not contradict your findings.
Yeah, well, you'll know from the area that you're interested in that there are different studies.
There was the UK Lancet, the medical profession journal.
They did a survey where they did verify against death certificates.
Came up with, again, many hundreds of thousands.
There are other people doing it different ways, such as Body Count, who are following up on media stories.
We are opinion pollsters, so we have taken the opinion pollsters route, which is to take a random sample, as far as we possibly can, and ask people a very simple but obviously very emotive question, which is, since 2003, has anybody died in your household other than through what you might call natural causes?
And so we take, most people, fortunately, say zero.
Nobody's died.
But those that say at least one person, we ask how many, and we extrapolate.
It's something where we've not put our interviewers into a position where they've asked for death certificates or asked for too much intrusive information.
We've taken the percentage that have said there's been a death and then extrapolated from that.
And our view is it's not the sort of thing that you would treat lightly or make up.
Well, it's kind of frustrating from this point of view because, well, you mentioned the Lancet and Johns Hopkins University in the fall of 2006 said that approximately 655,000 people had died.
You mentioned Iraq Body Count.
They just go by off of confirmed reports from the news media.
They still have less than 100,000.
And then there was a U.N. study that just came out that put the number right around 100,000, which the War Party was celebrating.
See, it's only 100,000.
So from my point of view, I'm not good at all these statistics, and I don't really know.
I have a wide disparity here.
Somewhere between less than 100,000 and a million people have died in this war.
And I'm not sure which information to try to take into account and compare with other information.
And what number am I supposed to settle on here with all this?
Yeah, well, I think the honest answer is that we will never know what the true figure is.
And I think you've mentioned the Lancet and our own results, which put the figures in hundreds of thousands.
The others you mentioned put it in tens or up to about 100,000.
And I think the difference is that the two higher figures are based essentially on going to people's households and asking them what's happened.
And the others are looking at external sources of information.
I think the U.N. one looks at actual registration of bodies at hospital morgues and mortuaries or something like that.
So a very precise measure.
And body count is a very precise measure.
It's following up media reports.
Now, I don't think you can say that one's right and one's wrong.
The body count is probably an accurate measure of what's reported in the media.
And the other one is probably an accurate measure of mortuary records.
So they're using different techniques.
And I don't think that's particularly helpful.
That would explain the difference in the figures.
Yeah.
But it's such a wide disparity in the figures, you know.
I mean, I guess I would leave a rack body count out of the argument since they are strictly confirmed media reports.
But, well, even the disparity between the U.N. report and the Lancet report and yours.
I mean, even the Lancet report at almost 700,000 by fall of 2006, you have almost another four or five hundred thousand on top of that in just one year's time.
Yeah.
With opinion polling, you have a margin of error.
We've put in what we think is the middle result.
If you take the lowest estimate, we would put it around probably towards nine hundred, nine hundred and fifty thousand.
And this is one of the things with extrapolation.
You only have to make small adjustments and your figures, when they get this large, can move by some distance.
And we've had lots of inquiries and conducted other interviews.
And I think what I would probably settle on is that whether it's a million or whether it's seven hundred thousand or six hundred thousand, that's a huge number.
And I think that is the point is that it's a huge number of people.
Right.
And these were the people who were supposed to be the prime beneficiaries of this invasion, supposedly.
Yeah.
Well, one of the one of the things about opinion polling is to describe and explain how we got the figures rather than go down the route of who's to blame.
Right.
Right.
I understand.
Now, another part of this is that your guys that you hired to do the research for you here were not allowed in Kurdistan.
It's not that they weren't allowed in Kurdistan.
We we have done interviews or part of this research is based on interviews in Al-Sulamaniya, which you'll know is in the, get it right, the eastern part of the Kurdish north.
We also interviewed in Dahuk as well.
It just so happens that at the time that we were doing this work, there was an issue over getting permits in Erbil itself.
So it wasn't to do with the security situation.
It was to do with bureaucracy.
And we are people in Iraq can now, if we if we want to do further work, operate in Erbil.
There was a bureaucratic dispute, shall we put it, which meant that we couldn't cover Erbil.
But we've got the Kurdish north covered reasonably well.
I see.
And now also, I guess you're excluded Anbar province because of the violence there.
Is that right?
And now how much difference do you think that'll make?
I mean, that's a pretty central part of this war, isn't it?
Yeah.
Let's put it this way.
It's our figures are unlikely to go down if we had included it.
Your figures what now?
I'm sorry.
If we had been able to include it, I don't think that the estimate would have would have gone down.
Right.
Yeah.
If anything, it would have been higher, probably.
Well, that's what and any rational assumption would would lead you to conclude.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, according to the Wikipedia page about your original study from last fall, it says, O.R.
B. reported that, quote, 48 percent died from a gunshot wound, 20 percent from the impact of a car bomb, nine percent from aerial bombardment, six percent as a result of an accident and six percent from another blast or ordinance.
Are those numbers still pretty much hold up for the new study?
Yes.
Forgive me.
I haven't got them in front of me and I can't quote them verbatim.
They're similar.
Yeah.
Obviously, we use the original study as part of the one that we're talking about now.
So so you wouldn't expect it to move too much.
But yeah, they're broadly in line.
They haven't moved too much.
OK, well, is there any important points that I've neglected to ask you about here?
Closing comments.
You like people understand about your work here.
Probably at least one, maybe two.
The first one is that we don't ask.
It's not the question about who caused the death, whether it's through militia violence, whether it's through multinational forces operations or in very many cases, whether it's through pure criminal activity.
We don't make any distinction.
We just measure the number of people that have died violently since since 2003.
So one thing we're certainly not saying is that all these are due directly to the activities of the multinational forces.
And I think the other point to make is that this isn't sponsored by by anybody, by any third party organization.
So we're a commercial research company and 95 percent of the work we do is paid for by somebody else.
This is one of the rare examples of work that isn't doesn't have a sponsor.
So we're not pushing anybody's agenda here to the best of our abilities.
This is our estimate of what the of what the situation is.
And oh, I wanted to clarify one thing, too, which was I believe the Lancet study was comparing the rate of death.
This was excess deaths.
If you looked at the death rate before the war and the death rate after the war.
And you're answering really a different question, which is violent deaths by the numbers.
Yeah, we we we ask.
And the question wording is on our website for listeners that want to follow it up.
But we do say in the question we're excluding what might be called a natural death.
So old age or or something like that.
So it's kind of similar to what the Lancet is doing.
But we've included that factor within our within our question.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for your insight.
I sure hope that you're wrong.
I'm afraid I don't think that you are.
Yeah.
The one thing I know for certain is that the figure we put out won't be exactly correct.
And as I mentioned earlier, I think our point is that it's a very big number, which is the unfortunate and tragic reality.
All right, everybody.
That's Alan Hyde.
He's director of Opinion Research Business.
The website is opinion.co.uk.
Thank you very much for your time today, sir.
You're welcome, Scott.