Wednesday, October 11, 2006
THIS IS RIDICULOUS
Lancet’s latest Iraq body count (published, as usual, shortly prior to an election): 655,000.
UPDATE. SCD notes: “Tim, your text is wrong. The ‘study’ counts ‘excess deaths’ - that is, above the number that Sadaam would have killed anyway. So the total body count (er, or ... body imagining) is waaaaaay more than 655,000.” That number, by the way, represents 500 deaths every single day since the invasion. The Associated Press reports:
“They’re almost certainly way too high,” said Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington. He criticized the way the estimate was derived and noted that the results were released shortly before the Nov. 7 election.
“This is not analysis, this is politics,’’ Cordesman said.
The New York Times:
Robert Blendon, director of the Harvard Program on Public Opinion and Health and Social Policy, said interviewing urban dwellers chosen at random was “the best of what you can expect in a war zone.”
But he said the number of deaths in the families interviewed — 547 in the post-invasion period versus 82 in a similar period before the invasion — was too few to extrapolate up to more than 600,000 deaths across the country.
Donald Berry, chairman of biostatistics at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, was even more troubled by the study, which he said had “a tone of accuracy that’s just inappropriate.”
UPDATE II. Professor Peter von Nostrand:
It is as clear as a summer day what happens next: As they did before with the Lancet Report to their utter discredit, the right will deride this research as liberal propaganda and drive it out of public debate faster than you can say “Dan Rather.” Yet it isn’t liberal propaganda.
Glad that’s settled. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Hamit Dardagan, co-founder of Iraq Body Count, a London-based human-rights group, called the Lancet study’s figures “pretty shockingly high.” His group tabulates the civilian death toll based on media reports augmented by local hospital and morgue records. His group says it has accumulated reports of as many as 48,693 civilian deaths caused by the U.S. intervention.
UPDATE III. TigerHawk:
Whatever the base credibility of The Lancet’s editors, their propensity to publish these things in October of even-numbered years makes them look like partisan hacks.