NYC Letter: The Topper To The Whopper

ONE IN 40 IRAQIS 'KILLED SINCE INVASION'
US And Britain Reject Journal's Finding
That Death Toll Has Topped 650,000

The death toll in Iraq following the US-led invasion has topped 655,000 - one in 40 of the entire population - according to a major piece of research in one of the world's leading medical journals.

The study, produced by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and published online by the Lancet, claims the total number of deaths is more than 10 times greater than any previously compiled estimate.

The thing about incredible numbers is that they are [Pause.] incredible. And the thing about the Lancet is that it dishes up some truly incredible numbers.

Two years ago, in time for the presidential election, the Lancet hurriedly published another report that came to similar conclusions: 100,000 civilian deaths attributable to the war, which is to say attributable to the United States because none of this would have transpired -- death would have taken a holiday -- had America not liberated Iraq.

Again the Lancet numbers were coincidently 10x any other organization's tally. Which was not surprising given its slack methodology: cluster sampling by interview without corroborating documentation -- "In the Iraqi culture it was unlikely for respondents to fabricate deaths..." -- and, oh, 2/3 of all violent deaths occured in the one cluster sampling, Falluja.

The Lancet report was followed a year later by a self-styled human rights group report that could only manage to kill off 25,000 Iraqis.

Let's take another look at this recent Lancet report.

Deaths as a consequence of the war are reported as: low 392,979, high 942,636, and a settled number, 654,965 (lower than the averaged estimates). You probably noticed right off that there is a 549,675 differential between the low and high estimates with a 40% deviation from the 654,965 number. Where we come from this is called guessing.

These deaths are said to be attributable to the war. But something is missing. The Lancet has not weighted its numbers with the deaths prevented by the liberation of Iraq.

Recall that the sanctions were in place because of Saddam’s failure to comply with the terms of the 1991 ceasefire agreement that ended the first Gulf War. According to the World Health Organization and UNICEF, roughly 5,000 Iraqi children under the age of five were dying each month as a direct result of the sanctions. Again, that’s the body count just for children under the age of five.

Certainly, that 5,000 number was always a grotesque exaggeration; Saddam’s own Health Ministry was providing the raw data on which it was based. More realistic estimates range between 1,200-2,000 dead Iraqi children per month. But if you’re going to trust U.N. numbers, then trust them consistently. If today’s critics of the Bush administration continue to damn the war in Iraq based on the U.N.’s hyper-inflated Iraqi civilian casualty figures, or based on the new super-duper-hyper-inflated JHBSPH numbers, then fairness demands they also remember the U.N. data on the effects of the prewar sanctions.

Also missing are the state and recreational killings of the Saddam regime -- an impossible number to accurately determine, though, with over a million people gone missing under Saddam, hundreds of thousands would be a conservative guess.

And the Lancet's big number takes no account of forestalling Saddam crossing his borders to kill a few hundred thousand Iranians (500,000+) or Kuwaitis (1,000+?) with concomitant losses of Iraqi cannon fodder (375,000+/25,000).

Yet this iffy number is now being quoted as a nose count for the purpose of damning the coalition.

Lancet editor Richard Horton makes this clear at a UK Stop The War Coalition rally (sharing the stage with George Galloway), where he associates these deaths wholly with the coalition. Yet the coalition does not go out and shoot the necessary 500 Iraqis per day needed to give Mr. Horton his big number. Terrorists do this sort of killing, though even for terrorists 500 murders a day everyday is a tall order as it resembles actual work, not pick-up jihadism.