Wednesday, October 11, 2006

655,000?   [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

I am always hesitant to be quick to dismiss death-toll numbers because all life is precious and fact is we just don’t know. But that is a not unimportant point as folks cite a new 655,000 number today — we don’t know and even the Associated Press in reporting on these new death-toll numbers in Iraq admits that (and early on in the report, even).

AP begins:

NEW YORK — A controversial new study contends nearly 655,000 Iraqis have died because of the war, suggesting a far higher death toll than other estimates.

The timing of the survey's release, just a few weeks before the U.S. congressional elections, led one expert to call it "politics."

In the new study, researchers attempt to calculate how many more Iraqis have died since March 2003 than one would expect without the war. Their conclusion, based on interviews of households and not a body count, is that about 600,000 died from violence, mostly gunfire. They also found a small increase in deaths from other causes like heart disease and cancer.

"Deaths are occurring in Iraq now at a rate more than three times that from before the invasion of March 2003," Dr. Gilbert Burnham, lead author of the study, said in a statement.

The study by Burnham, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and others is to be published Thursday on the Web site of The Lancet, a medical journal.

An accurate count of Iraqi deaths has been difficult to obtain, but one respected group puts its rough estimate at closer to 50,000. And at least one expert was skeptical of the new findings.

"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.

 

A Hill Guy e-mails:

The article below will be a story today, even though it shouldn’t. As the AP report points out, other experts agree that these numbers are grossly inflated, and the group has admitted to a political motivation in the timing of its earlier report. And the lead researcher of that report, Les Roberts, said the liberation of Iraq was done “under unsupportable, and probably illegal, pretenses.”  Even Human Rights Watch said the earlier report by these same researchers was “certainly prone to inflation due to overcounting” 

 This group’s October 2004 report claimed 100,000 Iraqis casualties as a result of Iraq’s liberation, and now claim that number is up to 655,000, or more than 550,000 casualties in the last two years alone. But as the authors wrote in an “author’s reply” following concerns that were raised about the methodology of the 2004 report, “The death toll estimated by our study is indeed imprecise.” (Lancet, March 26,2005 - April 1, 2005). And an article in the Guardian following the 2004 report highlighted that the 100,000 was, in the words of one of the study’s authors, only a “rough indicator,” and that the range or their findings was between 8,000 and 194,000.  

10/11 08:11 AMShare