Hello all. As you may know,
The Lancet, a formerly respected medical journal, reported last year that the estimated (and I mean
estimated) civilian death toll in Iraq since the start of the war was 655,000. Let me explain, using resources and facts, why this figure is so incorrect, it should remove this journal from the domain of serious debate for a long, long time:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR2006101001442.htmlA team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.This is important because the report actually does say these 655,000 people have died
on top of those that would have died had Saddam remained in power. This total, needless to say, is unimaginably high.
But is it wrong? Don't let me sway your opinion, lets hear what the experts have to say:
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. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/world/middleeast/11casualties.html?ex=1318219200&en=a8b58a972ff83c14&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rssRobert 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.” http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB116052896787288831-8l5AMVpCdg07M3w6XdmTXoPuzno_20061109.html?mod=tff_main_tff_topHamit 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. And what is Hamit's estimation of the civilian deaths?
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/#positionMin Max
57805 63573 Interesting, more than 10 times less, and with around 6 months' more data.
What does the UN think?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6266393.stmMore than 34,000 civilians were killed in violence in Iraq during 2006, a UN human rights official has said. That's hardly anywhere near the 150,000 or so a year the Lancet would have you believe. And then this: