Since it came up a couple of times in the past week, I wanted to rein in the '100,000 dead' claim made in the recent Lancet study (reg. required) by pointing out a few responses.
Slate weighs in with a debunking, without ignoring the heft of what truth is left:
"So, let's call it 15,000 or—allowing for deaths that the press didn't report—20,000 or 25,000, maybe 30,000 Iraqi civilians killed in a pre-emptive war waged (according to the latest rationale) on their behalf. That's a number more solidly rooted in reality than the Hopkins figure—and, given that fact, no less shocking."
Iraq Body Count, hardly a pro-war source has their own numbers (14-16,000)and a noncommittal response to the Lancet study:
"The Lancet study's headline figure of "100,000" excess deaths is a probabilistic projection from a small number of reported deaths - most of them from aerial weaponry - in a sample of 988 households to the entire Iraqi population..."
Finally, my favorite site Winds of Change has more on the subject:
"Actually, Kaplan's analysis doesn't really hold a candle to Lancet's peer review. He uses an undergraduate's knowledge of statistics to set up and demolish a straw-man rather than looking at the Lancet study for what it shows. Here are a few more-well-done third-party looks at that study..."
The aim of this post is not to diminish in any way the horror of the thousands of innocent civilians - unarmed men, women, and children - who have been casualties of the GWOT in Iraq, but rather to refocus its scope to more realistic parameters.
Posted by Matt at November 10, 2004 02:45 PM