Angry in the Great White North

a heat-seeking missile in the Conservative arsenal

Back in October of 2004, Lancet published a much-derided report that estimated 100,000 civilian deaths in Iraq since the invasion:

The analysis, an extrapolation based on a relatively small number of documented deaths, indicated that many of the excess deaths have occurred due to aerial attacks by coalition forces, with women and children being frequent victims, wrote the international team of public health researchers making the calculations.

The estimate is based on a September door-to-door survey of 988 Iraqi households -- containing 7,868 people in 33 neighborhoods -- selected to provide a representative sampling. Two survey teams gathered detailed information about the date, cause and circumstances of any deaths in the 14.6 months before the invasion and the 17.8 months after it, documenting the fatalities with death certificates in most cases.

"We are quite confident that there's been somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 deaths, but it could be much higher," [Les Roberts, Center for International Emergency, Disaster and Refugee Studies at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore] said.

That number, allocating 84% of the deaths to direct coalition action, has been used without question by the anti-war side, despite the fact that at time time, thinktanks and media sources estimated 16,000 deaths at the time.

Attempts to debunk this number have had little success, with both left-wing pundits and the main stream media repeating the 100,000 number as if it were gospel.

A new study is reporting a very different number:

A new study says more than 25,000 Iraqi civilians have died since the war began more than two years ago.

Iraq Body Count is a survey of media reports collected by a British research group. Researchers derived their statistics mostly from reports from respected media outlets, such as the AP, Reuters and Agence France Presse.

A great deal closer to the 16,000 deaths estimated almost a year ago, with 37% and 36% of the deaths divvied up between direct Coalition action and post-invasion criminality. Not that this report is all that great: I can't imagine Reuters and Agence France Presse being all that concerned about inflating casualty counts in their reports if it made the Americans look bad. But even so, the report seems much more credible, both in its methodology and its conclusions. Recall that the Lancet study derived its numbers from a survey:

The estimate is based on a September door-to-door survey of 988 Iraqi households -- containing 7,868 people in 33 neighborhoods -- selected to provide a representative sampling. Two survey teams gathered detailed information about the date, cause and circumstances of any deaths in the 14.6 months before the invasion and the 17.8 months after it, documenting the fatalities with death certificates in most cases.

Questions to ponder:

• Will the main stream media make as much effort to promulgate this much lower estimate as it did with the higher one?


• Will the media compare and contrast the reports in order to help the public develop a healthy skepticism when it comes to these sorts of reports?


• Will the media go to the authors of the Lancet report and ask them to comment on the discrepancy between the estimates, and give an opinion as to which report is more credible?


• Will the media mention that both studies are vague estimates, prone to overcounting?


• Will anyone listen even if they do?

My opinion is that the main stream media will not do any of these things. This is not just my natural pessimism. The CBC report about the new low estimate never once mentioned the Lancet report. Of course not. If they did, people might start to wonder if they can believe anything the CBC says, and the goal of the CBC is to make sure the viewership believes everything the corporation says.