Another reason to stick a fork in the Lancet studies on Iraqi civilian deaths
as if with anyone with common sense needed another reason
By Charles Bird Posted in War — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
As noted here, National Journal raised a whole raft questions on the methodology, supervision and objectivity of the "Lancet studies", which estimated civilian deaths in Iraq. Now there's another reason to question the results. From the Washington Post:
A new survey estimates that 151,000 Iraqis died from violence in the three years following the U.S.-led invasion of the country. Roughly 9 out of 10 of those deaths were a consequence of U.S. military operations, insurgent attacks and sectarian warfare.
The survey, conducted by the Iraqi government and the World Health Organization, also found a 60 percent increase in nonviolent deaths -- from such causes as childhood infections and kidney failure -- during the period. The results, which will be published in the New England Journal of Medicine at the end of the month, are the latest of several widely divergent and controversial estimates of mortality attributed to the Iraq war.
The three-year toll of violent deaths calculated in the survey is one-quarter the size of that found in a smaller survey by Iraqi and Johns Hopkins University researchers published in the journal Lancet in 2006.
Both teams used the same method -- a random sample of houses throughout the country. For the new study, however, surveyors visited 23 times as many places and interviewed five times as many households. Surveyors also got more outside supervision in the recent study; that wasn't possible in the spring of 2006 when the Johns Hopkins survey was conducted.
The number of deaths remains unacceptably high. Because we undermanned the post-invasion effort, all sorts of violence arose from the chaos. But at least now we have something that appears much closer to reality and is more consistent with the findings from other sources such as the Iraq Body Count and Iraqi Coalition Casualty Count. Anyway, I think we can stick a fork in those politically-motivated studies, which were published by a politically-motivated British medical journal, and which were timed to exert maximum political impact.