The exposure of the deaths-in-Iraq study
In October 2006 a study was published in the prestigious British medical journal the
Lancet claiming that 650,000 additional deaths had occurred in Iraq as a result of the U.S. occupation. In early January 2008, the
National Journal revealed that the
Lancet study had been funded in part by Bush-hater George Soros, that the authors had an anti-Bush political agenda, that the chief researcher for the study had once been employed by Saddam Hussein, and that the editors of the
Lancet have now distanced themselves from the article. On January 10 I
posted a blog entry about this development and sent it to Randall Parker of
ParaPundit. I thought he’d be interested, because in October 2006 he
reported the
Lancet study and gave the 650,000 figure complete credibility. He even suggested that it was too low. I posted a comment in the same thread saying that regardless of the supposed scientific basis of the study the finding of 650,000 deaths was obviously ridiculous and that the article was probably politically motivated. I was promptly assaulted by other commenters at
Parapundit, a paleocon site, both for my disbelief in the 650,000 figure and for my daring to say that a “scientific” study might be a left-wing hit job—as though there had never been such a thing before! In any case, I am surprised that in the ten days since I sent it to him, Parker, who is noted for his intellectual honesty and dispassionate, fact-based approach, has not posted any update mentioning the newly revealed doubts about the study which he endorsed and defended at length at the time.
- end of initial entry -
Ken Hechtman writes from Canada:
Here’s a good starting point on what the study does and does not say and what various people pro and con have said about it:
Study findings.
Reactions to the study.
My own reactions:
1. It’s hired-gun science and as such, even if it isn’t complete junk, it’s still going to be a little bit dodgy. A backer like George Soros doesn’t buy a “let the chips fall where they may” disinterested investigation. He buys a conclusion. He buys “put in the best possible light that which I already believe to be true.”
2. Specifically, the study pointedly did not ask, “How many people in your family do you know for a fact were killed by an American bomb or bullet?” It asked “how many people in your family died from any and all causes?” and then compared that figure to the pre-2003 baseline to calculate “excess deaths.”
In some sense, that number is meaningful information but if you want a number of deaths to complete the sentence “George Bush is personally responsible for … “—that isn’t it.
3. Iraq Body Count isn’t a good comparison to a cluster study. Iraq Body Count only counts direct casualties of war and those only when they’re reported by a Western publication. It doesn’t claim to be comprehensive.
4. The U.S. Civil War with set-piece battles between uniformed soldiers isn’t really a good comparison to what happened in Iraq either. The genocidal African civil wars (Liberia, Rwanda, The Congo) are closer to the mark. These were wars where tribal militias avoided open combat with each other but killed off as many of the other tribe’s civilians as possible. The casualty counts in those wars were within the same order of magnitude as what the Lancet study claims for Iraq.
5. I’m not sure what the National Journal means by “Riyadh Lafta worked for Saddam Hussein.” Do they mean he reported to Saddam Hussein personally as Director of Nefarious Propaganda Schemes or that he drew a government paycheck as an epidemiology professor at a state-supported university? The last is true, but it describes just about any Iraqi with the training and experience to do such a study.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 20, 2008 07:20 PM | Send