Say Anything Blog

Likwidshoe has a good post on it here, but I just wanted to add this little tid-bit:

LONDON (Reuters) - American and Iraqi public health experts have calculated that about 655,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion and subsequent violence, far above previous estimates.

Researchers used household interviews rather than body counts to estimate how many more Iraqis had died because of the war than used to die annually in peacetime.

Household interviews.

Wonderful.  I mean, it’s not like any of these household might have consisted of terror sympathizers who might have, you know, lied to skew the results a bit.

And then there’s the problem of how these deaths were characterized by those reporting them to the researchers.  Say you’re talking to a grieving mother whose son was killed.  She tells the researchers that he was a good boy and not causing any problems and was murdered, but in reality the guy was attacking our soldiers with a gun.  Yet because the mom characterized him as a civilian he gets added to the tally and America gets the blame.

This isn’t research, this is thinly-veiled and poorly researched anti-war propaganda.

If you want the real scoop on civilian casualties in Iraq go to Iraq Body Count.  It is run by anti-war people, but the methodology they use is sound.

Right now that website has the maximum number of Iraqis killed in Iraq at 48,693.  According to this article the Documental Centre for Human Rights in Iraq has compiled information on over 600,000 civilian executions in Iraq under Saddam Hussein’s regime. That’s probably low as it is just the executions we know about and it doesn’t include those who died because Saddam diverted money from the UN’s humanitarian oil-for-food program into his own coffers, but we’ll use it anyway. If we consider that Saddam Hussein was in power for 24 years, those 600,000 executions puts his yearly death toll at about 25,000/year.

We’ve been in Iraq for 3 years and seven months (almost to the day), so that works out to about 13,296 civilian deaths per year using the Iraq Body Count number. Of course, not all of those deaths were caused by U.S. action. The terrorists we’re fighting in Iraq routinely target Iraqi civilians for their attacks, so the majority of that death toll should be credited to the jihadists.

But for comparison purposes, there are about 12,000 fewer people dying in Iraq under U.S. occupation then were dying under Saddam’s rule. It’s an imperfect calculation because the deaths under Saddam’s regime are hard to quantify, but even using low-ball numbers for Saddam’s body counts shows that fewer Iraqis are dying in Iraq now than before the U.S. invasion.

But don’t expect the Democrats or their allies in the media to buy into such calculations even though they’re based on better methodologies.  They’re going to hype this 650,000 number (based on interviews not body counts!!!) because it makes for good headlines.  It will be shoved down the throats of the American people and a lot of them, not knowing any better, are going to buy into it.  By the time the media hype ends and this study is debunked (and it will be, if the fact that it was based on interviews doesn’t do it by itself) the lie will be set in the minds of many Americans and the press will be off hyping the next story.

Just another victory for the drive-by media.

Update: Remember the last Lancet study about civilian deaths in Iraq?  That one came out in October too, in 2004 right before the elections.

But the release of these studies couldn’t possibly be politically-motivated, could they?