Since Election Day is around the corner, the left-wing propagandists at the British medical Journal Lancet (which used to be one of the premier medical journals in the world) have decided to update the thoroughly debunked study which they published around Election Day 2004. That study purported that almost 200,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed in the Iraq War. The updated study claims that 600,000 Iraqi civilians have so far been killed.
Unfortunately for us all, the same “reseachers” intentionally did just as slipshod a job as they did the first time around. What are the main problems? Well, for one the NY Times reports that the margin for error of the updated study “ranged from 426,369 to 793,663 deaths.â€ÂÂ
Pretty amazing, huh? That alone would make the results completely useless. But how did these numbers even come about? Well, the researchers interviewed 1800 Iraqi families, from which they were able to actually confirm 527 deaths. They then extrapolated from there to get the outrageous figure of 600,000. Now, the website Iraqi Body Count keeps track of actual deaths reported by morgues, the military and the media, and reports a number of about 47,000, or less than 10% of what the Lancet researchers report. So, somebody is way off base here, and I don’t think it’s the people at Iraqi Body Count.
One of the many problems with the original study from 2004 was that deaths not actually due to the war were included as war deaths.
In addition, the study includes deaths that the researchers have arbitrarily determined were caused by the invasion but not caused by violence. If they are using the same criteria as the 2004 study, some of these causes of death include:
- Malnourishment due to bad economic conditions as a result of the invasion.
- Illness due to degraded health care infrastructure.
- Deaths due to domestic violence.
- Deaths due to criminal activity unrelated to the insurgency.
- And “… civilian deaths resulting from the breakdown in law and order, and deaths due to inadequate health care or sanitation.â€ÂÂ
If the researchers continued to include these non-war related causes of death, it would help explain why their numbers are so inflated. But the biggest reason why the numbers are so silly is that deaths of insurgents, Iraqi police, and Iraqi army personnel were all included as civilian deaths! How much more ridiculous can you get? All in all, the timing of the worthless study is designed to effect the November elections, and the media is complicit in the whole episode.
