Counting The Iraqi Dead By Eugene Robinson

[jbfam4]

Counting The Iraqi Dead

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/12/AR2006101201670.html
By Eugene Robinson
Friday, October 13, 2006; Page A29

"Not credible" was President Bush's quick verdict on the new study, published this week in the British medical journal the Lancet, calculating that more than 650,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the U.S. invasion and its ensuing chaos. It is understandable that the president would be quick to dismiss such an explosive claim, but the rest of us should take the time to look a bit more closely.

The number of estimated deaths claimed by the study is inconceivably huge and wildly out of scale with any previous figures we've heard. But it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that the human suffering in Iraq has been far beyond our imagining.

Does this prove, as the study asserts, that precisely 654,965 Iraqis have died "as a consequence of the war," and that exactly 601,027 of those deaths were due to violence? No, it doesn't. The Johns Hopkins team reports being 95 percent certain that the true figure lies between about 400,000 and about 900,000 -- a large range of uncertainty that some critics have seized upon as discrediting the whole project.


But quite a lot of science went into the Johns Hopkins study. Even if you assume that the number of Iraqi civilians killed since the war began is at the very low end of the study's range, that's still a quantum leap from earlier estimates. We now have reputable evidence -- not proof, I'll allow, but science-based evidence from respected scholars, published in one of the world's most prestigious medical journals -- that the humanitarian tragedy in Iraq is much, much worse than anyone had suspected.

If the study's findings are flawed, then its critics should demonstrate how and why. But no one should dismiss these shocking numbers without fully examining them. No one should want to.

[babylonsister]

1. Robinson has a good point. If the findings are flawed, the

admin needs to prove that. Just saying it's not so doesn't prove anything.

[al bupp]

2. But you know that they wont...

because that would require invoking something other than simple faith in making their "analysis".