655,000, give or take hundreds and hundreds of thousands. Needless to say, but I’m very skeptical.
President Bush says he doesn’t believe it. Some experts have a problem with it. But several others say it seems sound.
Such was the varied reception for a controversial new study that estimated the Iraq war has led to the deaths of nearly 655,000 Iraqis as of July.
Researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad derived that estimate from a door-to-door survey, conducted by doctors, of 1,849 households in Iraq. Taking the number of deaths reported by household residents, they extrapolated to a nationwide figure.
The researchers, reflecting the inherent uncertainties in such extrapolations, said they were 95 percent certain that the real number lay somewhere between 392,979 and 942,636 deaths.
That is quite a range of uncertainty, and does not speak well for any confidence in the work.
Even the smaller figure is almost eight times the estimate some others have derived.
The new study – which attributes roughly 600,000 of the deaths directly to violence and 55,000 more to other war-related causes – was released Wednesday on the Web site of The Lancet, a respected medical journal. But just how good is its conclusions?
“I don’t consider it a credible report,” President Bush said Wednesday.
Neither does Gen. George W. Casey, the top American military commander in Iraq.
“That 650,000 number seems way, way beyond any number that I have seen,” Casey said. “I’ve not seen a number higher than 50,000. And so I don’t give it that much credibility at all.”
And neither does Michael E. O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, which also tracks Iraqi deaths.
“I do not believe the new numbers. I think they’re way off,” he said.
Other research methods on the ground, like body counts, forensic analysis and taking eyewitness reports, have produced numbers only about one-tenth as high, he said. “I have a hard time seeing how all the direct evidence could be that far off … therefore I think the survey data is probably what’s wrong.”
[…]
Donald Berry, chairman of the statistics department at the University of Texas’ M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said he believes the study was done “in a reasonable way.” But he said the range of uncertainty given for the estimates was much too narrow, because of potential statistical biases in the survey.
While it’s impossible to calculate a better range that accounts for that, he said, it wouldn’t be surprising if the low end dropped about four-fold to 100,000 deaths. A wider range of uncertainty would make the 655,000 figure less meaningful, he said.
Even the latter, somewhat supportive statement recommends even greater uncertainty.
For it’s part, the Iraqi government has politely called the numbers exaggerated.
Meanwhile, LGF questions the timing of what could be a wildly inaccurate political hit masquerading as a study based on the fact that, well, it is right before an election and these same people put out a similarly questioned “study” right before a previous election.