Some analysis of the 100,000 Iraq death estimate

On the Friday before the election, Oct. 29, a startling claim hit the pages of mainstream newspapers like The Washington Post and The Sun, only to be dismissed out of hand and, apparently, forgotten.

The Lancet, a respected British medical journal, printed the results of the first and only scientific canvassing of Iraqis to determine how many had died as a result of the U.S. invasion and occupation. The conclusion: 100,000. At least.

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The study, which was carried out over four weeks by a team of seven medical researchers in Iraq, did not say that U.S. soldiers killed 100,000 noncombatants. It said that 100,000 excess deaths occurred since the start of the ground war. That counts the people shot or buried under rubble—and it also counts the people who died of malnutrition or starvation, who became sick and died from drinking polluted water, and people who died from all other causes directly and indirectly related to the war, including the skyrocketing crime rate.

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When the researchers entered Fallujah, the city now under attack by coalition forces, they found more deaths than in the other 32 places combined. So many civilian deaths were reported in Fallujah that the researchers threw out the data, reasoning that the tremendous mortality rate in that city could not be extrapolated to the rest of Iraq. If the Fallujah data were included, the group’s estimate of Iraqi casualties would have tripled, to 300,000. (Again, the data includes Iraqis who may have been fighting as insurgents.)

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http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=9349