CNN reports:
A controversial new study contends nearly 655,000 Iraqis have died because of the war, suggesting a far higher death toll than other estimates.
The timing of the survey's release, just a few weeks before the U.S. congressional elections, led one expert to call it "politics."
In the new study, researchers attempt to calculate how many more Iraqis have died since March 2003 than one would expect without the war. Their conclusion, based on interviews of households and not a body count, is that about 600,000 died from violence, mostly gunfire. They also found a small increase in deaths from other causes like heart disease and cancer.
"Deaths are occurring in Iraq now at a rate more than three times that from before the invasion of March 2003," Dr. Gilbert Burnham, lead author of the study, said in a statement.
The study by Burnham, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and others is to be published on the Web site of The Lancet, a medical journal.
An accurate count of Iraqi deaths has been difficult to obtain, but one respected group puts its rough estimate at closer to 50,000. And at least one expert was skeptical of the new findings.
The Lancet, you'll remember, was responsible for another phony-baloney "study" of Iraq war written by a crowd of anti-war crazies that used very dubious statistical techniques (i.e. go to the neighbourhood where the worst fighting is and extrapolate to the entire population) to come up with similar numbers in the past.
The last Lancet "study" came out just before the last US election. Remember when doctors used to be interested in medicine?
More interesting is their claim that "Deaths are occurring in Iraq now at a rate more than three times that from before the invasion of March 2003". I.e. if the invasion had not have happened, we would have expected to see 220,000 deaths over the last 3 years under Saddam's regime, as compared to the Iraq Body Count's 50,000. (Note that there's probably issues with the 200,000+ number too, since that rate be based on another phoney story).
That's not to say things haven't gone to ratshit recently; there's a lot more to be said there too.