Questioning the Iraqi Death Toll

Another good thought-provoking article in Slate (you really should go there and check it out, there's a tonne of worthwhile stuff to be discovered) by Christopher Hitchens. Well written and logically argued, I don't always agree with Hitchens' arguments but they're always worth a read.

In this one Hitchens questions the accuracy and the usefulness of the Iraqi war death toll figure published recently in the Lancet by researchers at Johns Hopkins University: 654,965. Firstly, there is the question of how such an exact figure was determined, as someone who has studied my fair share of statistics I must say that I find such a result unlikely to the point of impossibility, there must be some error margin involved. It seems to call into question then the motivation of the authors, was the research undertaken in the spirit of unbiased scientific inquiry or were there more partisan, political influences involved?

The second point that needs to be made is that the figure reported purports to give the number of deaths as consequence of the war. We are not talking here just about deaths directly consequent from the actions of coalition forces but also about deaths resulting from the actions of insurgents. Indeed, as Hitchens points out "less than one-third of the surplus deaths are attributed, even by this study, to "Allied" military action." Given this I have to agree with Hitchens' point that one might have expected a little more care in the reporting of this story by the media (or perhaps not, depending on your level of cynicism).

In case you missed the links earlier, the article can be found here.