Three years later, the lie about Iraqi civilian deaths is unraveled

Investor's Business Daily uncovers the truth about the lie that the US caused 600,000 civilian deaths in Iraq.

Dead Wrong Data

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, February 06, 2009 4:20 PM PT

Iraq: A shocking number from a study about the extent of civilian deaths during the war got a lot of attention. Too bad that further evidence indicating the figure is wildly inaccurate will go largely unnoticed.

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The "findings" of Dr. Gilbert Burnham were widely covered in 2006 because, as the National Journal noted at the time, they "fit an emerging narrative: Iraq was a horrific mess."

Writing in the respected British medical journal Lancet, Burnham accused the U.S. of inflicting 654,965 excess deaths in Iraq. The media received the numbers uncritically, but skepticism rose outside the press.

Anthony Cordesman of the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies believed the figures were "almost certainly" too high. "This is not analysis," he said. "This is politics."

Iraq Body Count, which believes "war is an abomination" and that "information empowers people to act" (presumably against the war), noted that the 654,965 figure "would imply that officials in Iraq have issued approximately 550,000 death certificates for violent deaths (92% of 601,000)."

Yet in June 2006, the total figure of postwar violent deaths known to the Iraqi Ministry of Health and the Baghdad morgue was roughly 50,000.

Debarati Guha-Sapir, director of a Brussels disaster epidemiology research center, told Canada's Nature News that the numbers were inflated and felt it was "because of the (2006 midterm) elections," a reasonable assumption as study co-author Les Roberts admitted he insisted on an October 2006 release for political reasons.

Burnham's latest trouble comes from the American Association for Public Opinion Research. After an eight-month investigation, it found that Burnham "violated the Association's Code of Professional Ethics and Practices."

The organization says the Johns Hopkins public health faculty member "repeatedly refused to make public essential facts about his research on civilian deaths in Iraq.. . . When asked to provide several basic facts about this research, Burnham refused."

Johns Hopkins is also trying "to determine if any violation of the school's rules or guidelines for the conduct of research occurred."

So how many civilians did lose their lives to the allied effort to topple Saddam Hussein? Iraq Body Count estimates nearly 100,000. Even that is appallingly high, but it must be understood in context:

If the bloody Saddam had stayed in power, it's conceivable that many, many more would have died since the invasion — with still no end to the horror in sight.