Deaths In The Fog Of War
(AP Photo/Hadi Mizban)
That's the response from skeptics in the wake of a new report that claims a horrifyingly high number of civilian deaths in Iraq since the 2003 American invasion. According to the New York Times, the study, which is tied to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, "uses samples of casualties from Iraqi households to extrapolate an overall figure of 601,027 Iraqis dead from violence between March 2003 and July 2006."
The margin of error is worth mentioning: Researchers said the true number of deaths could be anywhere from 426,369 to 793,663. The 655,000 figure, which takes into account both deaths from violence and "excess deaths," represents about two and a half percent of Iraq's population.
The figures, based on a survey of 1,849 Iraqi families across Iraq, have some crying fowl. "They're almost certainly way too high," Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington told the Associated Press. "This is not analysis, this is politics."
