Updated numbers on violent deaths in Iraq
I’ve cited the Lancet numbers myself (in qualified fashion), but maybe the estimate of a million Iraqi deaths is far too high:
A new survey estimates that 151,000 Iraqis died from violence in the three years following the U.S.-led invasion of the country…For the new study, however, surveyors visited 23 times as many places
and interviewed five times as many households. Surveyors also got more
outside supervision in the recent study; that wasn’t possible in the
spring of 2006 when the Johns Hopkins survey was conducted…"Overall, this is a very good study," said Paul Spiegel, a medical
epidemiologist at the United Nations High Commission on Refugees in Geneva.
"What they have done that other studies have not is try to compensate
for the inaccuracies and difficulties of these surveys, triangulating
to get information from other sources."
Here is more, here is the study itself. This new estimate is probably not the final word, but you will recall that anyone who questioned the older Lancet estimate was pilloried at length; there is a lesson here – Thy Shall Not Use Thy Blog to Squelch Heretics — and I am curious to see who will offer mea culpa and who will not. "The two estimates aren’t as different as they look" is one way of spinning it; "I was wrong" is another.