A Damned Statistic

THE respected statisticians at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have once again proved the truth of the old aphorism “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.” In their second study estimating the death rate in Iraq, recently published in the British medical journal Lancet, they say that 654,965 (give or take a quarter million) deaths since 2003 can be directly attributed to the coalition invasion. This is a whopping fivefold increase over the estimate in their first study, released in 2004.

If anything in this world is certain, it is that from now until the end of time every critic of American policy in Iraq will repeat this number. But it simply cannot be true. After the current report’s predecessor was released in 2004, Fred Kaplan at the online magazine Slate made a solitary attempt to expose its problems. I will not belabor his arguments concerning its methodological flaws, which were repeated in the more recent study. Rather, I will address only a few of the Lancet report’s largest problems.

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Jim Lacey

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THE respected statisticians at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have once again proved the truth of the old aphorism “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.” In their second study estimating the death rate in Iraq, recently published in the British medical journal Lancet, they say that 654,965 (give or take a quarter million) deaths since 2003 can be directly attributed to the coalition invasion. This is a whopping fivefold increase over the estimate in their first study, released in 2004.

If anything in this world is certain, it is that from now until the end of time every critic of American policy in Iraq will repeat this number. But it simply cannot be true. After the current report’s predecessor was released in 2004, Fred Kaplan at the online magazine Slate made a solitary attempt to expose its problems. I will not belabor his arguments concerning its methodological flaws, which were repeated in the more recent study. Rather, I will address only a few of the Lancet report’s largest problems.