Iraqi Deaths Academic Does His Dash

Ascertaining an accurate count of the number of civilians to die in the Iraq war -- a bloodbath that they neither invited nor deserved -- has been impossible. Some deaths are never reported, some are suppressed and the people who keep track of the carnage often have an ax to grind, which results in a predisposition to under or over report.

If there is anything approaching a consensus view, and I use that term advisedly, it is that somewhere between 90,000 and 100,000 civilians have died since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. That is the range arrived at by the folks at Iraq Body Count based on data cross-checked from media reports and hospitals, morgues, non-government organizations and official figures.

That number stands in stark contrast to the claim made by Johns Hopkins researcher Gilbert Burnham that there were 601,027 civilians deaths during the period that Iraq Body Count list 47,702 deaths.

Burnham's cluster-sample survey provoked skepticism and outrage when it was published in Lancet in late 2007, and if you're wondering why I'm not linking to the survey it's because the link has been taken down and now Burnham has been censored by a polling association for refusing to supply "basic facts" for its inquiry into his work.

It now seems that skepticism and outrage was entirely appropriate.

Top photograph by Franco Pagetti for Time magazine