Investor's Business Daily, May 29th, 2007
Iraq War: Lost in the hoopla over Rosie's departure is a number tossed around on national television that many believe. Those who claim Bush lied us into war may be trying to lie us out of it.
Before she abruptly left as co-host of ABC's "The View," the bombastic and clueless Rosie O'Donnell asked the following absurd rhetorical question: "655,000 Iraqi civilians are dead. Who are the terrorists?"
Well, there are only two choices -- members of the U.S. military or the Islamofascists they are fighting. Yet Rosie took umbrage at the suggestion she was labeling our troops as the terrorists.
Rosie stood her ground, revising and extending her remarks: "I'm saying if you were in Iraq, and the other country, the United States, the richest in the world, invaded your country and killed 655,000 of your citizens, what would you call us?" John Murtha should sue for copyright infringement.
The number Rosie tossed out is as absurd as her argument. But it has gotten instant credibility in the anti-war media, with the likes of CNN's Suzanne Malveaux asking President Bush about it at a recent press conference.
Last October, just before our midterm elections, a study by researchers led by Dr. Gilbert Burnham of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health was published on the Web site of the Lancet, a British medical journal. It claimed that there were 655,000 "excess" Iraqi deaths due to the Iraq war, 601,000 of them from violence.
The study was an update of an earlier Johns Hopkins study, one released just before the 2004 presidential elections. The lead researcher on that study, Les Roberts, admitted that the timing was deliberate, a calculated attempt to influence the U.S. vote.
The group defines "excess" as above and beyond the normal peacetime mortality rate. But how the researchers set their baseline is the first flaw in the study.
In an interview with Burnham on PajamasMedia.com, Richard Miniter pointed out that their baseline mortality rate for Iraq (set for the Saddam years) was half the mortality rate of Europe, including the people Saddam and his sons put feet-first into tree shredders.
Miniter inquired as to how the number could jump so high so fast, since the first study almost exclusively covered a period of large-scale combat and massive airstrikes that the last two years, although prevalent with insurgent activity and car bombs, did not. Miniter also noted the 655,000 figure is about 150,000 more than died in the American Civil War and that there have been no Iraqi Antietams, Shilohs or Gettysburgs.
Of the huge increase in his estimated body count, Burnham said the group "built on what we learned in the 2004 survey to design the 2006 survey." This time, he said, they included actual death certificates. Or was it that they found that the numbers weren't shocking enough to swing a U.S. election or be parroted by talk show hosts and CNN reporters?
"They're almost certainly way too high," Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington says of the new numbers, noting the results were released just before another U.S. election. "This is not analysis; this is politics."
Indeed, a private group called Iraq Body Count, which tracks reported casualties from all causes, including IEDs and homicide bombers, put civilian casualties in this war at between 64,333 and 70,471. In a press release, it said "there is considerable cause for skepticism regarding the estimates in the latest study."
Just doing simple math, if you divide the 655,000 figure by the 40 months covered by the study, you come up with 16,375 deaths a month, some 500 a day. Didn't see 500 Iraqi deaths on last night's evening news? Neither did we.
For Burnham's study, researchers gathered data from a sample of 1,849 Iraqi households with a total of 12,801 residents from late May to early July 2006. That sample -- which likely includes jihadists, terrorists and others who want the U.S. out of Iraq -- was used to extrapolate the total.
This methodology is like determining how many Americans wear dentures by surveying only nursing homes. Yet the new mythical number will be endlessly quoted by those who silently ignore the atrocities of Saddam or the millions of purple fingers that signified democracy's struggle to take root in Iraq.
We have a suggestion: If white-flaggers like Pelosi and Reid force us to leave Iraq prematurely, do a body count in Iraq 40 months after that.
