Another false report from the left

Jeff Jacoby:

FEW medical journals have the storied reputation of The Lancet, a British publication founded in 1823. In the course of its long history, The Lancet has published work of exceptional influence, such as Joseph Lister's principles of antiseptics in 1867 and Howard Florey's Nobel Prize-winning discoveries on penicillin in 1940. Today it is one of the most frequently cited medical journals in the world.

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So naturally there was great interest when the Lancet published a study in October 2006, three weeks before the midterm US elections, reporting that 655,000 people had died in Iraq as a result of the US-led war.

Hundreds of news outlets, to say nothing of antiwar activists and lawmakers, publicized the astonishing figure, which was more than 10 times the death toll estimated by other sources. The Iraqi health ministry, for example, put the mortality level through June 2006 at 50,000. Iraq Body Count, a nonpartisan anti-war group that maintains a public database of the war’s victims, tallied some 45,000 Iraqi dead. If The Lancet's number was accurate, more Iraqis had died in the two years since the US invasion than during the eight-year war with Iran.

President Bush, asked about the study, dismissed it out of hand: "I don't consider it a credible report." Tony Blair's spokesman also brushed it off as "not . . . anywhere near accurate."

But the media played it up....

But the truth, it turns out, is that the report was drenched with politics, and its jaw-dropping conclusions should have inspired anything but confidence.

In an extensively researched cover story last week, National Journal took a close look under the hood of the Lancet/Johns Hopkins study. Reporters Neil Munro and Carl M. Cannon found that it was marred by grave flaws, such as unsupervised Iraqi survey teams, and survey samples that were too small to be statistically valid.

The study's authors refused to release most of their underlying data so other researchers could double-check it. The single disk they finally, grudgingly, supplied contained suspicious evidence of "data-heaping" - that is, fabricated numbers. Researchers failed to gather basic demographic data from those they interviewed, a key safeguard against fraud.

"They failed to do any of the [routine] things to prevent fabrication," Fritz Scheuren, vice president for statistics at the National Opinion Research Center, told the reporters.

Bad as the study's methodological defects were, its political taint was worse:

Much of the funding for the study came from the Open Society Institute of leftist billionaire George Soros, a strident critic of the Iraq war who, as Munro and Cannon point out, "spent $30 million trying to defeat Bush in 2004."

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The fact is that despite all the claims that "Bush lied" virtually every journalistic fraud since this war began has been produced by the left. From the BBC to CBS to the Lancet the left's attempts to denigrate the war and its supporters has been drenched with a false narrative. The same can be said for election frauds, many of which have also been paid for by entities connected to Mr. Soros. The man obviously hates conservatives and is willing to do anything to insure our defeat and at the same time insure the defeat of this country.

The Lancet study was unworthy of publication. Even the other studies have a flawed premise, that the US war effort was responsible for these civilian deaths. The fact is that al Qaeda had a deliberate policy of targeting noncombatants in the hopes that other non combatants would be targeted in reprisal attacks. I think that a significant majority of civilian deaths in Iraq should be attributed to a wicked enemy, al Qaeda. It should also be noted that al Qaeda's war crime of camouflaging itself as a civilian and its use of civilians as human shields contributed to several civilian deaths. That is not a story that Soros and the anti war groups are willing to publish.