[DEBATE] : 655,000 Iraqi deaths

[Riaz K Tayob]

655,000 Iraqi deaths: Study
Bush dismisses toll as `not credible'
Estimate based on household survey
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/
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Oct. 12, 2006. 01:00 AM
BETH GORHAM
CANADIAN PRESS

WASHINGTON—U.S. President George W. Bush is dismissing a new report that 
pegs Iraqi civilian casualties at 655,000 — more than 20 times higher 
than his estimate late last year.

"I don't consider it a credible report," Bush told a news conference 
yesterday. "I do know that a lot of innocent people have died and that 
troubles me and it grieves me."

The president, who pegged civilian war casualties at 30,000 last 
December, declined to amend the figure at yesterday's news conference.

The new study released yesterday suggests a death toll from the Iraq war 
that's more than 10 times other independent estimates. Some experts were 
skeptical of its methodology and the release less than a month before 
the mid-term elections, while others hailed it as the most accurate 
study available.

"We have no reason to question the findings or the accuracy" of the 
report, Sarah Leah Whitson at Human Right Watch in New York told The 
Washington Post.

Ronald Waldman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University, said: "This is 
the best estimate of mortality we have."

More than 2,750 U.S. troops have died in Iraq since the invasion in 
March 2003. At least 39 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq this 
month alone.

But it's the Iraqi figure that has always garnered the attention, wrote 
Greg Mitchell at the Editor and Publisher journal.

"From the beginning, the U.S. military refused to count, and the 
American media rarely probed civilian casualties as a result of our 
invasion of Iraq," Mitchell wrote.

The survey was conducted by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public 
Health.

The estimate will be published today in the medical journal The Lancet. 
It was based on a house-to-house survey of 1,849 sample Iraqi households 
with 12,801 residents in 47 random neighbourhoods from late May to early 
July.

The total breaks down to more than 16,000 deaths a month in the 40 
months since the invasion in March 2003 through to July 2006.

The method is widely used in international health, said Dr. Gilbert 
Burnham at Johns Hopkins, one of the study's authors.

"This is the deaths above (what) would be expected before the invasion," 
he said.

About 600,000 were due to violence, mostly gunfire. The study also found 
a small increase in deaths from causes like heart disease and cancer.

A private group called Iraq Body Count estimated between 44,000 to 
49,000 civilian Iraqi deaths based on news reports but noted it probably 
overlooked "many, if not most" of the others.

Star wire services