Right-Wingers Can't Cover Up Iraq's Death Toll Catastrophe

By John Tirman, AlterNet. Posted January 21, 2008.

Now I know what Hillary Clinton meant, firsthand, by that "vast right-wing conspiracy." When the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the Sunday Times in London are going after you -- along with about 100 right-wing bloggers -- rest assured you've hit a nerve.

Or is it just Soros Derangement Syndrome at work?

More than two years ago, I commissioned a household survey of Iraq to learn how many people had died in the war. This topic had been virtually ignored by the news media and the U.S. government. It was important to know for at least three reasons. The first was to try to understand the nature of the violence there, which was steadily growing and creating a humanitarian crisis, possibly a regional conflagration. Second, it might tell us something about how and when to exit. Third, we needed to know for the sake of our national soul. What had we wrought?

So I contacted the people who had done a previous, largely ignored survey -- top public health professionals at Johns Hopkins University. They had published a survey in October 2004 that showed 98,000 had died in the first 18 months of the war, which was greeted with disbelief and charges of politicizing science, and quickly dismissed.

I said: "Do a bigger survey to improve the accuracy, and I will make sure it gets the proper attention in the news media." They did do a bigger survey, and I managed a public education campaign that permitted the results to be considered more broadly, results that estimated total deaths at 600,000 by violence after 40 months of war. The survey was published in the Lancet, the British medical journal. And get attention it did, roundly disbelieved and scorned by war supporters but spurring a brief but intense debate about the human cost of the war.

Dozens of statisticians and other professionals scoured the study and its data to see if the methods and implementation were proper; a special committee at the World Health Organization was convened to review it, and the Lancet had also subjected it to rigorous peer review. The survey held up to this scrutiny, with quibbles and some lingering "should have done this" and "might have done that." But virtually every competent person agreed that the study provided the best estimate we have.

Then, earlier this month, the National Journal, a Capitol Hill "insider" weekly, ran a cover story titled "Data Bomb" by Neil Munro and Carl Cannon. In a note by Munro, published by the National Review blog, he asserts:

George Soros funded the survey. The U.S. authors played no role in data collection and did not apply standard anti-fraud measures. The chief Iraqi data collector had earlier produced medical articles to help Saddam's anti-sanctions campaign in the 1990s, and said Allah guided the prior 2004 Lancet/Johns Hopkins death survey. Some of the field surveyors were employed by Moqtada Sadr's Ministry of Health. The Iraqis' numbers contain evidence of fakery, and the Lancet did not check for fakery.

It's a neat summary of their allegations, which include dozens of unfounded charges, promiscuous innuendo, misquoting of the principals and misunderstanding statistics, and relies on two disgruntled critics. It was a hatchet job, pure and simple. Not a sentence of Munro's summary is truthful, and that goes for much of the National Journal article, too, which I have demolished elsewhere (PDF). The principal author, Gilbert Burnham, M.D., Ph.D., and his colleagues have taken time from their clinics in Afghanistan and Jordan and Africa to answer the charges on the John Hopkins website, too ( with a letter here and a FAQ here).

But lies have a way of proliferating on the internet, and so it was with this set of schoolyard bully brickbats. What seemed most to get under the skin of the right-wing media was a small grant for public education funded by the Open Society Institute, a foundation created by George Soros.

See more stories tagged with: iraq, right-wingers, lancet study, johns hopkins study, civilian deaths, casualties

John Tirman is executive director of MIT's Center for International Studies.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from War on Iraq! Sign up now »