In a recent post on the John Hopkins study of 655,000 deaths in Iraq since the US invasion, William Arkin asks: “Is the Hopkins study correct, and can reasonable non-partisan people feel comfortable with the conclusion that Iraq has suffered about 15,000 violent deaths a month every month since the U.S. invasion, about 500 deaths a day? I think not.”

This is just the latest in a long line of statements coming out against the study. Bush, for example, declared that, “I don’t consider it a credible report. Neither does General (George) Casey (top U.S. commander in Iraq) and neither do Iraqi officials”, calling the study’s methodology “pretty well discredited.” Casey commented that the figure “seems way, way beyond any number that I have seen. I’ve not seen a number higher than 50,000. And so I don’t give it that much credibility at all.” (Although Casey couldn’t confirm where he got his 50,000 figure from). A spokesman from the Iraqi government said, “The report is unbelievable. These numbers are exaggerated and not precise.” UK Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett was a lot more reserved, saying, “The report gives a figure which is orders of magnitude different from any other source… nobody else has come up with figures on this scale… the report has been criticised by the Iraqi government as unreasonable”, but a spokesman for Blair was more forward: “It’s not [a figure] we believe to be anywhere near accurate”.

What annoys the hell out of me is not that people question the study - that just makes good sense - but that they pick and choose which studies to question. For example, in the Sudan, the press routinely takes estimates of deaths there also generated from studies also using estimates and, in some cases, using very similar methods, without question.

A recent study (by Hagan and Palloni) concluded that around 170,000 to 255,000 thousand people had died in Darfur (but the authors believe it much higher at near 400,000), while a Coalition for International Justice study caused Hagan, in an earlier analysis using the CIJ data, to conclude that the death toll was at around 390,000. The CIJ study, incidently, was “based on semi-structured interviews with 1,136 randomly selected refugees at 19 locations in eastern Chad. … The field data for the 1,136 interviews were compiled using a standardized data entry process that involved the collection and coding of detailed information from each refugee respondentâ??s set of answers. The researchers then used a statistical program to aggregate the data and analyze the results.”

My, that sounds very familiar. As pointed out in the John Hopkins newspaper, “These same survey methods [for the Iraq mortality study] were used to measure mortality during conflicts in the Congo, Kosovo, Sudan and other regions.”

Don’t know about you, but I have yet to read in the press refutations of the figures presented for these countries. Does the press publish columns or articles lamenting the fact that this is impossibly high? That it’s incorrect or too high? Of course not. The Washington Post went on about “Why has the world failed to act?”, pointing out that “Darfur has all ingredients for international intervention”, while citing the Hagan/Palloni study that the death toll was around 200,000 - 400,000. MSNBC also said that Hagan and Palloni’s study was the “first scientifically rigorous estimate of the death toll” and it showed “that the pessimists were right”. And so on. I also note with some amusement that, in 2005, the WaPo concluded in an editorial that Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick needed to “cite better numbers” - referring to Hagan’s original study - because if “his international partners … are allowed to believe that the death toll is one-third of its real level” the killing in Darfur will continue.

The real bottom line is that it’s easy to accept the Sudan estimate because they’re not, strictly speaking, “our” victims, but the Iraqi’s are. Of course the John Hopkins study will not be correct but it is by far the most accurate measurement we have to date; that’s the crucial point. The state of the country at the moment means it’s impossible for there to be any proper way of knowing the real figures (one of the reasons why the Sudan estimates and studies are also likely to be the most accurate assessment of casualties).