Eugene Robinson asks the right questions and offers the correct answers about the recently issued study claiming 650,000 Iraqi civilian deaths from the war (well, actually, somewhere between 400,000 and 900,000). Robinson makes the point that this was the first scientific attempt at putting a number on the death toll — previous efforts were estimates baed news stories — and that it is wrong to dismiss them out of hand as the Bush administration is doing. As he says, “the exact number is not the point. Rather, it’s the scope and scale of the carnage.”
The administration’s figures appear to have been “pulled out of a hat.”
But quite a lot of science went into the Johns Hopkins study. Even if you assume that the number of Iraqi civilians killed since the war began is at the very low end of the study’s range, that’s still a quantum leap from earlier estimates. We now have reputable evidence — not proof, I’ll allow, but science-based evidence from respected scholars, published in one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals — that the humanitarian tragedy in Iraq is much, much worse than anyone had suspected.
If the study’s findings are flawed, then its critics should demonstrate how and why. But no one should dismiss these shocking numbers without fully examining them. No one should want to.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
Hank Kalet 