Rosie's 1000 percent wrong

Iraq is a violent place. Al Qaeda intentionally targets Iraqi civilians with car bombs and kills a lot of people.

U.S. troops, on the other hand, don't kill a lot of people. We didn't kill many on the way in, and haven't killed many since. I saw somewhere the other day that the terrorist death toll in Iraq has just passed 4,000. I can't source it but it sounds hotair.com-ish. During the 1991 Gulf War, on the other hand, allied forces killed 20,000 to 22,000 Iraqi soldiers in the span of three months. I can't find a count of Iraqi forces killed during the March-April 2003 invasion.

Now, I don't pay much attention to people who think fire can't melt steel. But I find it annoying that Rosie O'Donnell has thrown out this figure of 655,000 civilians killed in Iraq, and it seems no one is interested in correcting the record. I'm sure no one on "The View" will question it.

The figure comes from a widely criticized Lancet article published by Johns Hopkins researchers. It's not a count of death certificates or hospital or morgue or government reports. It's basically a poll. I think the best takedown came from Iraq Body Count.

But you don't have to read an analysis to feel confident the figure's wrong. For it to be right, 511 Iraqis would have to have been killed, every day, between the fall of Baghdad and the study's October 2006 publication. On a multiple-car-bomb day, AQ sometimes manages to kill 100 people. But that's only now and then, not every day, and 511 is, well, five point one one times more than 100.

Two organizations, Iraq Body Count and Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, compile their statistics from news accounts, many of them double-sourced. IBC claims that "Civilians reported killed by military intervention in Iraq" total between 64,133 and 70,243. That's a strange way of putting it, and it's incorrect -- their own database lists Iraq Security Forces among the dead. But that's their line and they've stuck to it for quite some time.

ICCC takes a less emotional approach, and differentiates between civilian and ISF deaths. These organizations' counts used to be pretty close, but IBC's is now almost double ICCC's. It might have something to do with the way they're incorporating United Nations reports, which I don't trust. But that's another post.

ICCC's current counts are ISF: 6,843; civilians: 32,418.

So let's say the IBC's high-end count is right. That makes the Lancet figure 1000 percent wrong, if you carry the Lancet's daily average through today.

The situation in Iraq is bad enough. There's no need for that kind of exaggeration. Especially if you're going to attribute the deaths to the U.S. military instead of the people setting off the bombs.

Tracking to Hot Air...

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