Quote of the Day

From Omar Fadil of the IraqTheModel blog:

"All they want is to prove that our struggle for freedom was the wrong thing to do. This fake research is an insult to every man, woman and child who lost their lives."

Said in response to the recent propaganda in the guise of a “scientific” study published in the Lancet — and promptly debunked by a host of real scientists. Today’s Wall Street Journal has a piece ($) that excoriates the Lancet, saying in part:

So read a story in last week’s Washington Post on the new John Hopkins-led study — published in the British medical journal Lancet — purporting to document “excess deaths” in Iraq. “We have no reason to question the findings,” the Post quoted a Human Rights Watch official as saying. The article was fairly typical of reporting on the Lancet study, which has also been all over television and radio, as well as Internet sites such as Google and Yahoo! news.

All of which leaves us wondering if reporters and editors have enough sense anymore to ask basic questions about such enormous numbers, or whether they are simply too biased against the Bush Administration and its Iraq policy to do so. The 655,000 figure is more than 10 times higher than previous estimates of violent deaths in Iraq since the U.S. invasion, and it is larger than the number of Germans killed by allied bombing during all of World War II and larger than the number of Americans who died during our own Civil War.

Others have noted elsewhere that the Lancet’s estimate would require that over 1,000 Iraqis were killed every single day in 2006 — that nobody bothered to report to any police, hospitals, or other authorities. This seems unlikely in the extreme, as many Iraqis on the ground have observed.

Omar has it right: the Lancet has a political agenda in opposition to the war in Iraq. And it seems clear that their report was timed to influence the upcoming American elections. Shame on this “science” journal, both for publishing such a piece of rubbish, and for sullying the once-good reputation of a once-fine scientific journal…