IBC and Lancet

As noted by Tims Blair and Dunlop, the Iraq Body Count project has issued a response to Lancet/Johns Hopkins 2006. Both Tims are agreed that it’s a “must-read”, although obviously for different reasons.

It is indeed an interesting read, but seems rather short on substantive criticism of the survey and methodology. Basically IBC’s problem with Lancet is that the figures are too bloody high, carrying implications that IBC finds difficult to accept.

Just looking at one particular aspect, the IBC response notes that the Lancet/Johns Hopkins findings imply “incompetence and/or fraud on a truly massive scale by Iraqi officials in hospitals and ministries.”

Well, this seems just a bit hysterical. As noted elsewhere, the Iraqi Health Ministry released in June a war death toll of 50,000. However, the LA Times noted that, “Many more Iraqis are believed to have been killed but not counted because of serious lapses in recording deaths in the chaotic first year after the invasion, when there was no functioning Iraqi government, and continued spotty reporting nationwide since.”

So, why impute incompetence and/or fraud when the country, in particular its health system, was and continues to be a bloody shambles?

The whole point of doing a cluster survey, as undertaken by the Johns Hopkins people, was to circumvent that shattered state apparatus, and attempt to gauge excess mortality directly from the population.