20 car bombs a day in Iraq!!
October 17, 2006Ever since Danish journalists started reporting as a fact from the Lancet reports that 600,000 Iraqi people died violently since the invasion, I have been waiting for someone smarter or more patient to me to debunk it.
Thankfully Iraq Body Count have done so in Reality checks: some responses to the latest Lancet estimates. The Iraq Body Count can hardly be accused of being pro Bush as they have been one of the harshest critics of the war since it started. It is great to see someone on the left side with some honesty and decency.
Just a little excerpt from the brilliant and wonderfully sarcastic rebuttal:
Lancet estimates 150 people to have died from car bombs alone, on average, every day during June 2005-June 2006. IBC’s database of deadly car bomb incidents shows they kill 7-8 people on average. Lancet’s estimate corresponds to about 20 car bombs per day, all but one or two of which fail to be reported by the media. Yet car bombs fall well within the earlier-mentioned category of incidents which average 6 unique reports on them.
Unfortunately one of my favorite economist historians Nick Szabo seems to have fallen for it. I know Nick is very anti-Bush but I’m really saddened that one of the most thorough and intelligent researchers fell for this without doing a bit of an insanity or at least a fact check on it first.
