Glenn links to a lengthy essay in The National Journal which calls into question the veracity of two studies. The studies in question were published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, and they supposedly showed that civilian casualties had soared since the US led invasion. In fact, the studies claimed that civilian deaths were ten times greater than anyone had thought!
Our own Shannon Love picked the first of these studies apart when it was first published, and he received a lot of abuse in the comments for it. I’m glad to see that my fellow Chicago Boy is getting some small measure of vindication for all of his hard work, even if The National Journal is incredibly slow out of the starting gate.
[From Jonathan: A list of links to Shannon’s Lancet posts is here.]
It is good to get accuracy in these matteres but I have to assume that there re going to be more casualties after an invasion than when one does not take place, as seems indicated in the post…
Wars kill. But Joseph Hill, keep in mind that so do dictators – more ruthlessly and more often. That we don’t see that as always or even ever our country’s business may be a real argument. That we should care more about the deaths of our own – whether attacked or attacking – is also a reasonable position we generally share in varying degrees. But to ignore the greatest danger to life (and liberty)is foolish as well as blind.
Joseph Hill: Perhaps you would like to explain the number of ‘excess’ deaths in the USSR *after* the Revolution and *before* as compared to those due to the German invasion. Are you seriously claiming that there were more non-military deaths due to the invasion?
For some odd reason, everyone seems to forget those ‘million’ (or 500,000, depending on whether you’re listening to Saddam’s ambassador to the UN or Madeleine Albright) between 1992 and 2002. Assuming *no adults* were killed by Saddam, that’s still more than the deaths the idiotic Lancet ‘study’ claims.