I know you want to nibble away at the results and try to cast doubt upon them, but the magnitude of the numbers make it hard for you to do more than cosmetic damage. You really have an uphill battle ahead of you with this one. Subtract a few thousand here, a few thousand there, you still have a huge death toll.

Bush consistently maintains that only about 30,000 Iraqis have died, a strangely static number over time that suggests he picked it out of his...uh, thin air.

Last month's death toll was a little under 3,000, reportedly high; if we take an average rate as 2,000, in the 42 months since Bush declared "Mission Accomplished!", you'd expect about 84,000 based on media reports alone.

Bush's estimate is lower than anybody else's derived using any methodology. IraqiBodyCount estimates ~40,000, an Iraqi NGO commission (Iraqiyun) estimates 128,000, and this study estimates a range from 400,000-900,000 centered on about 650,000.

The JH study addresses the discrepancy:

Our estimate of excess deaths is far higher than those reported in Iraq through passive surveillance measures.1,5 This discrepancy is not unexpected. Data from passive surveillance are rarely complete, even in stable circumstances, and are even less complete during conflict, when access is restricted and fatal events could be intentionally hidden. Aside from Bosnia,21 we can find no conflict situation where passive surveillance recorded more than 20% of the deaths measured by population-based methods. In several outbreaks, disease and death recorded by facility-based methods underestimated events by a factor of ten or more when compared with population-based estimates.11,22–25 Between 1960 and 1990, newspaper accounts of political deaths in Guatemala correctly reported over 50% of deaths in years of low violence but less than 5% in years of highest violence.26 Nevertheless, surveillance tallies are important in monitoring trends over time and in the provision of individual data, and these data track closely with our own findings (figure 4).

"Passive surveillance" is the key, since people like IraqiBodyCount rely on published accounts, and in Iraq journalists rarely venture outside of about five population centers. This study is unique in that people actually went out in the field and gathered data. If you correct media reports by the 20% reporting figure cited for Bosnia, IraqiBodyCount's numbers, for example, could be reflecting an actual death toll around 200,000.

Within the numbers, no doubt the number of deaths attributed to the coalition is inflated. Iraqis are mad at us, and they're going to blame us for more than we deserve. But I don't think we can evade responsibility for the general death toll, taking place as it is in a situation we created. We may not be pulling the trigger in all cases, but we created the killing ground.

Another interesting fact I got from the survey is that the death rate prior to the invasion was 5.5/1,000, and 13.3/1000 in the post-invasion period. It's often been speculated that the death rate was underreported under Saddam, for reasons not dissimilar to why it's being underreported today: Fragmented record-keeping, a desire to downplay the numbers for political reasons, and the unwillingness of people to speak out for fear of consequences. Any argument that tries to raise the death toll under Saddam also raises the death toll in the new figures.

Are the Iraqi people better off now than before the invasion? Well, they're dying at a rate about 2.5 times higher than before. You tell me. Or, better yet, how about explaining it to the Iraqis?