This might account for a bit of the hostility
Quote of note:
Les Roberts, the lead researcher from Johns Hopkins, said the article's timing was up to him.
"I emailed it in on Sept. 30 under the condition that it came out before the election," Roberts told The Associated Press. "My motive in doing that was not to skew the election. My motive was that if this came out during the campaign, both candidates would be forced to pledge to protect civilian lives in Iraq.
"I was opposed to the war and I still think that the war was a bad idea, but I think that our science has transcended our perspectives," Roberts said. "As an American, I am really, really sorry to be reporting this."
In fact, the idea that the candidates would be "forced to pledge to protect civilian lives" simply doesn't take into account that 40-odd percent of the population believes Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks.
It will help folks see who is pro-life, though. It's logically impossible to be pro-life and pro-invasion at the same time. Anti-abortion and pro-invasion, sure.
Anyway…
Household survey sees 100,000 Iraqi deaths
By Emma Ross, AP Medical Writer | October 29, 2004
LONDON --Researchers have estimated that as many as 100,000 more Iraqis -- many of them women and children -- died since the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq than would have been expected otherwise, based on the death rate before the war.
Writing in the British-based medical journal The Lancet, the American and Iraqi researchers concluded that violence accounted for most of the extra deaths and that airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition were a major factor.
There is no official figure for the number of Iraqis killed since the conflict began, but some non-governmental estimates range from 10,000 to 30,000. As of Thursday, 1,106 U.S. servicemen had been killed, according to the U.S. Defense Department.
The scientists who wrote the report concede that the data they based their projections on were of "limited precision," because the quality of the information depends on the accuracy of the household interviews used for the study. The interviewers were Iraqi, most of them doctors.
Designed and conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and the Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, the study was published Thursday on The Lancet's Web site.
The survey attributed most of the extra deaths to violence and said airstrikes by coalition forces caused most of the violent deaths.
"Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children," the researchers wrote.
