23 November 2004 Blog Home : November 2004 : Permalink
I was going to add this as an update - but then I thought it was worth publishing spearately. Here is another Africa vs Iraq comparison
Melanie Phillips has a link to an Australian journalist who does some back of the envelope analysis of the Lancet's notorious 100,000 Iraqi civilian dead claim. Needless to say the words and phrases like "implausible", "load of cobblers" and "utter BS" spring to mind as one seeks ways to describe the Lancet article. Of course this hasn't been the only analysis, many others thought it just as "implausible" etc.
On the other hand there is Darfur where the Sudanese government has been far nastier that the Americans and where anywhere from 70,000 up have died since March 2004. Oh and of course there are 1.5 million or more refugess etc. etc.
If you do google queries on "iraqi 100,000 dead" you get back some 362,000 hits whereas if you do an equivalent Darfur search you get a mere 22,400 hits. Even better is that the top Iraq hits all seem to be reporting the debunked claim uncritically while a large number of the Sudan hits (including the fourth one - from Fox news) are reports of Sudanese government denials of the death toll.
Take a wild guess at which country has a US led coalition involved versus a UN inspired peacekeeping force.