Remember the study released last year by British medical journal The Lancet that ludicrously claimed more than 650,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the Iraq War? The study that was seized upon by “anti-war” groups, and is now cited as fact and repeated endlessly in the propaganda from International ANSWER, CODEPINK, Stop the War Coalition and every other loony left organization on the planet?

Now, a damning peer review has come to the conclusion that the Lancet’s study has “no scientific standing”—and may in fact be fraudulent.

Well, knock me over with a feather.

Could 650,000 Iraqis really have died because of the invasion?

One critic is Professor Michael Spagat, a statistician from Royal Holloway College, University of London. He and colleagues at Oxford University point to the possibility of “main street bias” – that people living near major thoroughfares are more at risk from car bombs and other urban menaces. Thus, the figures arrived at were likely to exceed the true number. The Lancet study authors initially told The Times that “there was no main street bias” and later amended their reply to “no evidence of a main street bias”.

Professor Spagat says the Lancet paper contains misrepresentations of mortality figures suggested by other organisations, an inaccurate graph, the use of the word “casualties” to mean deaths rather than deaths plus injuries, and the perplexing finding that child deaths have fallen. Using the “three-to-one rule” – the idea that for every death, there are three injuries – there should be close to two million Iraqis seeking hospital treatment, which does not tally with hospital reports.

“The authors ignore contrary evidence, cherry-pick and manipulate supporting evidence and evade inconvenient questions,” contends Professor Spagat, who believes the paper was poorly reviewed. “They published a sampling methodology that can overestimate deaths by a wide margin but respond to criticism by claiming that they did not actually follow the procedures that they stated.” The paper had “no scientific standing”. Did he rule out the possibility of fraud? “No.”

If you factor in politics, the heat increases. One of the Lancet authors, Dr Les Roberts, campaigned for a Democrat seat in the US House of Representatives and has spoken out against the war. Dr Richard Horton, Editor of the Lancet is also antiwar.

UPDATE at 3/5/07 8:09:16 am:

The article quoted above makes one error; Professor Spagat is an economist, not a statistician. But a quick review of his work makes it quite clear that he has published extensively on the subject of conflict statistics.

Here is the web site of Professor Spagat’s group, with much more information on their debunking of The Lancet’s biased study: Conflict Mortality Surveys.