Informed Speculation

It’s no good spending all of your time trying to justify yourself or the things that you’ve written; if you post as much as I do, you’re going to put up some clunkers. Still, I was taken to task by commenter Joe yesterday for suggesting that Bush’s estimate of 30,000 Iraqi dead was refreshing candor, and I can’t resist pointing out that if I’m an idiot for thinking that, then so is Peter Baker of the Washington Post:

The estimate marked the first time Bush has personally provided an assessment of the Iraqi death toll, a highly sensitive subject that his administration largely avoids discussing at any level, much less from the presidential lectern. Although the Pentagon keeps careful track of Americans killed in Iraq — now exceeding 2,100 troops — military officers have said they do not count Iraqi dead.

…The comments came during a rare audience question-and-answer session after a speech here on Iraq’s upcoming elections, the third of four speeches leading up to Thursday’s vote. After being criticized for refusing to honor the custom of taking questions at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington last week, the president opened the floor after his address to the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia.

The first person he called on was Didi Goldmark, 63, a former libel lawyer from New Hope, Pa., who asked him how many Iraqis have died in the war. Unlike aides who have been asked that question, Bush gave a direct answer.

“I would say 30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis,” he said. “We’ve lost about 2,140 of our own troops in Iraq.”

Bush moved on to the next question without identifying how he arrived at the figure or how many were killed by U.S. forces and not Iraqi insurgents and foreign militants. Aides later said it was not a government estimate but a reflection of figures in news media reports. Still, Bush offered it without qualification, in effect accepting it as a reasonable approximation.

The Iraqi death toll has been the subject of considerable debate. A group of British researchers and antiwar activists called Iraq Body Count estimates civilian casualties between 27,383 and 30,892, not counting Iraqi troops or insurgents, by tabulating incidents reported in media and human rights reports. Iraqi authorities have said that roughly 800 people die a month in violence there, a rate that if typical over the course of the conflict would come to 25,600.

An epidemiological study published in the British journal the Lancet last year estimated 100,000 deaths in the first 18 months since the invasion based on door-to-door interviews in selected neighborhoods extrapolated across the country, an estimate that other experts and human rights groups considered inflated.

The significance is that Bush put an ‘official’ stamp of approval on a subject that he, his aides, and the military have previously dodged – and furthermore, that he confirmed that the range was about what most reasonable observers had concluded.

That is significant, that is candor, and I don’t think any further explanation is necessary…