Informed Speculation

Kudos to Pajamas for pursuing and landing an interview with the principal author of the Lancet study.  I thought the interview was very reasonable and not at all antagonistic…and also quite revealing.  Either Professor Gilbert Burnham is remarkably obtuse, or he is quite practiced in the art of hearing what he wants to hear.

Two questions will illustrate what I mean:

PajamasMedia: According to this report 14% of the 655,000 people died as a result of suicide bombers, which would be about 91,700 people.  This is far greater than the media estimates and suicide attacks tend to be well-reported, as opposed to shooting or roadside bombings. Do you have any specific information about where these  97,000 people were killed? 

Burnham: We did not report on suicide bombers.

That’s it…that’s the entirety of Burnham’s answer, and it’s a fundamentally dishonest one.  The categories given the Lancet study for violent deaths are:

Gunshot, car bomb, other explosion/ordnance, air strike, unknown, and accident.  

14% are categorized as other explosion/ordnance.  Now if it’s not a car bomb, and it’s not an air strike, and it’s not gunfire, it is a quite reasonable assumption that the explosion came from a suicide bomber.  I haven’t read of any large scale grenade launching episodes, nor do the militants seem to own high-powered artillery.  And 14% of 605,000 is 84,700 (Miniter wrongly used the full 655,000 instead of the violent death figure of roughly 605,000). 

Now Burnham could have expounded on this, and explained why it’s not a reasonable assumption that this category is for suicide bombers, for example, but he answered with a glib, patronizing answer that wouldn’t satisfy a four-year-old.  Much, much worse, though, is the thought that a professor thinks he can get away with this:

PajamasMedia: Historical comparisons might be helpful here.  650,000 violent deaths is about 150,000 more than the number of soldiers who died (violently and by disease) during the American Civil War, a conflict which involved a population larger than Iraq’s, and lasted a year [sic] than the current conflict has been going on.  There is nothing in Iraq that looks like Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, Cold Harbor, etc.  What makes you believe that Iraq is deadlier than the American Civil War? 

Burnham: What we are reporting is cumulative deaths over a 40 month period throughout an area of 26.1 million, not a 1-2 day battle field event.

I’m not enamored of that question; talk about apples and oranges…but look at Burnham’s answer.  He completely ignored the import of the query; 618,000 – 700,000 Americans died ‘excess’ deaths of ALL causes during the 4-year conflict, not during a 2-3 day battlefield event.  Once again, he glibly answers a question with an insultingly insufficient answer that is actually quite deceitful. 

Now, why should I trust a man like that when he tells me anything else?…Once again, I realize that none of this ‘disproves’ or ‘debunks’ the study…but it does impair the credibility of the professor.  If this was a trial, he just lost the case…