655,000? Really?

A new "study" was released today claiming that 655,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed since the start of the Iraq war. That sounded wildly inflated to me, so being the dork I am, I ran the math to see how many deaths that would be per day.

The study allegedly takes data from the start of the Iraq war through July. By my calculations, that is 1,229 days (March 20, 2003 -- the start of Oper@tion |raqi Freedom -- through July 31, 2006.) Thus averaging out to 533 deaths per day.

This, to me, sounds absolutely incredible. And not the good kind of incredible. I'm talking about incredible as in lacking credibility. An average of 533 deaths per day extrapolates out to nearly 4,000 deaths per week and nearly 16,000 deaths per month. And that's on average. Presumably there would be times with more than that. I just don't buy it. Say what you will about the Bush Administration's secrecy or the press' incompetence on covering the issue, but if 16,000 were really dying every month...it would be all over the news.

The survey method of the study also seems slightly, uh, less than reliable. Apparently to gather this information, the surveyors interviewed some 1,849 households. Gee, interviewing people instead of relying on a body count? How could that possibly leave room for error? Call me cynical, but I find it hard to believe that everyone interviewed was absolutely precise and, well, honest. Even if one person exaggerated by, say, one death, that would add more than 2,000 deaths to the total figure. Now say for the sake of argument that one percent of the households interviewed exaggerated by one death. That would add almost 38,000 "fake" deaths to the final figure. So you see how quickly the number can inflate and become completely inaccurate.

Granted, tens of thousands of civilians have verifiably died since the start of the war, and that's tragic. But it's also pretty tragic that such a number would be inflated and used as a political tool less than four weeks from an election.