That Lancet study

A story in the Wall Street Journal highlights a remarkable article in the National Journal, which reveals startling information about the infamous 2006 Lancet ‘study’ which purported to show that Iraqi casualties had totalled more than 650,000 in the three years since the fall of Saddam in 2003. The figure was clearly absurd. The NJ authors say they have now learned that this ‘research’ was funded by George Soros, the financier who has spent millions of dollars trying to destroy George W Bush. They also discovered that the person responsible for collecting the data for the study, Riyadh Lafta, was hardly an objective or reliable source.

Lafta had been a child-health official in Saddam Hussein's ministry of health when the ministry was trying to end the international sanctions against Iraq by asserting that many Iraqis were dying from hunger, disease, or cancer caused by spent U.S. depleted-uranium shells remaining from the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In 2000, Lafta authored at least two brief articles contending that U.N. sanctions had caused many deaths by starvation among Iraqi children. In one article, he identified malnutrition as the main contributor to 53 percent of deaths among hospitalized children younger than 2, during a 1997 survey carried out at Saddam Central Teaching Hospital. The article cited no health data from before the sanctions, yet it asserted, ‘We can conclude from results that the most important and widespread underlying cause of the deterioration of child-health standards in Iraq is the long-term impact of the non-humanized economic sanction imposed through United Nations resolutions.’

In other words, the Lancet relied for its data upon assertions made by one of Saddam’s apologists, who had previously manipulated information in order to evade UN sanctions, about the alleged effects of the toppling of Saddam. This in a medical journal which hitherto was regarded as utterly authoritative — and which, because it played to the anti-war narrative, was swallowed uncritically by the ‘Bush lied people died’ crowd and was treated as holy writ.