Number Crunching  Military analysis. Oct. 20 2006 6:34 PM
Number Crunching  Taking another look at the Lancet's Iraqstudy.
Let us take another look at the Lancet study. This is the
report, issued by a team from Johns Hopkins University and
published in the current issue of British medical journal the
Lancet, estimating that 655,000 Iraqis have died as a
consequence of the U.S.-led invasion. It's a shocking number. Is
it true?  Initially, I decided to stay out of this controversy.
I'd written the first critique of an earlier Lancet/Hopkins
study, which estimated that 100,000 Iraqis had died in just the
first year of the war. The study's sample was too small, the
data-gathering too slipshod, the range of uncertainty so wide as
to render the estimate useless.  Fred Kaplan Fred Kaplan    The
new study looked better: a larger sample, more fastidious
attention to data-gathering procedures, a narrower range of
uncertainty. The number—655,000 deaths—seemed improbably high
(that's an average of 20,000 deaths a month