The collection of data for Iraqi and US deaths is about as fraudulent as one could imagine- what the tame Iraqis have done, along with the PCA is to delete large pieces of data and massage the rest, thereby cooking the books.- such as deaths by IED,(gone) and, in the case of Civilian deaths, redefining criminal vs. sectarian deaths by preposterous criteria- like whether they got shot in the front of the head vs. the back of the head.
Garbage in- garbage out. Capitalism searches out the darkest corners of human potential, and mainlines them.
It is possible to write entire books on the subject of data collection, and I decided that it was beyond the scope of this guide to include it - especially considering the fact that many of the techniques to detect doctored data acquisition require that you get your hands on the primary sources, which is a lot of bother for a newspaper aticle.
And often hacks will employ both bad data and bad presentation. It's usually easier to nail them on the presentation side of things...
But you're certainly right that any total figure for Iraqi casualties less than half a million or so is pure fiction. The official numbers certainly are. By at least an order of magnitude.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
I have not been able to verify this.
OTOH, soldier deaths are useful (to the extent that deaths can be useful...) primarily as a proxy for how things are going in general. So it does not really matter whether they lie a bit about the real numbers, as long as they've been lying in the same way since the war started.
The absolute values of coalition fatality figures from Vietraq are suspect anyway due to the fairly widespread employment of mercenary militias by the Coalition, as their numbers do not count towards casualties when they get killed.
