Or so the headline would read if they thought they could get away with it.

The next stop in the Democrats’ 2006 campaign tour is the newly released bogus study claiming 655,000 Iraqis have died because of the war.

Don’t think it’s a coincidence that this study is being published a mere 4 weeks before a major election. The “researchers” did this same thing just before the 2004 election and admitted the timing was intentional to get the most impact on the election:

The work updates an earlier Johns Hopkins study _ that one was released just before the November 2005 presidential election. At the time, the lead researcher, Les Roberts of Hopkins, said the timing was deliberate. Many of the same researchers were involved in the latest estimate.

2005 Presidential election? Even the reporting on the reporting is wrong.

The lead “researcher” then was also a Democrat candidate for Congress this year, before dropping out of the race. The current lead “researcher” was a financial supporter of his campaign. There’s some whopping credibility for their “research”.

On page 7 of the report, the “researchers” even admit:

Many of the Iraqis reportedly killed by US forces could have been combatants.

And I wonder how many of the bodies from Saddam’s mass graves have been counted among this study. To say nothing of the number killed by the terrorists themselves.

Of course, this stuff doesn’t have to be accurate. The media will pick it up without providing any substance as to the motivations or flawed statistics, and they’ll use it to try and gain political advantage.

UPDATE:
Here’s a pretty good debunking of the Lancet study (it’s from 2005 and focused on the first release of the study to which the current is an “update”)

UPDATE 2:
The actual study has been released (registratin req’d) and here’s the press release from Johns Hopkins. Couple of interesting items in the release:

Males aged 15-44 years accounted for 59 percent of post-invasion violent deaths

Does that profile look familiar?

The proportion of deaths attributed to coalition forces diminished in 2006 to 26 percent. Between March 2003 and July 2006, households attributed 31 percent of deaths to the coalition

So where are the other 70-75% of the deaths coming from? The researchers certainly wouldn’t want the world to know that they could be related to the terrorists that don’t exist in Iraq, would they? Or how about victims of Saddam’s regime that were dug up from mass graves and identified after the invasion? And this statistic alone would bring their numbers of “war dead” down to around 170,000, even if the numbers were accurate.

The survey recorded 1,474 births and 629 deaths among 12,801 people surveyed. The data were then applied to the 26.1 million Iraqis living in the survey area.

I’d be interested to see the mortality rate here by applying the deaths of 600 people in South Central Los Angeles to the 300 million in the U.S. Oh my God, 100 million Americans have died since Bush took office!!!!!

Others:
Allah asks, “If 600,000 people have been killed, where are all the bodies?”
LGF points to the timing of this, and the last, report from Lancet, as well as more context on the editor, Richard Horton (with video):

Here’s some context that media isn’t giving you, in a video clip from the recent “Time To Go” demonstration of the UK Stop The War Coalition, at which Lancet editor Richard Horton was a star speaker—sharing the stage with luminaries such as George Galloway.

Mark Coffey puts the Iraqi deaths in context of other wars. It is war, remember?
Gateway Pundit poses an interesting question…

This latest Lancet Study released today claims that 555,000 Iraqis have died in the last two years since their last controversial study! That comes to around 770 violent Iraqi deaths each day on average!!!

So, does this mean all of those headlines of 18 or 30 deaths were off by 700 or so?