Pardon me if I am struggling just a bit with the following quote, but something here does not seem right.

In response to a question about a new academic report that estimates the Iraqi death toll since the U.S. invasion and occupation of that country at 655,000, President Bush said: "I don't consider it a credible report. The methodology is pretty well discredited."

Bush suggested that the scholars who prepared the report had "guessed at" a death toll.

Now, the report was prepared by internationally respected researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, working in conjunction with the Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. The Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology also participated and the report was published by The Lancet, the British medical journal that sets the gold standard for seriousness and integrity when it comes to scientific inquiry.

Between May and June of this year, on-the-ground researchers surveyed 1,849 households, including 12,801 household members, in 47 randomly selected sites across Iraq. They questioned the inhabitants about births, deaths and migrations and then compiled the data, using precisely the same survey methods that have been employed to measure mortality in other conflict areas such as the Congo, Kosovo and Sudan.

U.S. officials have respected research of this kind on other conflicts - particularly those where the U.S. seeks justification for intervention. So what's wrong with this study?

The president says that its methodology is out of whack. Putting aside the fact that this president led this country into the Iraq quagmire peddling methodology about weapons of mass destruction was not nearly so sound - and that has since been proved to have been wrong - there is no evidence that the president or his aides reviewed the research methods employed in the production of the Johns Hopkins report.

Nor is there evidence that the new report's methodology has been questioned - let alone rejected - by scholars. Indeed, there is general acceptance that the study's population-based, active method for collecting mortality information is superior to passive methods that depend on counting bodies or tabulating media reports of violent deaths.

So what, exactly, is wrong with the report?

It does not match the political "reality" that Bush and his political allies seek to present in this election year.

The exact toll of the Iraq invasion and its aftermath may never be known. It is difficult to accept that the number of dead stands only in the tens of thousands, as Bush suggests. The daily news reports of catastrophic car bombings and execution-style slayings by "insurgents" - as well as the bloody attacks on those "insurgents" by U.S. and Iraqi forces - suggests a higher figure.

How high?

That is what the researchers with the Bloomberg School of Public Health sought to determine. They employed the most accepted and respected research techniques of the day, and they did so with an approach that has been accepted by the scholarly community.

Now George Bush claims "the methodology is pretty well discredited" and suggests that the researchers "guessed at" their findings.

If the president had any track record for getting things right with regard to Iraq, he might merit a hearing. But from the start of his miserable misadventure, Bush has talked up the wrong threats, imagined the wrong successes and embraced the wrong strategies. Now he tells us that others are wrong about the damage done by his miscalculations.

That's not a scientific judgment on the president's part. It's politics - or, to be more precise, an attempt to maintain the long lie that is Bush's Iraq policy through one more election.

Copyright ©2006, Capital Newspapers.

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