On October 11th, President Bush hosted a press conference at which he was asked to comment on a public health study released earlier that day. Its authors estimate that 654,965 deaths occurred in Iraq between March 2003 and July 2006 because of the invasion and Occupation of Iraq. Bush was asked if he “care[d] to amend or update your figure, and do you consider this a credible report?” He replied “No, I don’t consider it a credible report. Neither does General Casey and neither do Iraqi officials.” Putting aside whether Casey or Bush even read the report before judging it, its contents are worth considering.

The study’s authors, based at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al Mustansiriya University’s School of Medicine in Baghdad, spent the months of May, June and July in Iraq collecting data. Along with translators and trained professionals, they visited 1,849 households containing 12,801 persons. A household was defined as a group that shares meals and had a separate entrance to its dwelling, and an excess death is one caused by the conflict — not heart attacks, but mortar attacks.

Households were selected systematically. Fifty clusters were selected throughout Iraq based on its 2004 Ministry of Planning population figures. Baghdad, for instance, had 12 clusters because, in 2004, it was home to 6.5 million persons, while Kerbala had only one, home to 762,872 persons. Maps were produced of the cluster sites, and from there points of departure were randomly selected based on lists of streets. In a previous study, researchers used GPS devices to randomly select departure coordinates. This time, however, the team decided that the risks associated with carrying around GPS units and pointing them at houses was too high. GPS units “might be seen as targeting an area for air strikes,” they warned.

So the teams of two men and two women, fluent in English and Arabic, began knocking on doors, beginning at the randomized departure point and interviewing the first 40 households in its immediate vicinity. Though no incentives were offered to participants, only 15 households out of almost 1,900 refused to participate, an extraordinarily high rate of participation. The researchers asked the Iraqis about recent deaths, births and in/out-migration of people who had been living in the household for at least three months. Based on responses from the 1,800+ households containing 12, 801 people, the team determined that between 392,979 and 942,636 excess deaths occurred in the first 40 months of the Occupation. They found that most of the deaths were caused by gunshot wounds (31 percent) and explosions. Interestingly, they found that car bombs accounted for the same amount of violent deaths as air strikes (7 percent).

The range of 600,00 persons strikes many observers as odd. But of that range, the confidence interval (CI) was 95 percent — so 655,000 is the highly likely mid-point between the high and the low. The wide range is partially an effect of the sample size — 12,000 represented 28,000,000 Iraqis. So, like almost all statistics, it is an estimate, but one far more precise than existing means of calculating deaths in Iraq. The widely-cited Iraq Body Count website, for instance, calculates its totals by scanning media reports only. It states quite plainly that “It is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media” and therefore civilian deaths are wildly undereported in the Body Count. The Iraqi Ministry of the Interior’s estimates were 75 percent higher than Iraq Body Count, while Iraqiyun, an Iraqi NGO, estimated 128,000 deaths between the invasion and July 2005.

Is the study “credible?” The four expert peer reviewers who read the study and commented on it all recommended it be printed with minor changes. The reviewers remarked on the “’powerful strength of the research methods,” in their professional opinions. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology considered the project credible enough to sponsor it. But General Casey and President Bush don’t find it credible just moments after it hit the newsstands.

Maybe you’re in the same camp as Bush, who thinks peer-reviewed epidemiologists don’t have a clue what they’re talking about. Bush’s only statement on a casualty total came in December 2005. “I would say 30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis.” Then-Press Secretary Scott McClellan quickly reminded reporters that this was “not an official government estimate,” but in the October 11 press conference, the President said he “stand[s] by that figure.”

So in one corner we have a President who stands by the 30,000 count. He stands there alone. In the other corner, we have the Assistant Dean of Al Mustansiriya School of Medicine, and Ph.D. holders from Johns Hopkins and the University of London who’ve spent more time in Iraq than anyone in the Cabinet, claiming 655,000.

It is increasingly bizarre to live in a country where people still support the obvious loser in that debate. Why, we wonder, would anyone trust a man so obviously inept and ignorant? Another way to look at the situation might not insist on Bush’s incompetence, but instead on his apathy. Perhaps he does know the numbers, and he just doesn’t care about dead Iraqis. The fact is that a huge numbers of persons are being killed in Iraq by Americans. Media reports disproportionately focus on “sectarian” attacks, but the study found car bombings and other explosions are killing as many people as American air strikes and artillery. The civil war in progress is killing as many Iraqis as are American bombs.

Though the slaughter — not liberation — of Iraq is rapidly becoming a back-page paragraph, we now have more evidence that the population of Iraq is shrinking by our hand. It’s not on the cover of the newspaper, but it’s important to know — Americans have killed more Iraqis in 2006 than in 2005, than in 2004, and than in 2003. Things are worse there for everyone. The point isn’t that all Americans are bad, but that, objectively, America is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths.

At least 75 percent of Iraqis continue to demand that the Occupation of their country by foreign fighters end immediately, and even the commander of all UK forces admitted that the presence of his troops creates targets and stimulates violence. Of course Saddam Hussein was a monster, but America had more choices than letting the monster stay in power and occupying Iraq and killing hundreds of thousands of its people. The President, who either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about Iraqi deaths, doesn’t have a plan. All he’s got is arrogance and callousness. America is run by a war criminal.

Jeff Purcell is a graduate student in Africana Studies. He can be reached at jlp56@cornell.edu. Brutal Honesty appears Mondays.