zabbo

Tom Kean, chair of the 9/11 Comission, was on NBC News’ Meet The Press this weekend. While trying to make the case for substantial reform of the US intelligence services he compared the body count of the attacks of 9/11 and the war in Iraq. An excerpt from the transcript:

… When we say we want to reform intelligence and change it fundamentally, making this restructuring of government one of the largest in history, we think that’s pretty major. We have to remember that we know we’ve got this problem with the military. But more people died on September 11, double the number that have died so far in Iraq. I mean, we are facing very serious problems on the home front here, …

Presumably he meant to compare US and coalition casualties of the Iraq war so far (roughly 1400) to the number of people killed in the attacks on 9/11 across all nationalities (roughly 3000). Ignoring what conclusions one could possibly draw from that comparison, his startlingly poor choice of words imply that Iraqi casualties don’t count. Mr. Russert should have called him on it.

While googling around for well-grounded counts of human casualties of the Iraq war, regardless of nationality, I ran across an interesting piece in The Economist on statistical methods of estimating Iraqi casualties that I missed in the print edition.