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Water flows down hill no matter who pours it.

It is significant that the Lancet Study is not challenged,only who funded it.
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To that end, he has proved himself as ruthless and conniving as any international criminal who threatens the security of the United States.

exaggerate much?

Michael, what do you think of this post by Juan Cole?

A new World Health Organization study estimates the excess numbers of civilians killed in violence in Iraq from April 2003 through June 2006 at between 101,000 and 224,000. They settled on 151,000 or so as the most likely number. This number is an estimate of how many people died of violence beyond what you would have expected from the 2001-2002 baseline. Violent deaths increased 17 times over once the Bush administration invaded the country. As I read the AP article, the study actually found more like 302,000 excess deaths, but only attributed 151,000 to violence. It seems to me possible that some of the other 151,000 excess deaths could also be chalked up to the US invasion and the reaction to it, even if they are not violent. There have been disease outbreaks, shortages of medicine, poor medical care, displacement of populations to tent cities with poor sanitation, and difficulties in traveling to distant hospitals. Bears looking into.
[...]
One of the arguments warmongers gave for overthrowing Saddam Hussein was that his regime was responsible for the violent deaths of some 300,000 civilians between 1968 and 2003. That estimate now appears exaggerated, since the number of bodies in mass graves has not borne it out. But what is tragic is that in 4 1/2 short years, a foreign military occupation has unleashed killing on a scale achieved by the murderous Saddam Hussein regime only over decades. Bush did not kill all those people directly, of course, but he did indirectly cause them to be killed, since these are excess deaths beyond what you would have expected if there had been no invasion and occupation.

I am often struck by how clueless the American public is to the vast destruction we have wrought on Iraq and its people, directly or indirectly. It strikes me as a bitter joke that 4 million are displaced, often facing hunger and disease, and the rightwing periodicals and presidential candidates are talking about how the "surge" has "turned things around." For whom? How many orphans have we created? How many widows? How many people who weep and cry every night while trying to fall asleep on straw mats? I estimate on the basis of a UN study of refugees in Syria that as many as 600,000 or 700,000 Baghdadis were ethnically cleansed from the capital under the nose of the American troops implementing the surge. There is an old Chinese proverb, "Children throw stones at frogs in jest, but the frogs die in earnest."

The funding of the study should have been disclosed. And the fact that Soros funded the study certainly calls into question its veracity. But the fact that he funded the study does not automatically mean the study is bunk either.

Unfortunately, this is not outside the norm in the academic world. There are numerous cases of studies comissionied by partisan groups to espouse viewpoints on global warming, the effects of drugs, pesticides, etc. Usually these partisans hide behind various front-companies so they don’t appear to have a direct hand in the funding.

The Soros funding does raise some suspicions, but he wasn’t in Baghdada doing interviews. The major academic Lancet critics, Kane and Spagat, are also guilty of bias, with Kane to a lesser degree.

Spagat made the criticism personal when the L2 data wasn’t made available to him. The methodology is sound, but relatively new and untested, and this comes from Spagat’s own university department and website.
http://www.rhul.ac.uk/economics/Research/conflict-analysis/iraq-mortality/Methods.html

The WHO/EPI methodology is a rather new and experimental approach to measuring conflict mortality. The properties of this scheme are not very well understood as of yet and further research will be very welcome. For example, it would be very useful to see pairs of studies covering the same conflict but with different numbers of clusters. Meanwhile the researchers on the Congo and Darfur studies have been sensible to be cautious and to try to keep their sample sizes large.

Kane’s weblog devoted exclusively to the Lancet study is here:
http://lancetiraq.blogspot.com/2007/04/data.html
Kane’s arguments are sound, but his association to the TCS website also shows a bias. The two real questions about methodology are discussed here(It’s a start).
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/2006/10/lancet_iraq_survey_methodology_under_fire.html

Drat. Something went awry with the above post. It’s still legible I hope.

"I think that Juan Cole is a propagandist and that whatever he says has to be taken with a huge grain of salt."

The same goes for some of his critics and some of these "experts" that have went after the study.
 
"Add that knowledge to the fact that Soros funded it and suddenly it appears that the study was a piece of propaganda, to be ignored by all of us"
 
You wish.