Obviously a late election night impacted the judgment of the Chronicle editors. There is simply no other explanation for this editorial:
In contrast, the number of Iraqi civilians who have died in the past 18 months should be a key barometer for measuring this war’s success. Embedded media and aid groups earlier calculated that somewhere between 10,000 to 30,000 noncombatants have been killed during the Iraq war. This week, however, scholars from Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, and Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad placed the number of deaths much higher. Studying death rates in 32 neighborhoods — not including ultraviolent Fallujah — the researchers extrapolated that 100,000 more Iraqi civilians died in the last 18 months than would have died if the United States had not invaded. Most fell in coalition bomb or rocket strikes. Though the research was duly peer-reviewed before it appeared in the medical journal the Lancet, the authors stress that it is not definitive. The pool surveyed was small, and the study went to press more quickly than do most articles in scientific journals.
Oh come on! That study was so flawed that it was questioned immediately and its methods were shown to be wildly “out there.”
We just had some big goings-on yesterday. Surely there was something else the editors could have written about?
