JUST IN CASE you were worried that not enough supposedly neutral institutions and publications were gunning for George W. Bush, part of the international public health establishment just risked its reputation to join the fight. On Friday, the New York Times reported a new study in the British medical magazine Lancet claiming the U.S.-led invasion caused 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths, a civilian mortality rate more than double that of the 14 months before troops went in. The subtext is clear: the overthrow of Saddam Hussein hasn’t made life safer even for Iraqis. The Lancet‘s editors were even clearer: they “fast-tracked” the article for publication because they thought it ought to affect judgments about “the governments . . . responsible for launching a pre-emptive war,” including, presumably, governments up for reelection five days after the study’s release. And the Times wasn’t exactly bashful either. They authoritatively state that the “study is scientific” and don’t quote a single expert skeptical of the finding.

Nor does the politics seem to stop at the article’s edge. There are at least three major reasons to be skeptical of the study’s findings. Here’s how the study worked. A team headed by a public health professor at Johns Hopkins asked a small sample of Iraqis about deaths in their households, and then extrapolated a national mortality rate from there. The first grounds for skepticism is a very unpersuasive methodology. Slate‘s Fred Kaplan points out that the study’s method only supports a 95 percent confidence in the conclusion that the war caused somewhere between 8,000 and 194,000 deaths, an extremely wide range. In other words, even taken at face value, the study says that the mortality rate may have gone up quite a bit but also may hardly have risen at all, or may have landed anywhere in between. But the study doesn’t explain this, its authors haven’t highlighted it in press statements, and the Times never mentions it at all. Now, conditions in Iraq probably permitted at most a very small sample, which compromises the validity of findings. But researchers know that going in, and this team chose to press ahead anyway with a study whose results would almost inevitably be so imprecise as to practically invite being overblown and overhyped.