A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

Sure you do. It told us that casualties were over 650,000 and conveniently served to increase the tone and tenor of the critiques and attacks leveled at the American reconstruction effort in Iraq. "The reality-based community" was especially taken with the Lancet survey.

And as with a great many things "the reality-based community" is taken with, the Lancet survey turned out to be disastrously wrong. Key passage:

Officials at Iraq Body Count strongly opposed the Iraq war yet issued a detailed critique of the Lancet II study. Researchers wading into a field that is this fraught with danger have a responsibility not to be reckless with statistics, the group said. The numbers claimed by the Lancet study would, under the normal ratios of warfare, result in more than a million Iraqis wounded seriously enough to require medical treatment, according to this critique. Yet official sources in Iraq have not reported any such phenomenon. An Iraq Body Count analysis showed that the Lancet II numbers would have meant that 1,000 Iraqis were dying every day during the first half of 2006, "with less than a tenth of them being noticed by any public surveillance mechanisms." The February 2006 bombing of the Golden Mosque is widely credited with plunging Iraq into civil war, yet the Lancet II report posits the equivalent of five to 10 bombings of this magnitude in Iraq every day for three years.

"In the light of such extreme and improbable implications," the Iraq Body Count report stated, "a rational alternative conclusion to be considered is that the authors have drawn conclusions from unrepresentative data."

Will we have any response to all of this from "the reality-based community"? Probably not. Once the propaganda point is made and it permeates the public consciousness, our friends on the other side of the ideological divide don't really like to revisit the subject matter of that propaganda. Why mess up a convenient meme, after all?