Many experts and expert groups from a range of fields are attempting to combine their knowledge to understand the lethality to Iraqis of the invasion and post-invasion violence in Iraq.
This is a slightly abridged and amended version of an invited "meta-analysis" of IBC's potential contribution to that understanding, presented in a closed meeting of the Ad Hoc Expert Group on mortality estimates for Iraq, convened by WHO in Geneva, May 2007.
Concluding remarks
The accumulated work of IBC to date indicates some of the work that can now be done with media reports. But clearly, this is only a start.
With more resources and the development of new analytic techniques and processes, much more can be extracted from the existing data than has to date.
The sheer number of media reports, and the richness of the data they contain, is such that they cry out to be fully integrated with data from other sources.
Indeed, it would be the height of irresponsibility to pass over this data because not only is it, for the most part, irrefutable, but many people, most of them Iraqis, have lost their lives gathering it.