Civilian Deaths in Iraq.

Something a little odd seems to be happening and I, for one, would like an explanation. Via Blithering Bunny I see a report in The Times:

THE invasion of Iraq and its aftermath caused the deaths of 24,000 Iraqis, including many children, according to the most detailed survey yet of postwar life in the country.

This is from a United Nations report which can be found in full here. This does seem to jar a little, be a touch at odds, with the Lancet report from last autumn. I’m aware that I made a complete mess of analysing that report (my article is here, my apologia here,) and I’m also aware that some (many?) would argue that whether 24,000 died or 100,000 did is irrelevant, there being no number of deaths that make the enterprise "worth it".

What occasions my surprise is that the report seems to be getting no airplay, certainly nothing like the attention that The Lancet report did. The two people who showed how wrong I was, Tim Lambert and Daniel Davies of Crooked Timber, seem not to have noticed the new report, certainly have not commented upon it. The title of the report is "Iraq Living Conditions Survey 2004" and a technorati search shows, as at noon BST Saturday, no mention of it (although that could be due to my own failures in searching). A Google News search gives 53 matches, very few of which are actually to do with the report. A standard Google search shows some comments upon the report but  not that many and certainly nothing like The Lancet report had two days after its publication.

Now no, I don’t want to get all conspirazoid here, it may well be that the lack of MSM coverage means that people are unaware of the report as yet. Perhaps it will all happen next week as people find out about it. I do hope it will, for I would like to see the critiques of the methodology, the analysis, the hive mind of blogs  chewing over this information and aiding me in understanding what has been said. From memory, the Lancet report had a 95% confidence interval of 8,000 to 198,000 deaths caused by the invasion. The Times reports the UNDP as stating:

The 370-page report said that it was 95 per cent confident that the toll during the war and the first year of occupation was 24,000, but could have been between 18,000 and 29,000. About 12 per cent of those were under 18.

Well, who’s right?   Is this new report an addition to the sum of human knowledge? Should we regard The Lancet report as a valid but unfortunately flawed first attempt at an answer? (After all, the new numbers are within the old confidence interval.) Is there something about different time spans that makes both of them correct?

Maybe it’s just me, maybe I’m way off base or something, actually wanting attention paid to this new report, perhaps the same amount of attention as was paid to the one that came out just before a US Presidential election. It would, of course, be way way to cynical to think that that might actually be the reason why there is not, as yet, such attention being paid.

Update: Welcome Instapudit readers. Do have a look around. It’s also worth mentioning that after I put this up and asked Tim Lambert if he had any comments yes, indeed he does. Worth reading as he claims the new report simply shows The Lancet was correct....for they only said that 33,000 had died in "war related deaths", something a little different from the 100,000 number generally thrown around (the others coming from disease, violence and accidents). Still no breakdown of how many of those deaths were in fact of troops and insurgents though.
Tim Blair also noted the same study (from the same blog I did, Blithering Bunny).
Update II. Shannon Love has further thoughts.  John Quiggin seems to have misread what I wrote above.