You wanted me to "look it up this time" instead of you.
I find not a single organization or study that claims 1.5M deaths. You're pulling stuff out of your ass.
The Lancet study came up with a 650,000 figure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_Iraq_War_casualties
Debarati Guha-Sapir, director of the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters in Brussels, was quoted in an interview for Nature.com saying that Burnham's team have published "inflated" numbers that "discredit" the process of estimating death counts. "Why are they doing this?" she asks. "It's because of the elections.".[32] However, another interviewer a week later paints a more measured picture of her criticisms: "She has some methodological concerns about the paper, including the use of local people — who might have opposed the occupation — as interviewers. She also points out that the result does not fit with any she has recorded in 15 years of studying conflict zones. Even in Darfur, where armed groups have wiped out whole villages, she says that researchers have not recorded the 500 predominately violent deaths per day that the Johns Hopkins team estimates are occurring in Iraq. But overall Guha-Sapir says the paper contains the best data yet on the mortality rate in Iraq."[33] A subsequent article co-authored by Guha-Sapir and Olivier Degomme for CRED reviews the Lancet data in detail. It concludes that the Lancet overestimated deaths and that the war-related death toll was most likely to be around 125,000 for the period covered by the Lancet study, reaching its conclusions by correcting errors in the 2006 Lancet estimate and triangulating with data from IBC and ILCS.[34]
Beth Osborne Daponte, a demographer known for producing death estimates for the first Gulf War, evaluates the Lancet survey and other sources in a paper for the International Review of the Red Cross.[35] Among other criticisms, Daponte questions the reliability of pre-war estimates used in the Lancet study to derive its "excess deaths" estimate, and the ethical approval for the survey. She concludes that the most reliable information available to date is provided by the Iraq Family Health Survey, the Iraq Living Conditions Survey and Iraq Body Count.
Mark van der Lann, professor of biostatistics and statistics at UC Berkeley, disputes the estimates of both Lancet studies on several grounds in a paper co-authored with writer Leon de Winter.[36] The authors argue that the confidence intervals in the Lancet study are too narrow, saying, "our statistical analysis could at most conclude that the total number of violent deaths is more than 100.000 with a 0.95 confidence — but this takes not into account various other potential biases in the original data." Among the main conclusions of their evaluation are that "the estimates based upon these data are extremely unreliable and cannot stand a decent scientific evaluation. It may be that the number of violent deaths is much higher than previously reported, but this specific report, just like the October 2004 report, cannot support the estimates that have been flying around the world on October 29, 2006. It is not science. It is propaganda."
Borzou Daragahi Iraq correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, in an interview with PBS, questioned the study based on their earlier research in Iraq, saying, "Well, we think—the Los Angeles Times thinks these numbers are too large, depending on the extensive research we've done. Earlier this year, around June, the report was published at least in June, but the reporting was done over weeks earlier. We went to morgues, cemeteries, hospitals, health officials, and we gathered as many statistics as we could on the actual dead bodies, and the number we came up with around June was about at least 50,000. And that kind of jibed with some of the news report that were out there, the accumulation of news reports, in terms of the numbers killed. The U.N. says that there's about 3,000 a month being killed; that also fits in with our numbers and with morgue numbers. This number of 600,000 or more killed since the beginning of the war, it's way off our charts."[40][41]
&c
