What's in a number?

What does absolute uncertainty look like? Does it have a shadowy shape, a doubtful smell, a quizzical voice... or perhaps a perplexing number?

Anybody following this week's release of the second Lancet report on Iraqi deaths will know that uncertainty, in fact, has two shadowy and perplexing numbers.

The first is 48,693, the second 943,000. And both represent the same thing!

After shocking the world in 2004 with their estimate of 100,000 Iraqi deaths since the 2003 invasion, a team of Johns Hopkins researchers and statisticians returned to Iraq to widen and update their study. Their findings paint an image of Iraq steeped in an unprecedented level of blood. Over 650,000 civilians have died in Iraq as a result of the violence and circumstances of war, while the study still allows for a possible toll of nearly a million deaths – 943,000 (the minimum, they suggest, hovers about 400,000).

In this post-communist world, the spirit of enterprising competition rules over all fields, and even body counts must market themselves against one another. The Lancet report's chief competitor, Iraq Body Count (IBC), has remained the body count of record since its inception in 2003, referred to by journalists, policy-wonks and even politicians. Though IBC initially emerged out of the peace movement – to counter US general Tom Franks' curt admission that "we don't do body counts" – its estimate of the maximum number of civilian deaths of 48,693 (as of 12/10/06) has been described as "conservative" even by right-wing US daily The Washington Times.

The fresh Lancet report will add new fuel to the claims of IBC's left-wing critics, who allege that the body count has fallen into the service of the establishment and ceased to reveal anything meaningful about the situation in Iraq. Such criticism – however acerbic and strident – is difficult to refute when even the right-wing doubtfully diagnoses IBC's estimate as "too low". IBC came to fruition in a time when much of the US (and the world) had yet to think seriously about the civilian consequences of the invasion. Times have changed, and perhaps IBC has outlived its moment.

But what to do with these vastly, dastardly different numbers: 48,693 and 943,000?

Some would safely say the truth lies somewhere in between. But it is not. If anything, these figures (and the gulf between them) are a measure of how abstract the Iraq war has become to its outside viewers. Media coverage of ongoing violence in Baghdad has lost all shape, dissolved into the same images: the distant pans from the roofs of the Green Zone, the smoking car, the shattered mosque, raging mobs, crying mothers, children playing football amidst rubble. With journalism a nearly impossible profession in Iraq, real, deep perspectives are scarce for interested observers. The battle of the numbers has much more to do with how outsiders struggle to impose meaning on events in Iraq than Iraq itself. Such numbers and statistics are but the bones of a fleshless corpse.