Iraq war dead: 655,000

Washington Post - October 11, 2006

Study Claims Iraq's 'Excess' Death Toll Has Reached 655,000
By David Brown

A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.

The estimate, produced by interviewing residents during a random sampling of households throughout the country, is far higher than ones produced by other groups, including Iraq's government.

It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group.

The surveyors said they found a steady increase in mortality since the invasion, with a steeper rise in the last year that appears to reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the news media and civilian groups. In the year ending in June, the team calculated Iraq's mortality rate to be roughly four times what it was the year before the war.

Of the total 655,000 estimated "excess deaths," 601,000 resulted from violence and the rest from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 unexpected violent deaths per day throughout the country.

The survey was done by Iraqi physicians and overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. The findings are being published online today by the British medical journal the Lancet.

The most disgusting thing about this study is that the war's supporters will not be willing to acknowledge its findings. It will be a biased study or it will include too many deaths caused by insurgents or it will be something that Saddam brought on them: none of it will be admitted as our responsiblity in anything but the most glowing of terms. On the other hand, even the senators and congresspeople who claim we need to get out are disingenous since we've already built one of our largest bases on the planet there. No, the 655,000 will be many times that when we are done with Iraq. And I don't think they'll be a whole lot better off. Maybe the fairies of freedom and democracy are just standing by to sprinkle their magic dust and make it all better.

On the other hand, the economic policies we're imposing alongside the military campiagn will likely gut whatever domestic middle class there was and this will leave little social buffer between a new, repressive central regime (likely of Islamicist bent) and rest of the coutnry, newly terrorized into submission. In other words, we'll have definitely created regime change, but not in the direction the moronic neo-cons throught we would. I have plenty of bad things to say about people who feel there are clearly defined, definite paths to economic and political development, but I'm beginning to think that people who think it just happens spontaneously are even more dangerous--particularly when they are handed the joystick of a hegemon and given free reign.

Infuriating and sad.