Yet some asshole right wingers still want to pretend this war was a caring
effort to save Iraqi lives. Bush should be on trial right next to Saddam.



Iraqi Death Toll
Exceeds 600,000,
Study Estimates

By NEIL KING JR.
October 11, 2006; Page A4

WASHINGTON -- A new study asserts that roughly 600,000 Iraqis have died from
violence since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, a figure many times
higher than any previous estimate.

The study, to be published Saturday in the British medical journal the
Lancet, was conducted by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
by sending teams of Iraqi doctors across Iraq from May through July. The
findings are sure to draw fire from skeptics and could color the debate over
the war ahead of congressional elections next month.

The Defense Department until 2004 eschewed any effort to compute the number
of Iraqi dead but this summer released a study putting the civilian casualty
rate between May and August at 117 people a day. Other tabulations using
different methodologies put the range of total civilian fatalities so far
from about 50,000 to more than 150,000. President Bush in December said
"30,000, more or less" had died in Iraq during the invasion and in the
violence since.

The Johns Hopkins team conducted its study using a methodology known as
"cluster sampling." That involved randomly picking 47 clusters of households
for a total 1,849 households, scattered across Iraq. Team members
interviewed each household about any deaths in the family during the 40
months since the invasion, as well as in the year before the invasion. The
team says it reviewed death certificates for 92% of all deaths reported.
Based on those figures, it tabulated national mortality rates for various
periods before and after the start of the war. The mortality rate last year
was nearly four times the preinvasion rate, the study found.

"Since March 2003, an additional 2.5% of Iraq's population has died above
what would have occurred without conflict," the report said. The country's
population is roughly 24 million people.

Human Rights Watch has estimated Saddam Hussein's regime killed 250,000 to
290,000 people over 20 years.

The Lancet study, funded largely by the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology's Center for International Studies, said while the percentage of
deaths attributed to the U.S.-led coalition has decreased over the past
year, coalition forces were involved in 31% of all violent deaths since
March 2003. Most of the deaths in Iraq, particularly in the past two years,
have been caused by insurgent, terrorist and sectarian violence.

Overall, the study found 55% of deaths since March 2003 were due to
violence. Of that subset, 56% resulted from gunshots; car bombs and other
explosives accounted for 27%, and airstrikes caused 13%. The rest were due
to other factors.

Paul Bolton, a public-health researcher at Boston University who has
reviewed the study, called the methodology "excellent" and said it was
standard procedure in a wide range of studies he has worked on. "You can't
be sure of the exact number, but you can be quite sure that you are in the
right ballpark," he said.

A similar, smaller study by the same team in 2004 put the number of deaths
at the time at 9,000 to 194,000. That report drew fire for the breadth of
its estimate. In part to offset such criticism, the researchers said they
picked the largest sample possible for this survey, after considering the
high level of danger involved in sending teams door-to-door in Iraq.

The study's lead researchers, Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts of Johns
Hopkins, have done studies in the Congo, Rwanda and other war zones. "This
is a standard methodology that the U.S. government and others have
encouraged groups to use in developing countries," said Mr. Burnham, who
defended the study as "a scientifically extremely strong paper."

This study, "The Human Cost of the War in Iraq," puts civilian fatalities at
426,369 to 793,663 but gives a 95% certainty to the figure of 601,027.

Hamit Dardagan, co-founder of Iraq Body Count, a London-based human-rights
group, called the Lancet study's figures "pretty shockingly high." His group
tabulates the civilian death toll based on media reports augmented by local
hospital and morgue records. His group says it has accumulated reports of as
many as 48,693 civilian deaths caused by the U.S. intervention.

Mr. Burnham said the disparity between his survey and tabulations like Iraq
Body Count are largely because of the heavy media and government focus on
Baghdad and a few other cities. "What our data show is that the level of
violence is going on throughout the country," he said.

Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros, a Defense Department spokesman, said the Pentagon
doesn't comment on reports that haven't been publicly released. Nonetheless,
he said, "the coalition takes enormous precautions to prevent civilian
deaths and injuries," adding that "the Iraqi ministry of health would be in
a better position, with all of its records, to provide more accurate
information on deaths in Iraq."

Since 2004, the Pentagon has collected data on civilian deaths in incidents
where coalition forces were involved. According to its August
civilian-casualty report, those figures show that the daily civilian death
rate has increased nearly sixfold, to almost 120 this summer from about 20
in early 2004. The Lancet study cites the Pentagon's numbers to back its own
findings, saying the mortality-rate increases in both tabulations closely
parallel one another.


http://online.wsj.com/public/articl..._ main_tff_top

"Uncle Bush's Cabin" <headoverheels@tff.com> wrote in
news:452d1090$1_1@x-privat.org:

600K exceeds most estimates of the number of people killed by Hussein.


--
If I were a cactus, I wouldn't need so much water.

"theBZA" <dewey3kNOSPAM@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:Xns9859771188B20dewey3kNOSPAMgmailco@130.133. 1.4...

600k would equal approximately 42 million U.S. lives given the ratio of the
populations.

"grinder" <seagle@earthlink.invalid> wrote in message
news:bp8Xg.5811$Lv3.2488@newsread1.news.pas.earthl ink.net...

U.S. population approx 300 million
Iraq population approx 26 million

ratio 11.5:1

That would be about 6.9 million math boy.

T

grinder wrote:

http://worldfacts.us/Iraq.htm lists Iraq's population as 26,783,383
(July 2006 est.). Since the US Census Bureau has the US at 299,955,357,
that's about an 11.2:1 ratio. That means 600,000 dead in Iraq would
equal 6,720,584 dead in the US. That's more people than live in
Philidelphia or Dallas, the numbers 4 and 5 biggest metropolitan areas
in the US.

Plaidmoon

"theBZA" <dewey3kNOSPAM@gmail.com> wrote


But he would have kept on killing. It's more of a rate problem.

Besides, Saddam was targeting minorities. The current violence is
more random and thus more fair.

--Tedward

Edward M. Kennedy wrote:
I hear ya'. A half mil in 20-odd years versus 650k in 3.

Saddam *was* a minority. He targetted the majority.

Uncle Bush's Cabin wrote:

[a cacophony of warning bells go off, deafening all in earshot]

--
Gary Collard
SABR-L Moderator
gmcollard@yahoo.com
http://sarcastipundit.blogspot.com/

"Bill Clinton and his entire cabinet took the terrorist threat very
seriously, and Sandy Berger’s trousers are stuffed full of documents
to prove it. The poor man has paper cuts on his testicles that will
never heal." -- Lawrence "Liberal Larry" Chomstein

"theBZA" <dewey3k@gmail.com> wrote


Well then, he wasn't as bad as I thought.

--Tedward

Uncle Bush's Cabin wrote:

... and this study is pretty far out of line with others, right?