The price people pay for a 'safer world'

"A single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic." - Joseph Stalin

Seems we're not far off the point where those whom have died as a consequence of the US, opps I mean Coalition of the Willing's pre-emptive invasion of Iraq will just be a statistic.

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.

Washington Post

Lancet

Still no update to River's blog, a palce I used to visit monthly, now I fo=ind myself checking twice a day... I can't help myself. I am a worrier and I miss her insights on a situation I hope I never have the misfortune to experience myself, or anyone else for that matter.

Some, like myself, still contend this invasion was never warranted, never needed and has done nothing but enlarge certain key peoples and companies wealth.

Its all just so bloody wrong and as time goes by the chances for any solution to Iraqs toubles seems more and more remote.

RIP, all those who have needlessly lost their lives in this folly and for what?