654,000 stuffs happen

By Marty Kaplan

"Since the Iraq invasion, 654,000 more Iraqis have died because of it than would have died in a comparable period before it, according to a new Johns Hopkins University study just published on the online site of the respected British medical journal, The Lancet.

"The Bush Administration pegs the number around 30,000. Percentages can't do justice to that discrepancy.

"The Johns Hopkins findings will no doubt be roundly attacked, but they can't be blamed on mischief by George Soros or the liberal media. And even if you think the number should be a tad lower -- say, half-a-million civilian casualties -- it's hard to dismiss it, as Rummy did with the initial post-invasion looting and violence, as the bad stuff that happens to good liberators.

"Half-a-million is the kind of shocking casualty toll we might have anticipated from one of Saddam's WMDs being sold to al-Qaeda and being unleashed on an American city.

"Half-a-mlllion dead from violence is what you might expect from a campaign of genocide, ethnic cleansing, a horrible civil war.

"The one thing it's not is acceptable collateral damage from a humanitarian effort to liberate a people from a dictator ..."
Huffington Post

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The Lancet study in PDF format

Tagged: iraq, war, war+crimes, war+on+terror, usa, bush, rumsfeld