No Right Turn: At least they're dying free
A study published in The Lancet claims that the US invasion of Iraq has led to one hundred thousand extra deaths.
Scientists from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the US city of Baltimore gathered data on births and deaths since January 2002 from 33 clusters of 30 households each across Iraq.
They found the relative risk of death was one-and-a-half times higher for Iraqi civilians after the 2003 invasion than in the preceding 15 months.
That figure jumps to two-and-a-half times higher if data from Falluja - the scene of repeated heavy fighting - is included.
Before the invasion, most people died as a result of heart attack, stroke and chronic illness, the report says, whereas after the invasion, "violence was the primary cause of death."
Women and children are reportedly the biggest casualties of air strikes
One hundred thousand extra dead. And note that this is on top of the already terrible death toll wreaked by sanctions. This makes a mockery of claims that the Iraq war was "worth it" and that Iraqis are better off today than they were under Saddam.
The US excuse will no doubt be a flippant comment that at least they're dying free. I'm sure that that will be a great comfort to the grieving families of the deceased.
Update: More here. The BBC article has downplayed the involvement of local Iraqi doctors. And in response to the expected post from NZPundit claiming that the article "isn't peer-reviewed" and that the author is a communist or similar undesirable: The Lancet is one of the most respected journals in the world. Any article published there has met high academic standards. While there's no doubt some of the authors had an axe to grind - they deliberately timed publication in the hope of influencing the US election - it does not follow from that that the study is flawed. In fact,
(Emphasis added). Note that the 100,000 additional deaths excludes data from the obvious hotspot of Fallujah.
The full article should be going up sometime today or tomorrow.