My God!!

I can't even crack wise with a line about "commas" about this. This is sickening, this is madness, this is to our everlasting shame:

BAGHDAD, Oct. 10 — A team of American and Iraqi public health researchers has estimated that 600,000 civilians have died [Ed: AP says 655,000] in violence across Iraq since the 2003 American invasion, the highest estimate ever for the toll of the war here...

...But it is an estimate and not a precise count, and researchers acknowledged a margin of error that ranged from 426,369 to 793,663 deaths.

It is the second study by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. It uses samples of casualties from Iraqi households to extrapolate an overall figure of 601,027 Iraqis dead from violence between March 2003 and July 2006.

The findings of the previous study, published in The Lancet, a British medical journal, in 2004, had been criticized as high, in part because of its relatively narrow sampling of about 1,000 families, and because it carried a large margin of error.

The new study is more representative, its researchers said, and the sampling is broader: it surveyed 1,849 Iraqi families in 47 different neighborhoods across Iraq. The selection of geographical areas in 18 regions across Iraq was based on population size, not on the level of violence, they said.

The study comes at a sensitive time for the Iraqi government, which is under pressure from American officials to take action against militias driving the sectarian killings.

In the last week of September, the government barred the central morgue in Baghdad and the Health Ministry — the two main sources of information for civilian deaths — from releasing figures to the news media. Now, only the government is allowed to release figures. It has not provided statistics for September, though a spokesman said Tuesday that it would...

...The study uses a method similar to that employed in estimates of casualty figures in other conflict areas like Darfur and Congo. It sought to measure the number of deaths that occurred as a result of the war.

It argues that absolute numbers of dead, like morgue figures, could not give a full picture of the “burden of conflict on an entire population,” because they were often incomplete.

The mortality rate before the American invasion was about 5.5 people per 1,000 per year, the study found. That rate rose to 19.8 deaths per 1,000 people in the year ending in June.

Gunshots were the largest cause of death, the study said, at 56 percent of all violent deaths, while car bombs accounted for about 13 percent. Deaths caused by the American military declined as an overall percentage from March 2003 to June 2006.

The debate over the term "civil war" now takes on a special level of irony.

The number of killed in the American Civil War from 1861 to 1865 (a few months short of 4 years) 600,000 to 630,000.

Population of Iraq, about 27 million.

Population of the United States in the 1860s? A little over 30 million.

This study is going to be hard to swallow and will be marginalized -- in fact, it is marginalized quickly by Anthony Cordesman, who likely didn't actually read the methodology and had the off hand reaction many will have in this country, disbelief.

We don't want to believe we've unleashed this monster. We'll believe the statistics when they tally up Darfur or some other slaughter we are not involved in, but not when we have responsibility.

Juan Cole has much more on this.