IRAQI DEATH TOLL EXCEEDS 600,000

Today's Wall Street Journal brings more horrendous news from the iniquitous Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, but unfortunately the Journal's article is only available online to subscribers: a new study by Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health says that roughly 600,000 Iraqis have died since the beginning of the Iraq war.(Left, "The Dance of Death," Hans Holbein the Younger, 1493)

Says the Journal: "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 Journal quotes 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.

The study, called "The Human Costs of War," was published in The Lancet, the  distinguished British medical journal. You will recall the U.S. media's near-blackout on the last Lancet-published study by Johns Hopkins and Columbia University researchers which last year (see my DIRELAND post at that time, "Why U.S. Media Dismissed the Lancet Study of 100,000 Iraqi Civilian Dead." ) It will be interesting to see whether other major U.S. media will follow the Journal's lead this time, now that the tide of public opinion has turned against the Iraq war, and give this important study of the consequences of the U.S. invasion the prominent attention that it deserves. (Today's Washington Post buried their story on page 12.)

This new study is by the same team that produced last year's blacked-out estimates, and now  puts civilian fatalities at 426,369 to 793,663 but gives a 95% certainty to the figure of 601,027 total dead, the Journal reports. And so the old question remains: do you think was it worth it? Readers of this blog know my answer.

Meanwhile, the U.S. will maintain at least its current level of troops in Iraq until 2010, said the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, General Peter Schoomaker, today. "I have to have enough ammo in the magazine that I can continue to shoot as long as they want us to shoot," the Associated Press quoted Gen. Schoomaker as saying when he made the announcement. Which means the number of Iraqi dead since this war began will continue to grow.