The Hanover Collaboration

Joe brought up the body count number game again. I get sincerely angry when people pooh pooh the civilian deaths.

What Lancet actually found was that 98,000 Iraqis had died since Operation Iraqi Freedom began. In a country of 25 million, that isn’t hard to believe. The 98,000 includes asthma, cancer, accidents, car crashes, heart attacks, old age, suicide… The 98,000 includes everything.

The average Iraqi lives to be how old? We’ll leave that as an exercize.

Even if we use the 21,000 number (the sum of the deaths reported by news agencies) that alone makes violent death due exclusively to the {insurection, rebellion, terrorism, Americans} a worse risk than every other way of getting killed in Iraq. Even if this were instead of ordinary murders, which certainly aren’t decreasing, it would be an enormous increase over pre-war Iraq. And yes, it would also be an increase over the state of California.

I know that you can handle the math.