Proof - if more proof was needed - of the venality of invasion

In one of those bitterly amusing examples of unintentional humor, a subheading on this article read "Very Bad for Iraqi Civilians."

(Reuters, October 28) - Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed in violence since the U.S.-led invasion last year, American public health experts have calculated in a report that estimates there were 100,000 "excess deaths" in 18 months.

The rise in the death rate was mainly due to violence and much of it was caused by U.S. air strikes on towns and cities.

The survey was done by a team of researchers headed by Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. It was published in a report published online by The Lancet, an internationally-respected, peer-reviewed medical journal.

"Excess deaths" are those beyond what demographics and established rates of mortality would predict over a time period. In this case the researchers used a household survey to compare the 14.6 months before the invasion to the 17.8 months following it.

Mortality was already high in Iraq before the war because of United Nations sanctions blocking food and medical imports but the researchers described what they found as shocking. ...

They found that the risk of death from violence in the period after the invasion was 58 times higher than before the war.

One hundred thousand people are dead as the direct result of our illegal, immoral, destructive, murderous, pointless, lying, nation-destroying invasion.

SET THE DAMN DATE AND GET THE FUCKING HELL OUT!