A commentary worth watching

Very articulate defense of our country. Anymore, to my mind, to support this administration is to be anti-American.

Lancet article sets Iraqi deaths at 600k plus ...

More than 650,000 people have been killed since the start of the war in Iraq, new research has claimed.

The figure, published in the respected medical journal The Lancet, is far higher than previous estimates.

From ITV News and the chart is from actual Lancet article.

I woke this morning to a press conference with the U.S. president where he said he had heard of the report and it's methodology had been disproven and the US military and the Iraqi "government" don't think the survey is "credible". This lead me to do a little research including actually reading the report. This is a pdf. Then I heard an interview of Dr. Gilbert Burnham the lead author of the article. He systematically discussed the techniques that they used in putting the report together, emphasing the "off the shelf" techniques of standard epidemiology that were used. There were some doubts about an earlier report in 2004 since the windowing levels used were too broad for (mostly conservative) critics.

The bottom line is that this seems to be a legitimate estimate and the most asstounding part of it is that it is an order of magnitude higher than any I had read before. I had always depended on the excelent site Iraqi body count which tracks verifiable news accounts. They currently set the total at a minimum of 43,850 which is certainly awful, but no where near this much more horrifying figure. It is bordering on genocide at this point. To me, it is tangible proof of the misguided and, to my estimation, criminal policies of the Bush administration.

I recently heard an amazing analysis of the situation in Baghdad. The commentator George Packer the author of "The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq " made an interesting point. What would, say, San Francisco be like if the federal and state government officials were rounded up after a massive routine of "shock and awe" bombing. All of the prisons were opened up and when looting insued only the oil refineries and banks were protected. The water system and electricity systems are destroyed and all the major bridges and traffic arteries are destroyed or have series of "checkpoints" along them. Then systematically over the next three years, any progress towards a civil government was thwarted by an invading army or let's say "scientologists" or fill in whatever unlikely religion you might imagine. They are benevolent and "tolerate" your backward religion, but also patrol the streets looking for the "insurgents" that are working to get them to leave the San Francisco area and let them have self determination. Imagine a population the size of the Bay Area with no tangible civic government with an occupying army like this, with all the "reconstruction" effort riddled with graft and inefficiency because of the ongoing resistance and generally augmented un-policied criminal population. After 3 years, it is pretty clear what state any community would be in under this sort of pressure.

The repeated invocation of Christianity in this context is sickening to me. I pray for these poor people and hope that we will not have to suffer for what these dubiously elected criminals have done to their poor country.