Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Iraqi death rates 60% of American civil war casualties

Iraq has about 26 million inhabitants. During the US civil war we had about 33 million inhabitants, of whom about 1 million died.
Iraqi Dead May Total 600,000, Study Says - New York Times:

... A team of American and Iraqi public health researchers has estimated that 600,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003 American invasion, the highest estimate ever for the toll of the war here.

The figure breaks down to about 15,000 violent deaths a month, a number that is quadruple the one for July given by Iraqi government hospitals and the morgue in Baghdad and published last month in a United Nations report in Iraq. That month was the highest for Iraqi civilian deaths since the American invasion.

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...
If we adjusted the Iraqi toll to our population of 300 million, the conflict would claim 6 million Americans lives. Would we call that a civil war? The "conflict" in Iraq is now up to about 60% of the death total of a war that most of would consider "civil".

We usually consider the American civil war to have been a massive bloodbath that still affects us. I don't think future generations of Iraqis will look very kindly upon George Bush or the nation that elected him.

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