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There have been many posts that challenge the study published in Lancet.  The stated goal of the study was to measure “excess” deaths from any cause whatsoever, but there is no way to determine what would have happened if the US had refrained from invading Iraq.  There are also other problems with the study that I have documented on my own web site.

To keep things simple, please note that the Iraqi press identifies events involving a dozen deaths as significant.  Perhaps there are 5 or 10 deaths for each death noted in the press.  I deliberately choose a high number.  Let us say there are 100 Iraqi deaths due to war related violence every day.  That would be 36,500 per year, at most 100,000 since the war began.  This is not good, but it is a much more reasonable number than 500,000. 

There is also no reason to blame all these deaths on American malfeasance.  When Saddam released all the criminals from jail, he became responsible for many of these deaths.  When Syria allows suicide bombers to cross its borders, it becomes responsible for some of these deaths.

The first war lasted 100 hours and over 200,000 people were killed. Somehow that makes your 100 deaths/day seem a little low…

A lot of the people that Saddam realeased, are the same people were are saying were unlawfully held.

Regardless, these stats would be non-existant if we had never invaded Iraq, so as far as I am concerned, any death there is somewhat due to the US invasion.

Who knows really? However, I think that this IBC website needs to be set straight, since they don’t know either.