You know, this nattering about a false equivalence in comparative death rates between Iraq and drunk driving fatalities or whatever is rather disingenuous. Really. Let’s look at the numbers, shall we?
The CIA factbook gives the US population in 04 as 293m, and Iraq’s as 25m. Now, suppose we take the lowball civilian death estimate from Iraq Body Count, which is currently about 15k over 21 months, which gives us an annual rate of 8.5k/year, and adjust for the difference in population size. This works out to a rate that would be 100k/year in a population the size of the US. And that’s one of the lowest of the civilian body counts, as it only takes deaths that are confirmed. If we take the figure from the mortality study done by the Lancet of 100k deaths that wouldn’t have occured if death rates had remained at pre-March 03 rates, we get 1.76million/year. Which, I trust everyone will agree, is rather more than 45k/year.