655,000 Iraqis have died as a result of war

How is this not the only thing we are talking about? Is this for real? Before this article, I have been sitting on the fence about leaving Iraq. I thought the war was a stupid idea, but now that we were in there we had to clean up the mess. But now I just think we need to do stop doing harm. This is one of the most awful numbers I have ever heard.

Its bad enough that the casualty numbers are not comparable to Vietnam becauase modern medicine saves so many soldiers that people's perspective on how much damage is actually happening is completely eschew. This will go down as the most horrible egotistic war that America ever prosecuted.

Article in war rooms on salon.com

George W. Bush made news last year when he said that 30,000 Iraqis -- "more or less" -- have died as a result of the U.S. war and ongoing violence in Iraq.

Try "more."

A study conducted by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and published in the British medical journal the Lancet concludes that 655,000 more Iraqis have died since March 2003 than would have died if the United States had not invaded their country. The researchers, working with funding from MIT's Center for International Studies, say that about 600,000 of these deaths were the result of violence. The remaining 55,000 were the result of disease or other nonviolent causes.

How large a number is 655,000? It's equal to about 2.5 percent of Iraq's total population. If 2.5 percent of Americans were killed in a war here, the death toll would be an unimaginable 7.4 million.