Unimaginable: 655,000 Dead In Bush's Iraq

Via Wapo, via the antiwar.com blog, via Road To Surfdom.... a new study claims 655,000 Excess Deaths in Iraq

A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.

The estimate, produced by interviewing residents during a random sampling of households throughout the country, is far higher than ones produced by other groups, including Iraq's government.

It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group...

The surveyors said they found a steady increase in mortality since the invasion, with a steeper rise in the last year that appears to reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the news media and civilian groups. In the year ending in June, the team calculated Iraq's mortality rate to be roughly four times what it was the year before the war.

Bush responds:

"I stand by the figure that a lot of innocent people have lost their life... and that troubles me, and it grieves me," Mr Bush told reporters at the White House.

"Six-hundred thousand or whatever they guessed at is just... it's not credible," Mr Bush said.

As some other guy says:

They should’ve done ‘body counts’, because then at least they’d have their own ‘authoritative’ figures with which to counter the unauthorised ones.

Last word from Juan Cole:

I follow the violence in Iraq carefully and daily, and I find the results plausible.