100,000 Iraqi deaths

This is shocking (from Lean Left).

As many as 100,000 more Iraqi civilians have died in the 18 months since the US-led invasion last year than would have been expected in the period before the war, a study claimed today.

Researchers said the chances of a violent death were 58 times higher after the invasion than before it.

The study, whose results were published today by the respected Lancet medical journal, was based on interviews with Iraqis, most of them doctors. The findings were compared with the pre-war death rate.

I'm somewhat skeptical, since those numbers are several times larger than other estimates. However, the methodology -- interviewing a random cross-section of the population and extrapolating from their responses -- sounds like a solid approach to determing civilian deaths.

If those figures are in the right ballpark, they totally undermine the one moral argument for the Iraqi War: stopping Saddam Hussein's horrible human rights abuses. The anarchy and violence in Iraq have made it even worse than it was before the war. And I don't see Iraq improving for a while, even with Bush out of the White House.