In November of 2006, Peacework listed as a resource [1] the article in the prestigious medical journal, Lancet, which concluded that between 392,000 and 942,000 "excess deaths" ensued after the US invasion of Iraq from 2003-2006.

This is the most likely source of the claim, which many protesters have been making recently, but which I as an editor have sought to avoid making (because of lack of documentation and because of concerns about methodology), that the US invasion of Iraq has resulted in over a million Iraqi deaths. The reality of what we're protesting is awful enough. It only hurts our cause to use figures on the high end of the estimates which can then too easily be dismissed and used to change the subject towards research methodologies instead of focusing on the need to pull US troops out now.

The World Health Organization's recent study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Violence-Related Mortality in Iraq from 2002 to 2006 [2]  with a sample size much larger than the study printed in the Lancet, underscores the humanitarian disaster in Iraq, and concludes a better estimate of the deadly carnage post invasion is around 150,000 (between the range of 104,000-220,000).

There's a useful article published on Open Democracy by Michel Thieren about this issue, Deaths in Iraq: the numbers game, revisited [3], which I recommend to anyone who wants more information and analysis of these studies.

Two caveats: although Thieren claims the opposite, I've never seen even the much lower Iraq Body Count [4] numbers acknowledged by pro-Iraq War advocates. Second, the Iraq Body Count isn't trying to be an epidemiological study of "excess violent death," and we shouldn't really compare the epidemiogically-derived estimates with it. The Iraq Body Count seeks to document a baseline aggregate of multiply verified credible journalistic accounts of violent war-related deaths, a much different,  while quite valuable, endeavor.

We will inevitably fail at comprehending the incalculable costs of war, the physical, economic [5], political, emotional, and social toll which wars exact on the people of all nations involved. Yesterday, the New York Times attempted to estimate one such cost, a front page article, Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles [6], the first of a series on 121 US veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have been charged with murder since returning. (Yet, at least in this first article, the reporters failed to examine the military's culture of violent masculinity as a factor contributing to these alleged acts of violence by 120 men and 1 woman). The challenge is to mourn, rage, protest, resist, and seek to end each and every violent death, one by one by one by one [7]. Each loss is a tragedy for the person's family -- and the human family. Each death is a crime, because war itself is a crime. Whatever the casualty rate, it is our responsibility to resist these wars [8] by acting to bring US troops home, and exposing the realities of war to counter military recruiting, so we can begin to try to reverse the cycles of violence.