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Iraq toll now at 1.2 million lives?

Whilst the US, the Brits and Australia a couple of years ago poured scorn on the Lancet's estimate of lives lost in Iraq as a result of the Iraq War, The Guardian todays reports that the toll may now stand at 1.2 million people killed:

"A startling new household survey of Iraqis released last week claims as many as 1.2 million people may have died because of the conflict in Iraq - apparently lending weight to a 2006 survey in the Lancet that reported similarly high levels.

More than one million deaths were already being suggested by anti-war campaigners, but such high counts have consistently been rejected by US and UK officials. The estimates, extrapolated from a sample of 1,461 adults around the country, were collected by a British polling agency, ORB, which asked Iraqis how many people living in their household had died as a result of the violence rather than from natural causes.

Previous estimates, most prominently collected by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, reported in Lancet in October 2006, suggested almost half this number, 654,965, as a likely figure in a possible range of 390,000 to 940,000."

What a thing for George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard to have on their collectives consciences......especially as they so prominently "push" their Christian values.

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