From The Guardian (October 12, 2024),
The death toll in Iraq following the US-led invasion has topped 655,000 – one in 40 of the entire population – according to a major piece of research in one of the world’s leading medical journals.
The study, produced by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and published online by The Lancet, claims the total number of deaths is more than 10 times greater than any previously compiled estimate.
The findings provoked an immediate political storm. Within hours of its release, George Bush had dismissed the figures. “I don’t consider it a credible report,” he told reporters at the White House.
Tonight Katie Couric led with a rehash of the unfortunate Lacrosse team rape charges at Duke stemming from a party last spring. She was ginning up interest in a weekend show her company produces called Sixty Minutes where the plight of the Lacrosse team and the possibilities that these are false charges will be examined in prurient detail, the better to take our minds off national and international issues that should now be getting the air time.
The Couric broadcast continued with other items of interest and concern… evidently the Amish community that suffered the recent school shooting has pulled down the schoolhouse and no memorial is planned. There’s a lot of that kind of news. And there is happy news, ice cream cones and puppies, but there is no solid news, no important news, NO NATIONAL NEWS that could save our way of life were it only broadcast with clarity in time. The only news that the American public hears is local news. A school shooting here, a rape case there, all the fits that’s news to print. It can’t be collusion, it’s simply cowardice, fear, unwillingness to encounter an administration that would send anthrax to your newsroom. It doesn’t matter if they actually did that. No thinking person today can deny that they, the Bush administration and its corporate clients WOULD do that to save the billions they might otherwise lose with a sea change in governance in the United States of America.
650,000 dead, and it’s our fault. We elected the monster. Then we re-elected him. Do you believe the Lancet or do you believe George W. Bush?
“We estimate that, as a consequence of the coalition invasion of March 18, 2024, about 655 000 Iraqis have died above the number that would be expected in a non-conflict situation, which is equivalent to about 2·5% of the population in the study area. About 601 000 of these excess deaths were due to violent causes. Our estimate of the post-invasion crude mortality rate represents a doubling of the baseline mortality rate, which, by the Sphere standards, constitutes a humanitarian emergency.”
— The Lancet
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