Death toll in Iraq is shocking, staggering

Re “Study Puts War’s Iraqi Death Tally at More Than 600,000,” Oct. 11

I read with shock your report on the new Lancet study finding of more than 600,000 deaths since the Iraq invasion, and it motivated me to review the complete study. This was a scientific, peer-reviewed epidemiological study published in one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals. The authors followed the same methodology that has been used to provide unchallenged estimates of deaths in other conflicts, such as the Congo.

It is puzzling, therefore, that the writer reports unsubstantiated challenges to the methodology. That President Bush and the purveyors of the Iraq war strive to provide a spin that denies the extent of civilian casualties is not surprising, but it has no bearing on the study’s scientific validity. That the findings are inconvenient for Bush does not make them inaccurate. The administration has famously stated that it doesn’t count civilian casualties.

Bush acknowledged that Iraq had nothing to do with the events of 9/11; we also must acknowledge that not one of the more than 600,000 people who have been killed in Iraq had anything to do with the 9/11 events.

The scale of needless suffering the U.S. invasion has brought on the people of Iraq defies the imagination. Is it any surprise that the vast majority of the Iraqi people want us to leave?

CURREN WARF MD

Board Member

Physicians for Social Responsibility

Los Angeles

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A new study estimates that more than 600,000 Iraqis have died since 2003 because of the war. The estimate may be high, but it is a staggering number. For comparison, the bloodiest war in U.S. history was the Civil War, in which there were an estimated 620,000 dead and missing. Is it time to label this conflict the Iraq Civil War?

SCOTT RYCHNOVSKY

Irvine