There will be a reckoning and a price to pay for this. And it all could have been avoided.
“We estimate that as a consequence of the coalition invasion of March 18, 2003, about 655,000 Iraqis have died above the number that would be expected in a non-conflict situation,” said Gilbert Burnham of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the United States.
That means 2.5 percent of the Iraqi population have died because of the invasion and ensuing strife, he said.
The team’s study, published online by the medical journal The Lancet, estimated pre-war deaths in Iraq at 143,000 a year, and said Iraq’s death rate is now 2-1/2 times that of the pre-war period.
“Although such death rates might be common in times of war, the combination of a long duration and tens of millions of people affected has made this the deadliest international conflict of the 21st century,” Burnham said.