Oops!

A new study on mortality in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, has been published in The Lancet, available as a pdf file from here.

The authors conclude that “as of July, 2006, there have been 654,965 (392,979–942,636) excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war”.

Of course, these findings have been hotly debated since the study was first reported earlier today (AEST), for example here and here.

One wonders if the Coalition of the Willing leadership now regrets having made the decision not to “do body counts” of civilian losses from this war. It might have helped them to have had their own ‘authoritative’ figure with which to counter such unauthorised ones.