"BAGHDAD — At least 50,000 Iraqis have died violently since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, according to statistics from the Baghdad morgue, the Iraqi Health Ministry and other agencies — a toll 20,000 higher than previously acknowledged by the Bush administration."

Another stat as to the scale of this:

"The toll, which is mostly of civilians but probably also includes some security forces and insurgents, is daunting: Proportionately, it is equivalent to 570,000 Americans being killed nationwide in the last three years."

Hmmm.  Let's see.  646,000 Americans died in our civil war, I think.  

I'd say Rightwinger, if you keep this up, you might just make the word "Right" mean wrong within a few years.

Overwhelming Response.

Isn't that the mantra of the chickenhawks in government?

I made an error.  I shouldn't have compared the dead in Iraq to the American Civil War dead.  I badly muddled the numbers by taking the population of Iraq multiplied to equal the number of the people in the US, and then took our dead in the Civil War, which was really a population about 1/9 of our current one.

The number of dead in Iraq at 50k is still high given that there are no big armies facing each other, but there is no comparison still to the mortality in the US Civil War.

you beat me to it.

Roughly 2% of the U.S population died in our Civil War.

Two percent of Iraq's population would be about 520,000...over 10 times the 50K figure.

Another way to look at the impact of the U.S. Civil War (at the time in 1865) would be if it happened today, then over 5 million would die to have a similar effect.

That sounds like the body count for an ethnic parade in NYC gone terribly, horribly wrong.

And fer years wasn'tthat pretty much the annual fatality count for traffic deaths in the USA?