If the "Costs of the War" Study Proves Anything, It Is That the Left's Numbers of Iraqi Dead Through the Years Were Highly Inflated

If the findings of a Brown University project are to be believed, the U.S.-led war in Iraq claimed 190,000 lives and will cost the U.S. government at least $2.2 trillion.

Deutsche Presse-Agentur adds that

The total estimate far outstrips the initial projection by President George W. Bush's government that the war would cost $50 billion to $60 billion.

What Pat Reber does not note is that the number of dead — if true — is far inferior to the hysterical numbers made up at one time or another (out of the blue?) by BDS-infected leftists (half a million Iraqis dead, one million, etc).

By 2006, The Lancet's October (2004) surprise of 194,000 Iraqi deaths (Iraqis alone and over only the first year and a half of the conflict) had risen to over 600,000, while a year later, Opinion Research Business came out with a figure more than double that, at over 1.2 million deaths.

Those figures, moreover, had the additional particularity, needless to say, of ignoring the huge numbers of Iraqis who would have continued to die in the killing fields of Saddam Hussein had Bush and Tony Blair not invaded his Ba'asist Iraq.

More than 70 percent of those who died of direct war violence in Iraq were civilians, or an estimated 134,000 people. A small number of the 190,000 dead were U.S. casualties: 4,488 U.S. military members and at least 3,400 U.S. contractors, according to the report.

"The staggering number of deaths in Iraq is hard to fathom, but each of these individuals has to count and be counted," said Catherine Lutz, a professor at Rhode Island-based Brown University who helped lead the study.

"The staggering number of deaths in Iraq"? Indeed. Except that, again, it is far inferior to that professed by the hysterical anti-war activists. Additionally, we still do not know if this lowered figure isn't similarly exaggerated as well: I am not sure to what extent the make-up of the Costs of War report ("released ahead of the 10th anniversary of the war on March 20") is conducive to trust:

The Costs of War project involved 30 economists, anthropologists, lawyers, humanitarian personnel and political scientists from 15 universities, the United Nations and other organizations.

Offhand, that doesn't sound like many conservatives were involved. Although the UN was. Oh, and speaking of which: does the Costs of War study tackle the dollar amounts involved in the UN's food for oil scandal? I thought not…