Iraq Body Count

Recent media reports quoting the newly sanctioned "bureau of statistics" Iraqi Body Count (IBC) reiterated its claims that 25,881 civilians have been killed in Iraq since April 2003.

Here are some basic calculations:

• IBC have claimed in the past that the 1,200 civilians who died in Afghanistan were in fact 3,800 civilians.
• Considering a standard IBC exaggeration error of 216% (based on the Afghanistan statistic), the Iraqi death count should be scaled back to 8,173.
• Since the liberation of Iraq, mass graves containing 400,000 people killed by Saddam Hussein have been discovered. This figure, which represents a fraction of the dead and does not account for nearly a million casualties of the Iraq-Iran war, averages nearly 17,000 people per annum over 24 years of a brutal regime.
• This figure equates to 37,500 saved lives since April 2005.
• Based on the above, there is a net figure of 29,327 Iraqi men and women who are walking around freely in Iraq who would be rotting in graves had Bush yielded to left wing activists that form the backbone (or lack thereof) of IBC and its sister organisations.

That’s 29,327 reasons why the liberation of Iraq was necessary and legitimate!

When factoring in what the future held under Saddam and what the future holds under the emerging democratic state, this figure expands exponentially.