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1. Is the 1.2 million number really considered credible?
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Here and
here is a discussion of the surveys and their methods.
I'll summarize the contending numbers here:
2/2007 10,000 AP survey of American public. "How many Iraqis do you think have died violently in this war?"
2/2006 30,000 George Bush at a press conference.
6/2007 66,000 IBC. Count of deaths reported in English-language media.
4/2004 24,000 ILCS. Norwegians working for UNDP, large sample size. IBC was then 9000.
9/2004 98,000 Lancet #1. Epidemioligists from Johns Hopkins. "The very large 95% CI - 8,000 to 194,000 - confused many"
6/2006 655,000 Lancet #2. Same guys, bigger sample. (95% CI: 392,979–942,636)
9/2007 1,220,000 British polling complany ORB.
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We now have four survey estimates from three independent teams of professionals using two different good-practice methods. They all say that the excess deaths in Iraq are hugely greater than the IBC body count, let alone the numbers from the MNF or the Iraqi government. The mean estimate, combining the ORB result with my extrapolations from the three older ones, is 782,000.
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It is possible none of these guys care a whit about doing an honest poll and are fabricating numbers to make a political point. The way to show that would be to conduct a poll that gets different results.
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2. What is the number for the same time period prior to the US invasion?
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This looks like a good estimate. They give him credit for the 450k - 730k Iranians killed in that war, the 1.5k to 200k Iraqis kill in the Gulf War, and the 500,000 children who died due to UN sanctions, for a total approaching 2 million over his 30+ years in power. The 5 years before the war he did relatively little killing.
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3. Isn't it ultimately up to the folks in Iraq to say if they are better or worse off? If so, what have they said?
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Here is a poll of Iraqis.
Invasion was wrong 63%
Oppose presence of coalition forces in Iraq 79%
Directly on point
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About 90 percent of Iraqis feel the situation in the country was better before the U.S.-led invasion than it is today
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