Apropos of our brief discussion today in class, 303ers, here’s some information that– surprise– appears (as yet) only in marginal news aggregators and the foreign press.

At least 116,000 Iraqi civilians and more than 4,800 coalition troops died in Iraq between the outbreak of war in 2003 and the U.S. withdrawal in 2011, researchers estimate.

Its involvement in Iraq has so far cost the United States $810 billion and could eventually reach $3 trillion, they added.

see the AFP article in Japan Today

This number is far lower than the ORB’s 1.2 million figure and a prior study by The Lancet which posited 655,000, far higher than George W. Bush’s guess of 30,000 (“more or less”), and in the same range as Iraq Body Count’s  116,281- 122,088 . See also the recent conclusions of Brown University’s “Costs of War” project– 190,000 dead– which includes the following finding:

More than 70 percent of those who died of direct war violence in Iraq have been civilians — an estimated 134,000. This number does not account for indirect deaths due to increased vulnerability to disease or injury as a result of war-degraded conditions. That number is estimated to be several times higher.