As the ten year anniversary of the US invasion approaches, updated research shows that both the human and financial costs of the preemptive and prolonged military adventure in Iraq are higher than the most Americans even now realize and astronomically higher than its proponents assured the public as they made their case for war a decade ago.
At minimum, according to the Costs of War project at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, 134,000 innocent Iraqis lost their lives as a direct result of the US-led war that began in March of 2003. For numerous reasons, the groups says, this number could well "double" before a complete count is reached.
"The figures for the number of Iraqi civilians killed have been clouded somewhat by arguments about methods for counting the dead and by politics inside Iraq and in the US," the authors of the report note. "Yet to focus on the arguments about how to record the dead and wounded obscures the human toll of the war. What can be said, after reviewing the evidence, is that the conservative 123,000 estimate for civilians killed by direct war-related violence is low, perhaps very low. On the higher end, a 2006 study published by The Lancet estimated 654,965 excess deaths related to the war."
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