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Hello...Your headline makes it sound like the invasion of Iraq is directly responsible for 654,965 deaths in Iraq. Then you seem to twist the facts to prove your assumption, that the invasion of Iraq was bad.

First, you site a survey that supposes to have produced this number but don't provide the questions asked. Then you state the following: "The survey recorded 1,474 births and 629 deaths among 12,801 people surveyed. The data were then applied to the 26.1 million Iraqis living in the survey area." My first question is whether those surveyed were households, as previously stated, or people? My second question is whether those surveyed constituted a much smaller number of households? You then fail to establish exactly where those households were surveyed. If they were in the center of Baghdad, then of course the conclusions would be vastly different than if they were in Irbil, since the center of the conflict is Baghdad and many more people die there then elsewhere.

The numbers you propose suggest that 540 people died every day from March 2003 to July 2006 as a result of the American invasion of Iraq. In total you claim that 2.5 percent of the population of Iraq has died as a direct result of the American invasion. Those are some pretty heafty claims and to propose such claims you ought to be prepared to support it with a little more evidence than just a few "households" in "randomly selected clusters" in several "undisclosed locations".

I opposed the war from the beginning and I still do, but let us do a little "thinking" here, shall we?