This is what we get when we “bring democracy” at the point of a gun.

The surveyors said they found a steady increase in mortality since the invasion, with a steeper rise in the last year that appears to reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the news media and civilian groups. In the year ending in June, the team calculated Iraq’s mortality rate to be roughly four times what it was the year before the war.

Of the total 655,000 estimated “excess deaths,” 601,000 resulted from violence and the rest from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 unexpected violent deaths per day throughout the country.

What’s interesting is that the Beltway press corps has been asking questions about this (at least they are doing that these days) as if it says “655,000 Iraqi civilians have died since we invaded”, but that’s not what the report says or what the study was designed to measure. Like the first iteration of this study it measures the difference between expected deaths had we not invaded and the number of actual deaths because we did.

This is significant because it means that we have killed or caused to be killed 655,000 more people than would have died under Saddam. So we are seeing Saddam’s death numbers and raising him an additional 655,000 people, men, women and children. And we said we needed to get rid of Saddam because he was such a murderous bastard.

So what does that make us?