The 100,000 people dead in Iraq number is causing trouble, not because I don't believe it, because I do. It's causing trouble because it is impossible to verify. There was an interesting article on Slate . . . http://slate.msn.com/id/2108887/

I have to believe that the number is greater than the 30,000 they allow for at the end of the article, since in a country with little electricity and little infrastructure in general, the press can not function completely.

The numbers are really a distraction from the real point, though. Even if we concede (which I do not do) that invading Iraq was a good idea, thousands (tens of thousands?) of people have died because of American policy decisions. When Donald Rumsfeld stood in a press conference in April, 2003, and said they were not stopping the looting because free people have a right to make choices, he signalled to the people in Iraq that no one was in charge. When the Coalition Provisional Authority disbanded the entire Iraqi Army and banned Baathists from further duty, the job of training an independent Iraqi force in a reasonable amount of time was made impossible. When the President, the Natioanal Security Advisor, and the Secretary of Defense ignored and "retired" generals who cried very loudly that we did not have enough boots on the ground (by several fold), it allowed for actions such as the theft of the tons and tons of explosives from that bunker. When the President's counsel declared the Geneva Convention "quaint," the Iraqi people saw the same kinds of torture we were supposedly liberating them from.

Tens of thousands of innocent people have died because our policy decisions helped the current insurgency to incubate and explode. Even assuming I was overzealous with the 100,000 dead number, I believe that is worth the same outcry as a natural disaster.