The British government is not saying that Blair believes 650,000 Iraqis have died because of invasion that would otherwise have lived. The government is admitting that it's as good a number as any, and probably more reliable than most:
BBC NEWS | UK | UK Politics | Iraqi deaths survey 'was robust'
... The British government was advised against publicly criticising a report estimating that 655,000 Iraqis had died due to the war, the BBC has learnt.
Iraqi Health Ministry figures put the toll at less than 10% of the total in the survey, published in the Lancet.
But the Ministry of Defence's chief scientific adviser said the survey's methods were "close to best practice" and the study design was "robust".
Another expert agreed the method was "tried and tested"....
I wrote
this when the estimate was 100,000 and
this about the 600,000+ estimate:
... If we adjusted the Iraqi toll to our population of 300 million, the conflict would claim 6 million Americans lives. Would we call that a civil war? The "conflict" in Iraq is now up to about 60% of the death total of a war that most of would consider "civil"...
In the US we consider our civil war to have had horrific casualty figures, though ours were concentrated among combatants (young men). Whether the "true" number is 200,000 or 650,000, the conflict in Iraq is within range of the carnage of the American civil war.
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