Herodotus

The pre-war mortaility rate that Roberts gave us was 5.5 per 1,000 population in 2002

The Iraqi Family Study was 5.3 per 1,000 population in 2002.

The CIA World Fact Book has pre-war mortality at:

6.02 per 1,000---2002

6.21 per 1,000---2001

6.4 per 1,000---2000

6.56 per 1,000---1999

even ranking Iraq at 144th in the world in 1999

Death rate per 1,000 population - Flags, Maps, Economy, Geography, Climate, Natural Resources, Current Issues, International Agreements, Population, Social Statistics, Political System

However how much credence should be given to the World Fact Book since they list Iraqi mortailtiy at: 5.66 per 1,000 in 2004, 5.49 per 1,000 in 2005, and 5.26 per 1,000 in 2007? That gives Iraq a better mortality rate than Australia, Denmark, Norway, Japan, the US, or any other industrailized state in the world. So what are all these people complaining about.

The UN estimated the mortality rate at 10 per 1,000 from 1995-2000, and 10.7 from 2000-2005. So clearly something is amiss when estimating Iraqi deaths from before the war. Stating that Iraq under Saddam was an evil place to live and lots of people died does not really give us an accurate picture of what the pre-2003 death rate should or could be. Obviously Saddam had lost some capacity to make war or otherwise terrorize Iraqis since 1991, but just how much we cannot say. So if the invasion had not occurred would the Iraqi mortality rate have gone down, stayed constant, or increased? We cannot predict.

But the World Fact Book numbers aside (one can dispute if the authors are accurate in predicting post-war Iraqi mortality rate), it seems likely that the subsequent violence after the invasion has led to a (slight) increase in the mortality rate; and that is all we can say at the moment.