Recently, the British medical journal Lancet issued a study that said that 655,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the U.S. "liberation" efforts. The reaction to that figure has been all too predictable: Those who are against the war are sure the study is correct. Those who aren't insist it's a pack of lies. I've read a few articles on both sides and I'm unconvinced that any of their authors even looked at the study, except maybe as necessary to glean data they could use in making their cases. This is how it works in Partisan America: No new revelations are valid except those that support what you already believed.
This article by Fred Kaplan is the first one I've read that breaks that trend. Kaplan is against the war but he believes the study is flawed. On the other hand, as he notes, even if the true number is a third or a fifth of the estimate, it's still a shocking number of dead human beings.