...are even the lower numbers OK with you?

A number like 5 would not be "okay with me." But when we are at war, some perspective and historical context is important, and deliberately inflating the numbers for political points is not useful. If somebody caught anyone doing the reverse, declaring only a few hundred wounded in Iraq, they would be condemned from all quarters.

The current Lancet number is 655,000. This is usually rounded off to 600,000 by anti-war people who refer to it constantly, and seemingly have no problem with switching back and forth between that figure and the U.N. numbers.

100,000 was the number back in 2004, when the U.N. estimates, using the same techniques as the Lancet group, and a larger sampling, was 25,000.

Both reports were issued in the month prior to an election, for obvious reasons.