Hat tip Mark Coffey on this article breaking out the Iraqi deaths by the hands that caused the deaths (not the simple minded math where all deaths since 2002 were somehow linked to George Bush)

…that unfortunately many Iraqis have already suffered, shot at checkpoints and roadstops by jumpy troops, mistaken for possible suicide bombers, bombed by aircraft with faulty targeting information. All those things have indeed happened.

But how often, really? The answer: not very often, in fact. And not nearly often enough to make the 150,000 U.S. and coalition troops in Iraq the leading scourge of Iraq’s civilians. That dishonor goes, hands down, to the insurgents.
…
They tally 24,865 civilians reported killed between the invasion on March 20, 2003 and March 19, 2005.

That is too many, but a lot lower than I hear from the conspircay binging leftward fringes.

In fact, a fair reading of the report’s own data could support a completely contrary conclusion. Were it not for the insurgents, there would scarcely be much of a civilian death toll in Iraq now. A few isolated cases, yes, but nothing like the 8,000 civilians the Iraqi government says have died so far in 2005 from insurgent attacks. Fully 30 percent of the civilian fatalities Iraq Body Count records took place prior to May 1, 2003, when U.S. troops were actively engaged in the invasion and in subduing remnants of Saddam’s army. During that military campaign, large numbers of Saddam Fedayeen and other irregular forces foght back from the cover of civilian dress, a violation of the laws and customs of warfare. Those who died were inevitably declared civilians by their loved ones. And such forces in most places represented the bulk of the resistance against the invasion; the uniformed Iraqi military for the most part deserted and fled.

Yep. The dead enders were pretending to be civilians to ambush our troops, and the uniformed military were all show who left the battlefield the first chance they got. Too bad liberal propogandist cannot address this obvious issue – which leaves most Americans doubting all their claims. Once you lose your reputation for being truthful it is not going to come back by being half truthful.

Another big chunk of the fatalities recorded in the report took place in April and November of 2004, mostly in Fallujah during the two U.S. military operations to subdue that community.
…
The hospital was an insurgent stronghold, even at one point used as a fire base, and its officials were insurgent propagandists; they insisted, for instance, that every single casualty they treated had been a civilian victim, a claim so implausible as to remind one of the hilarious pronouncements of Saddam’s henchmen before and during the invasion.

But somehow a claim the easily duped leftwing dupes somehow fell for. And the left wonders why the have no credibility on national security?

At one point in April 2004, when Fallujah hospital officials were claiming more than 900 dead (a figure too incredible even to make it into the Iraq Body Count report), NEWSWEEK arranged for intermediaries to photograph the freshly dug graves in the cemetery, and we counted the headstones. There were 40 we could see, and Muslims do not normally wait around to bury their dead. Certainly there were probably other gravesites; but not 900 or even IBC’s 600 for April 2004.

Actually counting the headstones vs buying the propoganda? What a concept.

But it turns out that unknown agents are defined in the report as “those who appear to attack civilian targets lacking a clear or unambiguous link to the foreign military presence in Iraq. This may include some overlap with the groups above as well as with criminal murders.” In other words, terrorists and insurgents. And the “predominantly criminal killings” are all those recorded in mortuaries, subtracting the normal pre-war murder rate from the totals.

Talk about lies, damn lies and statistics. It’s abundantly clear to anyone who has been in Iraq that the great majority of those murders are political assassinations, and most of those are by anti-occupation insurgents against any and everyone connected no matter how remotely to the U.S. occupation or the Iraqi authorities, from ministers to off-duty policemen to cleaning ladies.

OK, no one should wonder why the left can be trusted with our national security when they cook the books like this. Winning elections seems to be their goal – regardless of the truth and our national security.

No where in this report do we see any mention of the astounding atrocities committed by the insurgents—the triple suicide car bombing at a sewage treatment facility that killed 40 children in 2004, or another suicide bombing last week that killed 28 children, lining up in both cases to receive treats from U.S. soldiers (only one of whom was killed, in the second instance).

Enough! If the liberal left cannot recognize the useless deaths of nearly 70 children then they are not to be trusted with anything. How could any human being, no matter how politically desparate, ignore the deaths of 70 children??

They weren’t fetuses – they were children.