Many believe that Iraqis are worse off now than before the U.S. invasion. Jeanne at Body and Soul has the details, found at Juan Cole and Chris Bertram. Crime, for example, has skyrocketed in Baghdad.

“Our morgue was designed to cope with between five and ten bodies a day,” explained Kais Hassan, the harrassed statistician whose job it is to record the capital’s suspicious deaths. He gestured into the open door of a refrigeration unit at the stomach-turning sight of tangled corpses inside, male and female, shaded with the brown and green hues of death. “Now we’re getting 20 to 30 in here a day. It’s a disaster.”

Figures compiled at the central mortuary, on file and indisputable, shine a light through the murk of estimate and rumour surrounding casualty rates in Iraq. Of the 6,635 suspicious deaths in Baghdad recorded this year at the city’s Medical-Legal Institute, the complex incorporating the central mortuary, more than 75 per cent were killed by a bullet. Stabbing is the next most common cause of death.

Those that work in the mortuary are divided as to whether things are worse now than under Saddam. Jeanne notes perceptively:

Saving Iraqi lives is a noble cause. But to justify continued war, you need to show how the result can reasonably be attained. Without that, all you have is brutality wrapped up in nice words -- which, if I recall, was pretty much the way this war began.