And this takes me to the last of my prepared remarks, which places debates about different mortality studies in a wider context.

One feature which almost all Iraqi mortality estimates share is that they were carried out with very limited funds by small, sometimes pitifully small, sets of researchers.

There are many people in whose obvious interests it is to keep the public largely ignorant (or at the very least confused) about the extent of the calamity that has befallen the Iraqi people.

It must be deeply satisfying to such people to have what public attention is available for such matters focused onto disputes between the differing, and all wholly inadequate, studies that have, somehow, managed to get undertaken.

In doing this, attention is drawn away from the much larger question of why it is that the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world, a country that freely spends trillions of dollars on war, cannot bring itself to devote the needed resources to accounting, either to its own people, or to the people in the country that it continues to occupy, for the full extent of civilian death and destruction in that country.

We hope that the main message coming out of today’s session is that modest means are capable of providing quite substantial information about casualties. With more substantial financial means, and the full co-operative involvement of nations and relevant international bodies, much more could be known, known to a higher degree of reliability, and known more quickly.