Summary here and here.

Contours of chaos.

Not long ago, about a dozen shops lined the one-block stretch of road in southwest Baghdad’s Saidia neighborhood. Now only Janabi’s computer-game arcade and the barbershop one door down remain, and the barber sneaks in for only a couple of hours each day, at a time whispered like a password to longtime customers.

Along a nearby section of a bit more than a mile, where 140 shops once stood only 23 remain. So many merchants in the area have been killed - or fled in fear that they would be - that the result of staying seems obvious, especially for a Shiite Muslim in a neighborhood that’s being methodically cleansed by Sunni Muslims, who dominate the area.

[snip]

The story of his street is emblematic of the collapse of society in Baghdad and is echoed across the city, where more stores are closed than open on most streets. Small shops where people used to get their daily needs - from vegetables to meat and bread, hardware and clothing - are an endangered species.

[snip]

In Baghdad, the loss of neighborhood stores is more than an inconvenience. With electricity only a sometime thing, refrigeration is impossible, so many people must buy food daily. Traveling even a few extra blocks can mean running a gantlet of death squads, illegal sectarian checkpoints, common bandits, kidnappers and random bombs. Showing up in a strange neighborhood, even just to buy tomatoes, can draw the wrong kind of attention. Article

Juan Cole gives a detailed reportorial look at The Lancet’s statistical extrapolation report on casualties (see Late Night Round-up, below). Data: (.pdf file).

Would add that it is crucial as well to ask what possible benefit it might be or what agenda it might serve for the constructers of the study or for the respected medical journal that published it to exaggerate or skew or inflate the statistics (which use the same methodology widely accepted and cited in other crisis situations)? Realistically, the answer would have to be: None.

Related:

We are not even close to leaving Iraq or even decreasing our troop levels by any meaningful amount. If anything, a Republican victory in three weeks would make it highly likely that the neoconservative dream of still more troops would be fulfilled. The trend of violence and death in Iraq is unquestionably worsening, and not only do we achieve nothing by staying, but the situation in Iraq worsens every day — not just for Iraqis but for our own security. The invasion of Iraq is one of the greatest strategic disasters in our country’s history, and this new survey, independent of morbid and inconsequential quibbles over its accuracy, underscores why that is the case. Article

Highly relevant:

Every three days, Ali says, he and other al-Sadr militiamen go to the Tigris river to pick up bodies. At a spot on the bank just downstream from the Aima bridge in central Baghdad, a series of eddies gently gather in the dead. “More and more are coming there,” Ali says, “from north of Baghdad, from villages like Taji and Balad. Many have their hands tied, most are blindfolded.” The method of execution varies, Ali adds, from the basic bullet to the head to more macabre and viciously novel techniques involving power tools, electric cords and other such domestic instruments.…

[snip]

Sectarian hostility aside, there is another aspect to Ali’s work that is troubling: the deaths of the people whose bodies he pulls out of the river often go unreported, leading to questions about the real scale of the violence in Iraq. Even the wildly fluctuating official death counts are a stark reminder that Iraqi, and by association U.S. officials, are attempting to minimize a problem getting worse by the day.…

[snip]

…The Ministry of Health has instituted a strict policy for journalists, requiring them to seek permission before visiting the facility. Those allowed in get only a truly sanitized tour; more often than not reporters are barred from entering. But at the gate, guards who have worked at the facility tell a chilling tale. “Last year, I saw maybe 1,000 bodies a month coming into the morgue,” says one man who, fearing for his life, requested his name not be published. “Now we’re getting nearly 1,000 a week.” Article