African leaders meeting at the United Nations have hailed as historic an agreement to extend the mandate for slaughter in the Darfur region until the end of the year. ‘The 7 000 African Union troops will continue looking the other way until the year or until every last refugee has been slaughtered whichever comes first,’ commented the UN.

No sooner had the party conference season come to an end and the new parliamentary session was underway at Westminster than they were up to their old trick of burying bad news and banishing uncomfortable facts to the Media Margins. Their useful…and doubtless unwitting…idiot was a soldier by the name of General Sir Richard Dannatt.

Sarah Sands had the Chief of the General Staff remarking that if Our Boys carried on getting killed in Iraq and Afghanistan for long enough there would be no army left for him to lead. All his soldiers would be dead. His impeccable Sandhurst logic therefore dictated that the British Army leave Iraq…some time soon. Shock and Horror!

Meanwhile buried with their bad news is a significant part of Iraq’s civilian population…one in forty to be precise. Nuclear Devices in Oxford and Cambridge would do much the same job to this country…with less suffering.

The same team from Johns Hopkins University who discovered 100 000 Iraqi deaths in 2004 while the Pentagon was talking hundreds have now found it is actually much worse. Not 100 000 but 650 000 additional Iraqi civilian deaths.

Working with Iraqi doctors and visiting over 1 800 homes in Iraq the John Hopkins team identified more than 12 000 family members and tracked those who had died over an interval that spanned both pre- and post-invasion periods. The Iraqi interviewers spoke fluent English as well as Arabic and they were well trained to collect the information they were seeking. They asked permission from every family to use the data they wanted. And they chased down death certificates in over four out of five cases to make sure that they had a double check on the numbers and causes of death given to them by family members. They were stunned by the picture that emerged from their investigations.

Now we have a better understanding of the true toll from the invasion and how those deaths have come about. Before the invasion only a tiny proportion of deaths were due to violence. But since the invasion over half of all deaths have been due to violent causes. It is the occupation and the continued army presence in Iraq that is fuelling this violence.

The nature of these causes has changed too. Early on in the post-invasion period deaths were made worse by aerial bombing. But now gunshot wounds and car bombs are having a far greater effect. Far from the British presence in Iraq stabilising the chaos or alleviating the rate at which casualties are mounting it is making the situation worse. In each year since the invasion the mortality rates due to violence have increased.

The total figure of 650 000 is truly staggering. It represents 2.5% of the Iraqi population. Two years ago there was much huffing and puffing…and official denial…when The Lancet reported 100 000 additional Iraqi deaths since the invasion in March 2003. Government ministers were successfully deployed to destroy the credibility of the findings.

But their denials are now coming back to haunt them. Washington panicked and sent Bush out to cry ‘Bullshit!’ At least Whitehall kept its nerve…for the moment. To them Civilian Casualties are just another Spin Factor. Figures from Darfur and the Congo based on the same methodology are met with frowns as heads are nodded. ‘The situation is grave and intolerable. The International Community must act’ say the diplomats. But when it comes to Iraq the story is different. At least this time no attempt is being made to discredit The Lancet report. Instead it is being buried.

Also Richard Horton the editor of The Lancet is getting smarter. To ensure the latest results are not kicked into the long grass he penned an article for The Guardian. ‘Passive surveillance’ he explained ‘will always underestimate the total number of casualties.

We know this from past wars and conflict zones where estimates have been low by factors of 10 or 20. Only when you go out and knock on the doors of families…actively looking for deaths…do you get close to the right number. This method is tried and tested. It is the basis for mortality estimates in other war zones.’

Horton goes further. ‘Iraq is an unequivocal Humanitarian Emergency. Civilians are being harmed by the British presence in Iraq not helped. Just what are we doing there? And why? We have a legal obligation under the Geneva Convention to protect civilian populations. We are not adhering to it. But progressively subverting it year on year.’

British Imperial Foreign Policy…based on 19th-century notions of the Nation-State…is long past its sell-by date. We need new principles to govern our diplomacy and military strategy. The idea of Human Security and not National Security should be one of them. Another should be the health and wellbeing of Innocent Civilians and not the economic self-interest and territorial ambitions of states and corporations. In short a Human Scale Foreign Policy.

Richard Horton was on the right track when he ended his Guardian article with these words. ‘The best hope we can have from our terrible misadventure in Iraq is that a new political and social movement will grow to overturn this politics of humiliation. We are one human family. Let's act like it.’