Iraq death stats important?

A number of doctors from around the world are upset that there has not been a proper body count in Iraq, with Klim McPherson, professor of public health epidemiology, taking the lead:

Counting the dead is intrinsic to civilised society. Understanding the causes of death is a core public health responsibility. The government's white paper on public health emphasises the vital role of assessing the impact on health of all public policy. This is well recognised, and yet neither the public nor public health professionals are able to obtain reliable and officially endorsed information about the extent of civilian deaths attributable to the allied invasion of Iraq. Estimates vary between tens and hundreds of thousands.

These estimates come from reports in the press, or counting bodies admitted to hospitals, (www.iraqbodycount.net) as well as surveys. The former are likely to be inaccurate and to underestimate the true numbers and do not easily allow for reliable attribution between, for example, violent and natural causes. Public access to reliable data on mortality is important. The policy being assessed—the allied invasion of Iraq—was justified largely on grounds of democratic supremacy. Voters in the countries that initiated the war, and others—not least in Iraq itself—are denied a reliable evaluation of a key indicator of the success of that policy. This is unacceptable.

Note the focus on voters' need to know: how are we to truly hate ourselves if we don't know how many deaths we're responsible for? Anyway, is counting civilian war deaths an established practice? Statistics, we need statistics. How are we going to establish the cost-benefits ratio if we don't have statistics? 100,001 civilians killed, bring back Saddam.

In a companion piece, Owen Dyer makes pretty much the same point but, since this is billed as a news item, a photo is attached.

Save yourself the trouble of reading both articles: go here, look at the photo, read its caption and you'll have the instant summary of both.