This (from The Independent) is just appalling:

Statistics unpublished until today reveal the stark facts: 242 people have died in Baghdad in just over three weeks, almost all from bullet wounds. It is an epidemic, and it is getting worse....

Dr Fa'ak Amin Bakr, director of the city mortuary, says 242 people have died in the past 25 days, of whom more than nine out of 10 had been shot. He says that before the invasion Baghdad had an average of one death a day caused by gunshot wounds.

Battles between looters and score-settling from the Saddam years have taken hold, fuelled by a security vacuum that owes much to a decision by Donald Rumsfeld, the American Defence Secretary, to invade and occupy Iraq with minimum troop numbers – two divisions short, say well- informed sources within the Allies' reconstruction team.

They are the by-product, too, of the failure of the Allies to coax the Baghdad police to return to work in sufficient numbers. Most of the Iraqi officers who have returned have yet to come out of their police stations.

And homicide figures are going up. The 124 who died from bullet wounds in the past 10 days is a rise of 60 per cent on the previous 10-day period....

I keep going back to what that smug bastard InstaPundit said near the end of the war in his MSNBC blog:

The latest Iraqi claim I could find was for 500 civilian casualties and it’s almost surely inflated. Various antiwar groups are claiming to keep count, but their numbers, as several different commentators have observed, appear to be bogus. So I think it’s very possible that Iraqi civilian casualties, too, will turn out to be under 500.

The casualties from gunshot wounds in the postwar period are nearly half that -- in Baghdad alone. And it's all because Donald Rumsfeld was determined to show off and fight this war with low troop numbers, just to show what a big stud he is. Call this apples and oranges if you want to -- I say these are casualties of war.