Plantagenet,
Assassinating the Saddams would have yielded the exact same result, on the other hand Socialism even with all it's goons and gunmen can't hold a society together for any length of time so civil war in Iraq was probably inevitable.
As we know good information is hard to find on the internet but lately I'm leaning toward the theory that the NATO interventions in the Middle East were a controlled demolition of the region in order to stall the inevitable war between Shia and Sunni until the West had built up the infrastructure for their own energy security.
See we haven't seen state sponsored, imperialistic Islamic Jihad for over a hundred years but it was always going to re appear, this is the Islamic world falling under a new Ottoman Empire, the Saudi Empire.

Plantagenet

It looks like the Lancet study is a lot broader than reported deaths – including general increases in mortality after the invasion. The article talks of people “killed”, which to me implies the individual’s death can be directly ascribed to actions arising because of the invasion.

Also, the Lancet estimate is controversial – most estimates are lower, as your wikileaks article indicates.

The Lancet appears to be trying to estimate whether there would be more or less Iraqis alive today had the invasion not happened. The baseline estimate is therefore important. Does it include the hundreds of thousands killed by Saddam, the deaths in the Iran-Iraq war, and the reported million+ Iraqis (mostly children) who died as a result of economic sanctions on Saddam?

Agree with your last para, though. The case for action against Saddam had almost nothing to do with 9/11

Isn't marvellous as we sit in our ivory towers, thousands of miles from the action of war, we tend to believe the Government of the day that what they did was right, I have yet to believe any action a Government takes, perhaps one hundred years from now the truth on any present action will come out. Pilger actually says what most people think. Perhaps Edward Snowden could give us the answer to the Abbott secrecy regarding the refugee boats, it would be nice to know.

I started to read PIlger's article but only because as a ranting, left wing jpurnalist who exchanges commonsense for ideology, I sometimes raise a smile at his absurdities. Then in the first paragraph, after he had stated how far removed the opinions of ordinary Britishers were from a scientific report on the number of deaths in Iraq, he concluded:
"What this reveals is how we in Britain have been misled by those whose job is to keep the record straight."
Since Pilger nowhere states that the ordinary Britisher derived their opinion from the British government, this non sequitur can serve no other purpose than to provide the straw man he can beat up in the rest of his article - which he does.
Since the source of the public's opinion is always going to be journalists like Mr Pilger, what his straw man is suggesting is that the government should correct the mistakes of the journalists and news media. Perhaps, where the mistake is gross and likely to cause wrong opinion, Mr Pilger would like to see freedom of speech abated and censorship? I am sure his writings would be very high on that list.

Pilger is one of the worst offenders when it comes to misinformation and he's as much part of the "Media" control mechanism as Cameron or Obama.
Let's pick out a couple of examples from this piece:
"Rwandan Genocide", no, there was no Rwandan Genocide because in fact there has never been any such thing as a Genocide and there never will.
Causes of the Hutu vs Tutsi conflict are political and class based:
http://worldnews.about.com/od/africa/a/hutututsiconflicthistory.htm
He describes the Apartheid regime as "depraved" when it was really far more humane and just than what's been unleashed upon the population by the Marxist ANC:
http://www.censorbugbear.org/
So Obama and Cameron support a far worse regime than that which existed before 1994 but in the mind of Pilger and his ilk racial discrimination is a seen as a worse crime than murder.
Iraq as a peaceful state where Sunni, Shia, Christian and Kurd lived in harmony? That's bogus, the Saddam regime was Sunni, the Mukhrabat and his other goons simply whacked anyone who stepped out of line and the Shia and Kurds were treated as second class citizens. The figure of 70-125 civilian deaths per day at the hands of Saddam's government for the duration of his rule is a widely accepted estimate

Pilger goes on to canonise PFC "Dick Tuck" Manning, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange and describes how the mighty may tremble at the secrets they hold but what have the heroes of the hipster left really revealed? They've said nothing about Israel or Russia, very little about China, Japan and Saudi Arabia and there's always been a cloud of suspicion over Wikileaks in particular, Assange is accused of taking bribes from the Israeli government:
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/12/08/gordon-duff-busted-wikileaks-working-for-israel/

Hi Rhian

I agree with your concerns about the Lancet methodology.

If we applied the Lancet formula to Australia in WWI and WWII Australian "casualties" might have been (say) one million people more people in Australia who might have been born under peacetime conditions.

Hence the Lancet approach looks a bit far-fetched involving a whole different way to view demographic and "blame" history.

Pete