A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred. The survey was done by Iraqi physicians and overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health.

U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., says the United States is not winning the war in Iraq and he still thinks more troops are needed on the ground.

The Bush administration suddenly faces three rapidly expanding crises in the Middle East, but it has limited options to defuse tensions in any of them anytime soon, U.S. officials and Middle East experts say.

Top Pentagon officers have told the Bush administration that bombing Iranian nuclear facilities would probably fail to destroy that country's nuclear program, the New Yorker magazine reported on Sunday.
The senior commanders also warned that any attack launched if diplomacy fails to end the standoff over Iran's nuclear ambitions could have "serious economic, political, and military consequences for the United States,"

In President Bush’s June speech, he accused Iran of pursuing a secret weapons program along with its civilian nuclear-research program (which it is allowed, with limits, under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty). The senior officers in the Pentagon do not dispute the President’s contention that Iran intends to eventually build a bomb, but they are frustrated by the intelligence gaps. A former senior intelligence official told me that people in the Pentagon were asking, “What’s the evidence? We’ve got a million tentacles out there, overt and covert, and these guys”—the Iranians—“have been working on this for eighteen years, and we have nothing?"

Saudi Arabia's ambassador in Washington said Tuesday that a military conflict with Iran would double or triple the price of oil.

The Pentagon has decided to omit from new detainee policies a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that bans "humiliating and degrading treatment," according to military officials. That step would mark a potentially permanent shift away from strict adherence to international human-rights standards.

Nuclear weapons have not been used for 60 years. Once the U.S. uses a nuclear weapon again, it will heighten the probability that others will too. In a world with many more nuclear nations and no longer a "taboo" against the use of nuclear weapons, there will be a greatly enhanced risk that regional conflicts could expand into global nuclear war.

The Pentagon has notified about 21,000 Army soldiers and Marines that they are scheduled to be sent to Iraq late this year as part of the latest deployment rotation.  The moves suggest that U.S. commanders are sticking largely to their original troop rotation plan for this year, leaving unclear when and if a sizable reduction in U.S. troop levels will begin.

Current military and former intelligence officials remain concerned about a US-led strike on Iran, despite the recent appearance of diplomacy on the part of the US State Department and the offer of an incentives package to Iran.