I am not, nor have I ever suggested that our guys are killing them in great numbers.
What I'm saying is that it's more dangerous for people there now than it was under Hussein. The estimate in the newspapers for his secret-police killings number around 200,000. Throw in 30,000 Kurds he gassed. Spread that over 25 years. Do the math, and that's about 25 people per day. How many are getting killed in the mess there now? We just had a few hundred last week.
If you throw in the Iran-Iraq war casualties (500,000 Iraqis), it's greater, but then you'd have to throw in all the Iraqi combat deaths from our war too, including the army regulars and the militiamen we've killed. You're starting to approach comparable numbers of Iraqi dead.
"The estimate in the newspapers for his secret-police killings number around 200,000"
Yes, the newspapers estimate that, but coalition forces have found 500,000 to 600,000 mass graves from the time Hussein was in power. That is on top of the war and the gassing of the Kurds.