Over 1,000 United States troops have been killed in Iraq since last year's invasion. Estimates of the number of Iraqi deaths range from a conservative 11,000 to a more likely 30,000.
The running daily rate of deaths is estimated to be 18 and 59 respectively. This week's ferocious violence in Baghdad and Fallujah, in which hundreds of Iraqis were killed by car bombs and US attacks, has presumably driven these daily averages up again.
They represent an escalation of the insurgency there and demonstrate a singular failure by the interim Iraqi government and supporting coalition troops to provide everyday security. Iraq has instead become a focus and a haven for terrorism and a source of radicalisation throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds. This makes existing political plans to resolve it, including those being debated in the US election campaign, increasingly unreal.
The Bush administration relies on the interim government led by Mr Iyad Allawi (consisting largely of expatriot ministers nominated by the US) to assume control of the country gradually. Preparation of elections to a constituent assembly in January next year and democratic elections the following December will create, they argue, conditions for the gradual withdrawal of US forces. Mr John Kerry believes it will be possible to set a deadline for US withdrawal in four years and that in the meantime better relations with US allies in Europe will enable them to widen the international role there.
In the face of these violent events such relatively benign scenarios are frankly incredible. This is acknowledged by an intelligence estimate for Mr Bush whose predictions range from tenuous stability to political fragmentation to civil war. Iraq is more and more ungovernable and increasingly fissiparous between its various ethnic and regional components. Free elections are essential to provide a unitary focus and to give Iraqis a democratic choice but how can the peaceful conditions needed to hold them be in place by January? US military action to eliminate resistance and terrorist movements rather provokes them to more daring attacks and to undermine whatever legitimacy the interim government has. It is naive to think European states such as France and Germany will be willing to intervene in such a worsening situation, unless there is a much more radical internationalisation of Iraq's future than Mr Kerry would accept.
These events and other atrocities around the world are reinforcing Mr Bush's appeal as an incumbent who can guarantee US security - even if his actual policies undermine it. Having created a spurious association between the 9/11 attacks on the US and the war in Iraq in the minds of many US voters his administration now finds it daily justified by the growing resistance to its role there. Whoever wins this election will face a major crisis in Iraq and the Middle East region with which it will be ill-equipped to deal. The fall-out will affect us all.