The relevance of this is to bring home the scale of what is happening, and to try and give a sense of proportion - a corrective to this kind of thing:

We had something like 200 or 300 or 400 people killed in the major cities of America and is that perfectly peaceful? No. What's the difference? We just didn't see every homicide in every major city in the United States on television every night."

That was the US Secretary of State for "defence", Donald Rumsfeld, shooting his mouth off the other day, trying to make out that Iraq is really doing fine these days, and there'll be no real problem in having a fair and free election in a couple of months.

But of course, when you multiply all the deaths of Iraqis and all the rest by a factor of ten, to make it comparable to the USA, the way that piece Alaska Mike gave us did, that reassurance just melts away.

Iraq and the USA are both roughly the same distance from where I live.
Innocent Iraqis getting killed, innocent Americans getting killed, I can't see any significant difference, or any reason to feel less unhappy about one than the other.