It's happened

The newest addition to the right hand column at Lotus, added a week or two ago, is the running total of "Iraqi Deaths Due to U.S. Invasion" provided by Just Foreign Policy. As a base, the counter total used last year's study published in The Lancet that said there had been about 650,000 "excess deaths" in Iraq as a result of invasion, of which 601,000 were due to violence. It then uses the Iraq Body Count's tabulation of civilian deaths to estimate the rate at which those excess deaths by violence are increasing and updates the number displayed accordingly. The entire methodology is explained in more detail here.

Just a little while ago, sometime this afternoon, it ticked over to 1,000,985.

Over one million.

One million.

One million dead because of our hubris, our stupidity, our greed, our murderous violence. One million. One million.

Amid all our talk of "surges" and "schedules" and "drawdowns" and "deadlines," this is what it actually means: One. Million. Dead. One million people who would have been alive today had some among us not decided to act out their imperialist fantasies and the rest of us had not allowed ourselves to be stampeded with lies and fear-mongering. After this, I do not want to hear any shit from anyone about Saddam Hussein. Not one freaking word.

Yes, it's an estimate. Yes, it's a calculation. Yes, the number could be lower - which also means it could be higher. I don't care. It's the best guess we have now. And it's over one million.