When trying to figure out whether to support this war or not, one my most important considerations concerned body counts: How many would likely live or die, either way? To find out, I scoured the Internet and tried to consider everything I could, either way.

One incredibly obscure bit of information I found was a professor who was familiar with the region, who noted that Iraq had a much higher excess mortality rate than other nations in the region, including Syria, which is similar and right next door. He attributed the difference to the Baath Party's bloody tortures and purges.

I tried to just tally up the known dead due to Saddam's conquests, internally and externally. Most estimates put the number of people known to be killed by Saddam at about 2 million (the real number, undoubtedly higher) -- and were regularly told, at the time, that 50,000 children were dying each month from sanctions.

So something had to change: we had to let Saddam go back to his old business (which probably would have involved repeats of his various conquests, or even his long-desired goal of plunging the entire region into war) or take him out -- as the Democrats of the 1990s had convinced me was necessary.

Given that Hussein was in power for about 20 years, that two million came out to about 100,000 excess dead per year -- at a minimum. Probably another 20,000 per year disappeared in one way or another, I guessed. So that was my range for estimation: if the final state ended up with significantly less than 100K dead per year, it would be an improvement over Saddam.

I've been hearing things are terrible: that we've made Iraq worse. In some ways (particularly for Iraqi Christians) that's undoubtedly true. But were lives saved overall? I thought I'd check the Iraq Body Count again.

They currently give 80K as their highest number, over the five year range. To be generous (or is it pessimistic?) I'll simply double it (with no particular cause for doing so) let's say the true number was actually even 160,000. Over five years, that's 32,000 killed each year. Far better than under sanctions, and better than Saddam's average over his entire reign. If we use their actual number, we end up with about 16,000 dead per year on average. Or, using the documented numbers, about 84,000 lives saved each year, 420,000 lives saved since the start of the war.

Friends, that's a huge number. That's almost half the number of people killed in Rwanda when the UN refused Romeo Dallaire another few dozen troops to stop it early, and when Clinton refused to used the G-word ('genocide') because he might legally have had to do something about the killing.

(When Clinton lied no-one died? Clinton said it wasn't genocide, and 800,000* died.)

Things certainly could have been better, had Petraeus won out earlier, or had more troops been otherwise deployed to stop the violence -- and the Bush administration certainly bears responsibility for that. And things could still be worse at some time in the future, particularly if we withdraw.

But at the moment, this war is apparently still saving lives.

There are many more arguments in support of this war, but half a million saved lives should make some dent in the minds of people of conscience, I should think.

* It's amazing: 80,000 die, and the screams of outrage and hatred for the man "responsible" (never mind lives being saved) reverberate around the world. 800,000 die right under the UN's nose, due to their deliberate, calculated inaction, and you barely hear a whimper of protest.