H.D. MILLER DOES THE MATH, and concludes that the war killed fewer Iraqis in a month than the peace did:

Saddam was killing hundreds of his own people every day. Even Iraqi Body Count, using the most biased methodology possible, can only come up with 2,325 civilian deaths in Iraq over the past month. Compare this astonishingly low number with one supplied by John Burns of The New York Times who estimates that during Saddam’s reign “figures of a million dead Iraqis, in war and through terror, may not be far from the mark.”

Now do the math: One million Iraqis killed over the past 23 years comes out to something around 3600 deaths per month, or 50% more per month than were killed during the most intensive bombing campaign conducted since World War II. And the result is that the Iraqi people are less oppressed, less terrorized than they’ve been in decades.

I’m not so sure about this calculation. I’m pretty sure that the million-deaths number includes Iraqi soldiers killed in various wars. The 2,325 number is “civilian deaths,” though given the source I suspect that it is quite highly inflated. I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone knows, how many Iraqi soldiers were killed, but I suspect that it was more than enough to drive the total number of dead over 3,600.

It wouldn’t surprise me, though, to find out that (using non-Heroldized numbers) fewer Iraqi civilians died in the past month than died in a typical month under Saddam. And, of course, the war is pretty much over, while Saddam’s terror was an ongoing phenomenon.