That was the number of Iraqi civilians estimated to have been killed by 2006 as a result of Bush's War by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Yesterday I spoke with Drs. Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts, authors of the original 2004 report and the update in 2006. In interviews, Roberts made a strong point about the value in counting dead Iraqis -- something our military has no interest in doing -- and not allowing Bush to get away with dismissing the Bloomberg number as outlandishly high. That, Roberts said, is like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dismissing the Jewish holocaust of World War II as myth.

Roberts, from an earlier interview: "If someone said in the 9/11 attacks, 'I think only 200 or 300 people really died,' we would be really, really upset. And I think in the long view, the danger of discarding this study, if it’s correct, is that, at a moment when we as a society should be showing contrition, our leaders have essentially expressed indifference to an extraordinary level of suffering. And that’s just the wrong message in terms of either our long-term security or peace in the Middle East."