Barbara Ehrenreich, in "Blood Rites," her extraordinary 1997 examination of the history of the passions of war, writes of the evolution of the phenomenon: "Meanwhile, war has dug itself into economic systems, where it offers a livelihood to millions, rather than to just a handful of craftsmen and professional soldiers. It has lodged in our souls as a kind of religion, a quick tonic for political malaise and a bracing antidote to the moral torpor of consumerist, market-driven cultures."

Saying this, I return to the figure of a million war dead in Iraq, pause in horrified awe that, one, it could be possible, and two, it hasn't made mainstream headlines, where big, round numbers normally scream with significance.

The estimate, by the U.K. organization Just Foreign Policy and corroborated by the market research firm Opinion Research Business, extrapolates from data published just over a year ago in the respected British medical journal Lancet, which indicated a violent-death toll, as