This story didn't get the attention it deserved. The Iraqi Health Minister, Ali al-Shemari, has offerred a new, roughly tripled figure of 150,000 Iraqi civilians' having been killed, far more than the accepted estimates mostly used by Washington elites and considerably closer to the range used by Burnham et al. in the Lancet this year (393,000 - 943,000). The method of al-Shemari was based on bodies being received at morgues (and the AP article states that this method actually yields a number "closer to 130,000") -- which probably undercounts the total, because many bodies are unlikely to have arrived at morgues. Bearing this new account in mind, anyone who had difficulty describing the war as having led to "hundreds of thousands" of deaths should at least start considering that scale as plausible (dare I say likely?).