Naturally, those who would have died from murder and sheer poverty under Saddam are considered irrelevant in this calculation.

So you're arguing that completely hypothetical speculation that some number of people might have died in an alternate universe during the time period since the war means that America's not responsible for the deaths that happened in this universe?

Try another hypothetical: You murder somebody, and then subsequently we find out that your victim was terminally ill and probably wouldn't have lasted a year anyway. Are you any less guilty of murder? What if your victim was 80 years old? Would you expect the jury to give you a free pass if you haul out the actuarial tables and show that the person had an X% chance of dying of natural causes anyway?

How does the statistical possibility that somebody would have died from another cause negate the fact that the person did die as a consequence of our invasion of Iraq? Is the death any less significant because we caused it than if Saddam had caused it? Is it a morally superior death?

If anything has helped convince me that Bush has to go, it's the way his supporters have to scrape the bottom of the ethical barrel and resort to tortured logic that would shame Baghdad Bob to contrive justifications for Bush's actions.