Nicely put - but one thing you should consider is that Geras' numbers are very conservative. He rounds down to 230,000 from the Human Rights Watch estimate of 290,000, which, I believe, does not include victims of "regular" state terror, but instead mainly concentrates on victims of ethnic cleansing and punishment among the Kurds and Shia, and buried in mass graves. It also leaves out the very large numbers of Iraqis and others who died as a direct result of war or as economic victims of Saddam's larceny and misrule.

See for instance, from Steven Hayes' report on the Abu Ghraib prison: "The assembly-line killing that took place within these walls accounts for a far lower death toll than the 300,000 estimated to lie in the mass graves now being dug up at scores of sites around the country. Still, "as many as 30,000 were executed here in this prison," Irvine explains. "There are reports--unsubstantiated reports--but there are reports of at least 100,000 people killed in this prison."

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/936wfkzy.asp