According to this article in Alternet, a British polling firm has concluded that “1.2 million Iraqis have met violent deaths since the 2003 invasion.”  More disturbing, Americans have no idea that their invasion has caused such misery and, for the most part, the American media doesn’t care about reporting these tragic numbers.

Field workers asked residents how many members of their own household had been killed since the invasion. More than one in five respondents said that at least one person in their home had been murdered since March of 2003. . .  In Baghdad, almost half of those interviewed reported at least one violent death in their household.

Americans have no idea about the amount of bloodshed in Iraq:

Here’s the troubling thing, and one reason why opposition to the war isn’t even more intense than it is: Americans were asked in an AP poll conducted earlier this year how many Iraqi civilians they thought had been killed as a result of the invasion and occupation, and the median answer they gave was 9,890. . . .  Most of that disconnect is probably a result of American exceptionalism — the United States is, by definition, the good guy, and good guys don’t launch wars of choice that result in over a million people being massacred.

As indicated, the American media has no interest in communicating an accurate picture of the Iraqi disaster to Americans, and the plan is working:

While the stunning figures should play a major role in the debate over continuing the occupation, they probably won’t. That’s because there are three distinct versions of events in Iraq — the bloody criminal nightmare that the “reality-based community” has to grapple with, the picture the commercial media portrays and the war that the occupation’s last supporters have conjured up out of thin air. Similarly, American discourse has also developed three different levels of Iraqi casualties. There’s the approximately 1 million killed according to the best epidemiological research conducted by one of the world’s most prestigious scientific institutions, there’s the 75,000-80,000 (based on news reports) the Washington Post and other commercial media allow, and there’s the clean and antiseptic blood-free war the administration claims to have fought (recall that they dismissed the Lancet findings out of hand and yet offered no numbers of their own).