By Robert Koehler

Let him rest in . . . peace?

I don’t know. The irony of those words is a little too much for me to grasp as I sit here contemplating the death of Dick Cheney at age 84. Cheney, mastermind and primary organizer on the “war on terror,” which, in a 20-year span of insanity, cost the United States some $8 trillion and killed (murdered) nearly a million people, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

And as though that total wasn’t high enough, the Project notes that this number is very much an undercount, since it doesn’t include indirect deaths of the war caused by “disease, displacement and loss of access to food or clean drinking water.”

Revisiting these numbers in the wake of Cheney’s death throws some horrific complexity into the present-day news, that

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