In a rather morbid piece Thursday, Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan fantasizes about all the evil that could have been avoided if Dick Cheney had only died from his first heart attack.

Inspired by the release of Cheney’s new book, Heart: An American Medical Odyssey, Nolan takes the opportunity to imagine a post-1978 world without Dick Cheney:

But what if Dick Cheney had died there on the floor in 1978? A promising young political leader, taken away all too young? He would not have gotten elected to Congress and spent the next ten years there. He would not have become Secretary of Defense in 1989. He would not have overseen the first Gulf War, nor the US invasion of Panama. He would not have spent five years as CEO of Halliburton. He would not have signed on as George W. Bush's vice president in 2000. He would not have been alive to see the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. And he would not have been in the White House to take a lead role in shaping America's response to those attacks, including the invasion of Iraq, the torture of terror suspects, and the global "War on Terror" that continues to this day.

And of course that last part, Cheney’s role in the invasion of Iraq, is the main thrust of Nolan’s musings.

Many of these historical events, of course, would have happened whether Cheney was around or not. But the Iraq War? Perhaps not. It's hard to imagine that George W. Bush himself would have formulated the plan to attack a nation wholly uninvolved in the 9/11 attacks, under false pretenses, without the strong assistance of a group of intellectual neocons led (and empowered) by Dick Cheney.

Thus, Nolan argues, if Cheney had not stubbornly survived, hundreds of thousands of people might still be alive...

So let's say that—conservatively speaking—approximately 300,000 people killed in the Iraq War would be alive today, had Dick Cheney passed away after his first heart attack in 1978.