Comments on: George Will Previews SOTU, Takes Shot at Ex-POTUS

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 16:21:39 +0000

Well, no, I don’t concede the point…there are established ways of estimating these things, and human rights groups and other organizations have followed precise methodologies in coming up with their figures…

In any event, and this is truly my final word, though you and others are of course free to continue to discuss it:

Even if the numbers were one for one, any deaths we caused were unintentional and aimed at freeing the Iraqis from tyrany…and that makes all the difference in the world…some things are worth living for, and some are even worth dying for…

By: peter

peter — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 15:59:12 +0000

Not to beat a dead horse, but that’s exactly the point: nobody knows these things, so you have to pull numbers out of the air –

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 15:12:19 +0000

peter, come on…I give you citations, you pull figures out of the air, and then you compare deaths in wartime to everyday murder by a tyrant…

I’m going to have to let this one go…I’m losing both my patience and my cool at this pointless exercise in moral relativism…

By: peter

peter — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 15:03:38 +0000

OK, let’s assume that your numbers are correct: “70 and 125 civilian deaths per day for every one of Saddam’s 8,000-odd days in power.”

Let’s also assume that, as you cite, the number of Iraqi civilians dead is 30,000. Add 2,250 American dead. How many Iraqi soldiers died? We don’t know — let’s guess 20,000. Could be more, could be less. Now how many people died as a result of the secondary effects of the war? Again, we don’t know – let’s assume that is also 20,000. The total is 72,250.

It’s been roughly one thousand days since we invaded Iraq. That yields a mortality rate of 72 per day. Order of magnitude less than Saddam? Seems pretty close to me…

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 05:39:07 +0000

Some other examples of why the Butcher of Baghdad earned his name:

Under Saddam’s regime many hundreds of thousands of people have died as a result of his actions – the vast majority of them Muslims.

According to a 2001 Amnesty International report, “victims of torture in Iraq are subjected to a wide range of forms of torture, including the gouging out of eyes, severe beatings and electric shocks… some victims have died as a result and many have been left with permanent physical and psychological damage.”

Saddam has had approximately 40 of his own relatives murdered.

Allegations of prostitution used to intimidate opponents of the regime, have been used by the regime to justify the barbaric beheading of women.

Documented chemical attacks by the regime, from 1983 to 1988, resulted in some 30,000 Iraqi and Iranian deaths.

Human Rights Watch estimates that Saddam’s 1987-1988 campaign of terror against the Kurds killed at least 50,000 and possibly as many as 100,000 Kurds. o The Iraqi regime used chemical agents to include mustard gas and nerve agents in attacks against at least 40 Kurdish villages between 1987-1988. The largest was the attack on Halabja which resulted in approximately 5,000 deaths. o 2,000 Kurdish villages were destroyed during the campaign of terror.

Iraq’s 13 million Shi’a Muslims, the majority of Iraq’s population of approximately 22 million, face severe restrictions on their religious practice, including a ban on communal Friday prayer, and restriction on funeral processions.

According to Human Rights Watch, “senior Arab diplomats told the London-based Arabic daily newspaper al-Hayat in October [1991] that Iraqi leaders were privately acknowledging that 250,000 people were killed during the uprisings, with most of the casualties in the south.” Refugees International reports that the “Oppressive government policies have led to the internal displacement of 900,000 Iraqis, primarily Kurds who have fled to the north to escape Saddam Hussein’s Arabization campaigns (which involve forcing Kurds to renounce their Kurdish identity or lose their property) and Marsh Arabs, who fled the government’s campaign to dry up the southern marshes for agricultural use. More than 200,000 Iraqis continue to live as refugees in Iran.”

The U.S. Committee for Refugees, in 2002, estimated that nearly 100,000 Kurds, Assyrians and Turkomans had previously been expelled, by the regime, from the “central-government-controlled Kirkuk and surrounding districts in the oil-rich region bordering the Kurdish controlled north.”

“Over the past five years, 400,000 Iraqi children under the age of five died of malnutrition and disease, preventively, but died because of the nature of the regime under which they are living.” (Prime Minister Tony Blair, March 27, 2003) o Under the oil-for-food program, the international community sought to make available to the Iraqi people adequate supplies of food and medicine, but the regime blocked sufficient access for international workers to ensure proper distribution of these supplies. o Since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom, coalition forces have discovered military warehouses filled with food supplies meant for the Iraqi people that had been diverted by Iraqi military forces.

The Iraqi regime has repeatedly refused visits by human rights monitors. From 1992 until 2002, Saddam prevented the UN Special Rapporteur from visiting Iraq.

The UN Special Rapporteur’s September 2001, report criticized the regime for “the sheer number of executions,” the number of “extrajudicial executions on political grounds,” and “the absence of a due process of the law.”

Executions: Saddam Hussein’s regime has carried out frequent summary executions, including: o 4,000 prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in 1984 o 3,000 prisoners at the Mahjar prison from 1993-1998 o 2,500 prisoners were executed between 1997-1999 in a “prison cleansing campaign” o 122 political prisoners were executed at Abu Ghraib prison in February/March 2000 o 23 political prisoners were executed at Abu Ghraib prison in October 2001 o At least 130 Iraqi women were beheaded between June 2000 and April 2001

Now, here is the latest from Iraqi Body Count (an anti-war but generally fair source) for civilians killed (not by the U.S., mind you, but total civilians killed) in the Iraq war: between 28,287 and 31,891…a horrifying thought, yes, but an order of magnitude less than Saddam’s intentional butchery…

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 05:27:06 +0000

100,000 murdered Kurds in one operation alone – and back to the D-Day analogy…Germany attacked our allies, you say…well, Israel is our ally, and Saddam paid the families of suicide bombers, not to mention the plot to kill Bush I, and the attacks on our planes enforcing the UN-sponsored no-fly-zone.

Really, this is not a debate – the facts point in one direction only…

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 05:24:46 +0000

peter, sorry, my friend, it’s time to put an end to this charade:

“Along with other human rights organizations, The Documental Centre for Human Rights in Iraq has compiled documentation on over 600,000 civilian executions in Iraq. Human Rights Watch reports that in one operation alone, the Anfal, Saddam killed 100,000 Kurdish Iraqis. Another 500,000 are estimated to have died in Saddam’s needless war with Iran. Coldly taken as a daily average for the 24 years of Saddam’s reign, these numbers give us a horrifying picture of between 70 and 125 civilian deaths per day for every one of Saddam’s 8,000-odd days in power”

But such facts are not enough — because for him the true question is whether civilians killed by the war are “unnecessary”. I need to ask whether he thinks the civilian deaths were necessary or not. I clearly believe they were necessary to oust Saddam and save the lives he would have murdered, to free the children from prison, etc. — in fact more necessary than the atomic bombs to force Japan’s surrender If Mr. Crow is willing to accept Muslim fanatic terrorists with WMDs, or Muslim theocracy, rather than fight for Western/ Christian/ Capitalist/ Freedom, then indeed comparing death rates doesn’t mean much”.

Ronald Hilton – 4/25/03

By: peter

peter — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 04:19:02 +0000

sorry, meant to write “there are lots of hard data”

By: peter

peter — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 04:18:16 +0000

Mark: not at all — our allies were attacked by the Germans, we had the perfect right to defend them –

Clint: of course the Holocaust is established fact. The estimate of six million is considered reliable because the Germans were obsessive record-keepers and there is lots of hard data to support this estimate.

To the best of my knowledge, there are no similar data for Iraq. There are no census takers recording how many people died from bombs and ordnance, much less how many died from secondary effects such as hospitals which lacked supplies or electricity due to the war. There is no organization — not the US military, nor the Iraqi government, nor anyone else — which compiles this information. I don’t see how you could possibly say that more Iraqis died under Hussein than due to the invasion when nobody really knows how many people died as a result of the invasion.

There are no inconvenient facts I am trying to dismiss. Of course many people died under Hussein. I don’t dispute that. I just don’t see how you can accept as an a priori truth that more people died as a result of his rule than because of the invasion without facts to support it.

By: Clint

Clint — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 03:56:18 +0000

Peter-

Do you consider claims that on the order of six million people died in concentration camps in Europe during WWII to be established fact or mere speculation?

It seems rather convenient to dismiss facts you don’t like with phrases like “[t]here are simply no hard data.” Are you seriously suggesting that our current estimates, for example, of the dead in the Iran-Iraq war might be wrong by a factor of ten?? Or are you rather trying to rhetorically conflate a reasonable ten percent uncertainty with a total lack of information in order to dismiss inconvenient facts?

Re: “less” and “fewer” ( — a pedantic difference. I just put it in there because I liked the irony of putting it right after my own deliberately ungrammatical “do math good”.)

It’s the difference between things that you count (e.g. jelly beans) and things that you measure (e.g. water) — you have less water in your glass than I do, but I have fewer jelly beans.