I INVOLUNTARILY laughed out loud and had to stop reading John Byrnes's silly defense of the indefensible Iraq war at this fatuous and hypocritical remark: Cindy Sheehan's dead son "helped overthrow and bring to justice a vicious dictator who will soon go on trial for the first of many counts of mass murder." Mass murder? How many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis has the United States killed in 15 years of war and sanctions against Iraq? Madeleine Albright acknowledged on CBS' 60 Minutes that half a million Iraqi children (567,000 to be more exact, according to the UN) had died as a result of sanctions as of May 1996. And the British scientific journal The Lancet published a study in October 2004 that suggests that 100,000 Iraqis have died as a direct result of the latest war. So what's the real total of Iraqis killed by the United States? We will never know because Saddam didn't want his people to know, the U.S. Government does not want our people to know, and the Iraqi government put in place by the U.S. does not want the Iraqi people to know, lest it be seen as a Quisling co-conspiring in mass Iraqi death. Only one thing is sure: the U.S. has killed far more Iraqis than Saddam ever did, and the chaos we produced has, according to The Lancet, made life for Iraqis 58 times as dangerous as it was under Saddam!

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:42 PM