"Bonehead" Is Too Gentle. (Long entry. Read at your leisure — but before November 7th.)
+
Media have been all aflutter in the past few days about Bill O'Reilly's appearance on Letterman last Friday. I saw a minute or two of that exchange, but turned off in disgust when O'Reilly made up a statistic to try to justify the U.S. war against Iraq. David Letterman expressed concern that we've done terrible things to Iraq and asked O'Reilly if he really thinks the people of Iraq are better off now than under Saddam. O'Reilly then claimed that Saddam killed 400,000 people. That is an invention, a number snatched from the clear blue sky. A fabrication. No such statistic exists, nor could exist, because Saddam did not keep track of how many people his government killed; the opposition could not have that information; the present government has no such information; Amnesty International has no such information. No one on Earth has any such information, nor could.
+
An attempt to tally Saddam's toll by The New York Times produced a toll half that invented by O'Reilly. In "How Many People Has Saddam Killed?", January 27, 2003, John F. Burns said:

Casualties from Iraq's gulag are harder to estimate. Accounts collected by Western human rights groups from Iraqi émigrés and defectors have suggested that the number of those who have "disappeared" into the hands of the secret police, never to be heard from again, could be 200,000. As long as Mr. Hussein remains in power, figures like these will be uncheckable, but the huge toll is palpable nonetheless.

Burns's figures are no more reliable than O'Reilly's. Burns, however, admits that the figures are unreliable, just guesses by people who are not necessarily disinterested observers but who may have an ax to grind against Saddam's regime. There are many such people.
+
In channel-surfing last nite, I chanced across the last half hour or so of an astonishingly absurd British 'documentary', Saddam and the Third Reich, that tried to tie Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler! Never mind that Saddam wasn't born until April 28, 1937, so was only 8 years and 2 days old when Hitler died. Preposterous comparisons are made between Hitler and Saddam, and the program asserts that Saddam regarded Hitler as his hero. Everything the 'documentary' asserted about Saddam being isolated and suspicious, and killing people who might challenge him for power could be said about just about any dictator anywhere, and especially about Stalin. Indeed, the Burns article above says, explicitly:

Since then, Mr. Hussein's has been a tale of terror that scholars have compared to that of Stalin, whom the Iraqi leader is said to revere, even if his own brutalities have played out on a small scale. * * *

Mr. Hussein even uses Stalinist maxims, including what an Iraqi defector identified as one of the dictator's favorites: "If there is a person, then there is a problem. If there is no person, then there is no problem."

So which was Saddam, a Nazi or a Communist? It's all nonsense, slanderous nonsense. Saddam was a bad man. He was not a Nazi. He was not a Communist, and it is not necessary to compare him to Hitler, Stalin, or any other generally vilified tyrant to object to his atrocities.
+
Getting back to O'Reilly's assertion that Saddam killed 400,000 people, four points jump out: (1) the claim is unsubstantiated and unsubstantiatable;(2) even if it were true, the U.S. has killed far more Iraqis than that; (3) a great many, if not an actual majority of Iraqis today feel that they were better off under Saddam; and (4) there are far worse governments in the world, about which the United States has done nothing.
+
(1) Letterman called O'Reilly on his fabrications:

"A reasonable person can't believe what you're saying." [And, when O'Reilly said the U.S. isn't a bad country, doing evil things,] "You're putting words in my mouth, just the way you put artificial facts in your head."

Letterman had prepared the audience in advance, that he was likely to call O'Reilly a "bonehead", and at one point did so, to the audience's delite, telling O'Reilly immediately thereafter that he had told the audience he'd say that. O'Reilly said he'd heard that (in the 'green room'). Yes, 'Dave' (I know we've never met; forgive the informality), O'Reilly is a bonehead.
+
(2) The U.S., Britain, and Iraqi interim and 'permanent' governments have been unwilling and unable to do a body count of the dead during the invasion and occupation. Saddam was unwilling to give a full count of the dead from the first Gulf War, tho I read somewhere that he did offer a round number of 100,000 dead, tho a study commissioned by the U.S. military suggested less than 25,000. Since both the U.S. Government and Saddam's had reason to minimize the death toll for their respective audiences, and there was no reliable count, we will never know. A great many Iraqis died as a result of a decade and more of sanctions. And then came Gulf War II and the unending occupation, in which, every day, dozens of Iraqis die in violence that would have been impossible under Saddam. In early January 2006, leftwing Anglo-Irish writer Alexander Cockburn (who lives in the U.S.) wrote:

President Bush's off-hand summation last month of the number of Iraqis who have so far died as a result of our invasion and occupation as "30,000, more or less" [that is, more than TEN TIMES the number of Americans who died on 9/11, which we thought was TERRIBLE, in a country 1/12 our population, and thus the equivalent in U.S. national terms of 360,000 dead Americans] was quite certainly an under-estimate. The true number is probably hitting around 180,000 by now, with a possibility, as we shall see, that it has reached as high as half a million.

But even Bush's number was too much for his handlers to allow. Almost as soon as he finished speaking, they hastened to downplay the presidential figure as "unofficial", plucked by the commander in chief from "public estimates". Such calculations have been discouraged ever since the oafish General Tommy Franks infamously announced at the time of the invasion: "We don't do body counts". * * *

Of course the [Lancet] survey [which estimated 100,000 deaths] ... was conducted fifteen months ago [then; 24 months ago now]. Assuming the rate of death has proceeded at the same pace since the study was carried out, Sprey calculates that deaths inflicted to date [January 2006] as a direct result of the Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq could be, at best estimate, 183,000, with an upper 95 per cent confidence boundary of 511,000.

Though the figures quoted by Bush were without a shadow of a doubt a gross underestimate (he couldn't even be bothered to get the number of dead American troops right) 30,000 dead among the people we were allegedly coming to save is still an appalling notion. The possibility that we have actually helped kill as many as half a million people suggests a war crime of truly twentieth century proportions.

In some countries, denying the fact of mass murder is considered a felony offence, incurring harsh penalties. But then, it all depends on who is being murdered, and by whom.

Well, it turns out that there has indeed been an update to the Lancet study, which I only now heard about in looking for the information. I had to search for it. It didn't come to me, or to Americans generally, thru prominent mention in the news, tho the Associated Press did carry a story 18 days ago:

President Bush says he doesn't believe it, and Iraq's government called it exaggerated.

But several experts said that a study that estimated that the Iraq war has led to the deaths of nearly 655,000 Iraqis seems sound.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, Iraq, derived that estimated death toll from a door-to-door survey, conducted by doctors, of 1,849 households in Iraq. Taking the number of deaths reported by household residents, they extrapolated to a nationwide figure.

The researchers, reflecting the inherent uncertainties in such extrapolations, said they were 95 percent certain that the real number is somewhere between 392,979 and 942,636 deaths.

Even the lower figure is almost eight times most other estimates.

The new study — which attributes roughly 600,000 of the deaths directly to violence and 55,000 more to other war-related causes — was released Wednesday on the Web site of The Lancet, a respected medical journal.

To make that figure fully meaningful to Americans, we need to multiply it by 12 to give the equivalent in U.S. terms, since Iraq has 1/12th our population. 392,979 (the low-border figure) x 12 = 4,715,748. The mid-range figure of 655,000 x 12 is the equivalent of 7,860,000 Americans killed here. And the upper-limit figure, 942,636, x 12 = 11,311,632. But let's just discount all these figures and arbitrarily knock off 200,000 from the lowest Lancet figure. That yields 450,000 dead Iraqis due to the U.S. invasion. That's still 50,000 — or 12.5% — more deaths in Iraq in the short time since our invasion (3 1/2 years) than Saddam is asserted to have caused in 24 years! Perhaps we need to speak not of "deaths", but of "people killed", to make the point. 450,000 people killed by our invasion. 50,000 more people killed than Bill O'Reilly claims for the 'monster' Saddam. We're not monsters, so why would we produce death tolls even remotely within the vicinity of what Saddam caused, much less higher? Or are we in fact monsters who refuse to accept our monstrousness?
+
How about Iraqis dead from sanctions between our military attacks? Bill Clinton's Secretary of State, the odious Madeleine Albright, was asked if a posited half-million dead (mostly children and the elderly) from sanctions was worth the price, and did not hesitate to say Yes. One extreme figure offered by the Iraqi government was 1.8 million dead from sanctions between 1990 and 1999. So how many Iraqis have we killed? 100,000 or more in the first Gulf War; a minimum of 500,000 thru a decade of sanctions; 450,000 or more since the 2003 invasion = a grand total of, round numbers, 1,050,000. Times 12 yields the equivalent of 12.6 million Americans dead at the hands of a foreign power. Is it any wonder that Iraqis think they had it better under Saddam? They even had electricity, sewage treatment, and sanitary water under Saddam. Not under us.
+
Bill O'Reilly said we needed to oust Saddam because he had killed 400,000 Iraqis. That was over the course of almost 24 years in power (1979-2003). Whatever the death toll from U.S. action might be, that is from a period only two-thirds that long (1990-2006). Who is to oust us? We are to oust us. That is our responsibility on November 7th: to end the crimes committed in our name, by ousting the criminals who have created deadly chaos in a country 7,000 miles from the nearest part of the United States and which never attacked us.
+
(Little aside: In looking for how many Iraqis the U.S. has killed, I inadvertently typed "www.aks.com" (instead of "ask.com"). Oh, just what we need: an ebonics search engine!)
+
(3) The Times of London printed an article 7 months ago titled 'I hate to say it, but we were better off under Saddam'. In the intervening months, things have only gotten worse. What might we have achieved for the Iraqi people by trying to moderate Saddam's behavior rather than overthrow him? Remember Nixon and Communist China? We're supposed to be very proud of having helped to moderate the behavior of the Butchers of Beijing (even tho a book published by Harvard University Press in 1999 estimated that Communists killed 65 million people in China). Why was 'constructive engagement' with the Butchers of Beijing OK but constructively engaging Saddam was unthinkable?
+
(4) Among the governments on planet Earth with a far worse record of atrocities against their own people than Saddam Hussein's, count North Korea's and the Sudan's at the very top. (Tho Communist China, darling of Wal-Mart Republicans, was worse not long ago.)
+
Neither country keeps good records, but outside observers estimate that over a million North Koreans have died from government-induced starvation and political repression under Kim Jong Il. That's the little man who recently exploded a nuclear weapon. George Bush has done nothing about him. We hear a little now about one part of the Sudan, Darfur, where mass starvation, deliberately produced and continued by the central government, has killed many and threatens many more. The BBC says:

The latest research published in September 2006 in the journal Science puts the numbers of deaths above and beyond those that would normally die in this inhospitable area at "no fewer than 200,000".

This is only the latest of endless crimes by the Sudan's national government against the people of the southern Sudan. The CIA World Factbook summarizes:

Military regimes favoring Islamic-oriented governments have dominated national politics since independence from the UK in 1956. Sudan was embroiled in two prolonged civil wars during most of the remainder of the 20th century. These conflicts were rooted in northern economic, political, and social domination of largely non-Muslim, non-Arab southern Sudanese. The first civil war ended in 1972, but broke out again in 1983. The second war and famine-related effects resulted in more than 4 million people displaced and, according to rebel estimates, more than 2 million deaths over a period of two decades. Peace talks gained momentum in 2002-04 with the signing of several accords; a final Naivasha peace treaty of January 2005 granted the southern rebels autonomy for six years, after which a referendum for independence is scheduled to be held. A separate conflict that broke out in the western region of Darfur in 2003 has resulted in at least 200,000 deaths and nearly 2 million displaced; as of late 2005, peacekeeping troops were struggling to stabilize the situation. Sudan also has faced large refugee influxes from neighboring countries, primarily Ethiopia and Chad, and armed conflict, poor transport infrastructure, and lack of government support have chronically obstructed the provision of humanitarian assistance to affected populations.

George Bush sees no need to do anything about the government of the Sudan. If the Sudan were treating Israel the way it is treating black Africans, might Bush do something? If Kim Jong Il had his missiles aimed at Israel, might Bush do something? Surely so. But as long as Israel's security is not at risk, the U.S. doesn't care about the rest of the world. As soon as Israel's security is at risk, however, the U.S. Government will mount an invasion 7,000 miles from our nearest shore, spend hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money to maintain a years-long occupation that kills tens or hundreds of thousands of Israel's enemies, and try to persuade the American people to launch yet more wars (against Iran and Syria) to protect Israel. I don't care a thing about Israel. It's not my country. And I would never kill so much as a single Iraqi, much less hundreds of thousands, to protect Israel. Nor do I value Israeli lives one whit more than the lives of innocent civilians in North Korea or the Sudan.
+
This is our government, folks. (I assume, for this purpose, that most people who read this are Americans. Outsiders, especially from Canada and Britain, should consider how the admission of their own area to our Union would alter the political balance and thus policies of the United States.) We're supposed to be responsible for what it does, and we are, if we keep electing bastards who commit horrible crimes of commission and omission in our name. November 7th we have the chance to begin to redeem our good name. Will we?
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,814 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:56 PM