To to tell the guys responsible for attacking the Green Zone with 20 mortars that the surge has been an enormous success. Similarly with whoever planted the homemade bomb in southern Baghdad that killed four American soldiers. I hope things manage to stay on roughly this plateau until through the election and when we get a chance to start bringing the troops home, but I think you've got to fear that as spring turns to summer and we can't maintain the full-size surge deployment that violence is going to keep crawling back up.
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Someone Forgot
23 Mar 2008 10:34 pm
Comments (36)
"I hope things manage to stay on roughly this plateau until through the election and when we get a chance to start bringing the troops home"
A normal person would hope for things to get better in the coming months. Then again, normal people don't have a monomaniacal need for events to support their desired policy outcome in Iraq...
Well, maybe the answer is another surge!
A normal person would hope for things to get better in the coming months. Then again, normal people don't have a monomaniacal need for events to support their desired policy outcome in Iraq...
A reasonable person would hope for things to get better in Iraq, but would also understand that they will not. A reasonable person would also understand why things in Iraq will not get better, and would thus oppose continued U.S. efforts to subjugate Iraq through a strategy of divide-and-rule.
Fox news fan - okay, hows this: I hope the people of Iraq put aside their difference to unite to force the United States out of Iraq, as soon as possible, and join with other nations in the middle east to force the United States to leave the region entirely? How's that? Happy, you fucking monster?
A New Fox News Fan is right! Matt is an awful troop hater and Iraqi hater for being so skeptical that he is nervous that the situation will likely get worse, so he publicly hopes 'only' that the current, moderately less bad situation stays constant!
Yeah Matt!
I'll show you!
I'll not only hope it gets better, I hope that the Iraqis overcome all the violence, and then invent solar-powered entrepreneurship machines that magically make all our troops rich & happy!!!
See? Now that is what you're supposed to publicly hope for.
ANFNF, let me translate MattY's post into the simple words that you speak: "I hope that things in Iraq don't get worse."
And on the five year anniversary show, the CNN reporter was remarking on how great it was that the Green Zone was no longer getting shelled.
MY _ Someone forgot to to tell the guys responsible for attacking the Green Zone with 20 mortars that the surge has been an enormous success. Similarly with whoever planted the homemade bomb in southern Baghdad that killed four American soldiers.
AS a liberal Jew, Matt is more familiar with Harvard and pen-pushing than with military measures of success and assessing how insurgencies are going.
An example would be MY claiming the existence of Israel was proved "failed" - because 42 suicide bombings in 2002, and their inability to make Islamoids want and deliver on secular democracy in Palestinian areas...
Obviously, when you have an intelligent, resourceful enemy, committed to kill with all their soul, as with the Nazis and Islamoids - then you have V-2 rockets still raining down on London weeks after Hitler's death, and Saudi suicide bombers kept under lock and key in Mosul so they don't desert before they can be used.
People - the committed ones - fight all the way to the end.
And, when the end is reached, for amny populations - the only way to get them to accept defeat is to subject the occupied people to complete ferocity of repercussions. While we should never be as subhuman as the Japanese were against insurrectionists, obsolete Geneva Conventions need substantial change to account for assymetric warfare and civilian populations that support insurgency and bushwhackings.
Josef Broz Tito united Yugoslavia agains rival insurgents by laying out reprisals unless they stopped fighting. His favorite was complete isolation of a village his people were bushwhacked in or hit with command-detonated mines or IED booby traps was to encircle the town, kill any military age boys or men coming close or attempting to leave, and waging a complete embargo of food, medicine, coal in or out...until the dying residents caved - with warnings that if they did attack Tito's people again, the town would be isolated until the last resident died.
The Israelis preferred the more expedient "ethnic cleansing" as have the Islamoids. Flush out all dangerous minorities, level their former village, plant flourishing Zionist farms..
The Russians solved their "insurgency" problem by mass artillery fire into hostile villages, or with the Germans, by gang-raping every innocent Nazi female from 12 to 75, with Round 2 promised if a Red Army soldier was bushwhacked.
All three methods - (1)Seige, (2)Cleansing, (3)direct reprisals - were quite effective and may have to return with Geneva Conventions currently failing to make both sides comply with lawful war rules...
Look the surge HAS been a huge success. Just like all the other actions of the Bush/neocon/liberal-hawk team, if there wasn't a surge (fill in any other action in the blank space) things would be much worse.
Fox News Fan: A normal person would hope for things to get better in the coming months.
A normal person would hope for things to get better and the insurgency to be crushed within days, not months. But then the normal person doesn't hate the troops, like you seem to.
Well, perhaps our friend "Chris Ford" can enlighten us about exactly *why* we're still in Iraq or its Green Zone?
The Iraqis don't want us there. Our soldiers don't want to be there. Our top generals don't want to be there. The American people don't want to be there. And the whole thing costs a godawful amount of money, which we really can't afford right now.
Admittedly, Iraq has oil. But if give whoever ends up controlling the oil just a little money, they'll give us the oil. It's called "trade."
Bush doesn't want to leave because it would mean he "failed". And since he's already failed at just about everything else in his life, he doesn't want yet another failure.
Our mercenary-contractors don't want to leave because they're getting paid ridiculous sums of money. McCain doesn't want to leave because he's too stupid to know up from down.
But aside from Bush, those expensive mercenaries, McCain, and perhaps a few others, why in the world would anyone want us to stay in Iraq?
What the fuck, Yglesias?
...I hope things manage to stay on roughly this plateau...
Is that supposed to mean what I think it could mean? Pretty shitty choice of words. I find it hard to believe that you'd like the current rate of US deaths in Iraq to be maintained in order for a candidate of your particularly liking to be elected, but that's sure as hell the way it sounds.
MY is pretty clearly pragmatically wishing for the violence to stay at this relatively low level, all the while acknowledging the specter of increased violence in the coming months.
"MY is pretty clearly pragmatically wishing for the violence to stay at this relatively low level, all the while acknowledging the specter of increased violence in the coming months.
Posted by Andy | March 24, 2008 1:23 AM"
But how can the wingnuts feed their need for anger without misinterpreting things on purpose? Being a neocon not only means never having to say you're sorry, it also means never being able to calm down and just live life without being pissed off 24/7.
MY is pretty clearly pragmatically wishing for the violence to stay at this relatively low level, all the while acknowledging the specter of increased violence in the coming months.
I understand this, but his leaving himself pretty well open for misinterpretation.
- then you have V-2 rockets still raining down on London weeks after Hitler's death,
Hitler's death - 30 Apr 1945
Last V-2 rocket attack - 27 Mar 1945
(yeah, yeah don't feed the troll, etc, etc.)
"The Israelis preferred the more expedient "ethnic cleansing" as have the Islamoids. Flush out all dangerous minorities, level their former village, plant flourishing Zionist farms.."
Yeah, because driving Palestinians off their land sure was effective at avoiding a prolonged insurgency.
Of course, that's beyond the idiocy of suggesting that we should, in our quest to ostensibly liberate the Iraqis, indiscriminately kill anyone in the immediate area of an insurgent attack.
But if it makes you feel touch to suggest brutalizing civilians, post away...
It seems to me that there's a small minority posting here who are literally hoping for a defeat in Iraq so they can feel justified in their tunnel-vision perspective on the history of our involvement there, and exact revenge against their hated political enemies.
I'd like to see a more realistic approach. We didn't initially get into Iraq in 2003, and the place isn't going to lose its geopolitical importance during the next administration, or most likely in the next generation. We need a much less ideological approach to what we need to do there, but everyone should agree that there is no reason to think we can simply bail out. I'm confident that Obama is no more likely to do so than McCain or Hillary.
A good start would be to recognize that Iraq has the most representative and legitimate government of any Arab state, and we have a decent relationship with this government. The Iraqi government is much more likely to know and reflect what the Iraqi people want than bloggers' speculations based a few drive-by partisan opinion polls. According to Larry Kaplow, one of the longest-serving US reporters in Iraq (he's been there since 2003 for Cox News and Newsweek), "...many (Iraqis) want a US pullout, but most also say it should not happen until America provides for their security...". This is reflective of our interests too.
It doesn't take much of an organization to set off a car bomb or fire the occasional mortar. Aside from the Iraqi government, there is no group in Iraq that's remotely prepared to run the country. There is no indication that the "insurgency" has popular support, infrastructure, a plan for governance, or the slightest chance of actually taking power.
The new American mega-embassy should have a nice mortar fire cross-section.
Robert P,
I'm certainly hoping for victory for the Iraqi people, but that would entail a defeat for the United States. So in that sense you are correct, though I don't think that's what you mean.
And, vis a vis popular support in Iraq, of course I guess it depends what you mean by "the insurgency." If you mean AQI, you are surely correct, which is one reason we should leave; they don't need our help to beat that tiny organization, and our leaving would only help defeat it (as leaving would (a) dry up whatever tiny support it does have, and, more importantly, (b) dry up its recruiting sources). But if you mean the various Sunni and Shite militias, which often fight each other and sometimes fight us, of course they have broad popular support. That's all there is.
You keep professing to believe that the Unites States is in some sense "allied" with the people of Iraq. We aren't.
So shut the fuck up you baby killing monster.
Re Chris Ford
In his list of insurgency suppression actions, Mr. Ford missed perhaps the most effective such action since the end of WW 2. That was the action of Syrian President Hafaz Assad in the matter of a terrorist campaign emanating from the Syrian City of Hama which was attempting to overthrow the Assad kleptocracy and install an Islamist government in Damascus. As I have described on many occasions on this blog, Mr. Assad had the city surrounded with several hundred artillery pieces and commenced a concentrated fire for 2 days in 1982. The result was that in excess of 20,000 people had their tickets canceled. Rough stuff but very effective as the perpetrators of the insurgent campaign against the government hasn't been heard from since. This is what NY Times writer Tom Friedman dubbed "Hama Rules."
A "normal" person would hope for peace and happiness everywhere. A "normal" person knows that could begin with American soldiers leaving Iraq this morning.
As for that happening, it isn't going to. Things get worse: we stay. Things get better: we stay. In "reality" words have no fixed meaning. There's only will and power. That's "reality" on the Monday after we celebrate the Resurrection.
Violence in Iraq has been increasing since January despite the surge. And the "improved" levels of violence in late 2007 were the same as the unacceptably high levels of violence in 2005.
The purpose of the surge was not to tamp down violence--that was just step A. The Iraqi gov was supposed to use that breathing space to drastically improve and become effective, and that hasn't happened. Yes, little bits of it happen here and there on the edges, but it's around a great mealstrom that isn't improving.
Matt's hoping for what could realistically happen--steady but not increasing violence for a few months. Sure, I'll hope that violence ceases and a unified, effective Iraqi government suddenly appears, aided by their solar-powered entrepeneurship machines. I also hope the Easter bunny will be by today with a second round of chocolate eggs.
See? Now that is what you're supposed to publicly hope for.
El Cid, I can't tell who you hate more: the troops or America. How can you possibly not wish for the Iraqis to also burst into spontaneous yet unified song about the glories of democracy and America, while using their newfound technologies to cure cancer?
Your shortsightedness alarms me.
Tyro wrote:
ANFNF, let me translate MattY's post into the simple words that you speak: "I hope that things in Iraq don't get worse."
Yes, I expect that IS what MY was trying to say. But his tortured syntax and typing errors tend to obscure his meaning. He badly needs an editor.
I know, I know.....don’t feed trolls. But damn, this is too tempting!
“People - the committed ones - fight all the way to the end. And, when the end is reached, for amny populations - the only way to get them to accept defeat is to subject the occupied people to complete ferocity of repercussions. While we should never be as subhuman as the Japanese were against insurrectionists, obsolete Geneva Conventions need substantial change to account for assymetric warfare and civilian populations that support insurgency and bushwhackings.”
“The Russians solved their "insurgency" problem by mass artillery fire into hostile villages, or with the Germans, by gang-raping every innocent Nazi female from 12 to 75, with Round 2 promised if a Red Army soldier was bushwhacked.”
Let’s ignore the fact that there was no significant German insurgency in post-WW2 Germany. They, the German, people, largely accepted the fact that they started a war and lost, fair and square. Lets also ignore the truly monstrous suggestion that the mass-gang rape of German women, (mostly in the greater Berlin region though), was actually a fomented plan to dissuade an insurgency. Russian soldiers raped German women, NOT NAZI, German women because they felt liked it. Some poor souls didn’t only suffer through “Round 1” as you so perversely called it; some had to endure up to “Round 20”.
Let’s ignore all of that. Question. How exactly did Ike and his boys crush the raging insurgency in the half of Germany that the US and her Western allies ended up capturing? Mass rape? No! Simply put, even if the German people wanted to start an uprising, they couldn’t have. F.D.R. went to war with enough troops, even though his US of A was attacked by surprise. The details can be found here: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EG01Ak01.html
But the Cliff-Notes version is in 1945, Germany was a defeated nation, requiring a troop ratio of about 2.2 per thousand. Iraq of today would require a troop ratio of 20 per 1,000, ala the British army’s role in Northern Ireland. Of course that ratio would require 480,000 in Iraq, the total authorized strength of the entire active duty US Army. And I think former US Army colonel Daniel Smith knows a bit more than you are I about the subject.
So not only are you grossly immoral, you’re ignorant as hell too! I just really hope that you aren’t the same Chris Ford that coached my beloved Boston Celtics from 1990-1995. That would suck.
I know, I know.....don’t feed trolls. But damn, this is too tempting!
“People - the committed ones - fight all the way to the end. And, when the end is reached, for amny populations - the only way to get them to accept defeat is to subject the occupied people to complete ferocity of repercussions. While we should never be as subhuman as the Japanese were against insurrectionists, obsolete Geneva Conventions need substantial change to account for assymetric warfare and civilian populations that support insurgency and bushwhackings.”
“The Russians solved their "insurgency" problem by mass artillery fire into hostile villages, or with the Germans, by gang-raping every innocent Nazi female from 12 to 75, with Round 2 promised if a Red Army soldier was bushwhacked.”
Let’s ignore the fact that there was no significant German insurgency in post-WW2 Germany. They, the German, people, largely accepted the fact that they started a war and lost, fair and square. Lets also ignore the truly monstrous suggestion that the mass-gang rape of German women, (mostly in the greater Berlin region though), was actually a fomented plan to dissuade an insurgency. Russian soldiers raped German women, NOT NAZI, German women because they felt liked it. Some poor souls didn’t only suffer through “Round 1” as you so perversely called it; some had to endure up to “Round 20”.
Let’s ignore all of that. Question. How exactly did Ike and his boys crush the raging insurgency in the half of Germany that the US and her Western allies ended up capturing? Mass rape? No! Simply put, even if the German people wanted to start an uprising, they couldn’t have. F.D.R. went to war with enough troops, even though his US of A was attacked by surprise. The details can be found here: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EG01Ak01.html
But the Cliff-Notes version is in 1945, Germany was a defeated nation, requiring a troop ratio of about 2.2 per thousand. Iraq of today would require a troop ratio of 20 per 1,000, ala the British army’s role in Northern Ireland. Of course that ratio would require 480,000 in Iraq, the total authorized strength of the entire active duty US Army. And I think former US Army colonel Daniel Smith knows a bit more than you or I about the subject.
So not only are you grossly immoral, you’re ignorant as hell too! I just really hope that you aren’t the same Chris Ford that coached my beloved Boston Celtics from 1990-1995. That would suck.
Damn. Double post. Sorry!
Re:baby-killing monsters.
The UN says that the sanctions folks like Larry M usually tout as "working" killed half a million Iraqi children, and about an equal number of other innocents among the old and infirm. The best current statistics, also from the UN, indicate that less than a quarter of that number of Iraqis have been killed since the invasion, most of them by fanatics who are enemies of the US, Iraqis, and civilization, and not an insignificant number the fanatics themselves that we should be killing. Real baby-killing monsters need to face the reality that playing ball with genocidal dictators has consequences, even if they don't get 24/7 media play.
We are currently putting ourselves on the line to protect innocent Iraqis and support the development of their freely-elected government. That seems a much more moral position than killing people randomly by remote control in such a way as to enhance the grip on power of their tormentors.
On Germany: there was no "insurgency" because we and our allies killed or crippled nearly every male German between the ages of fifteen and sixty-five and occupied the country with a huge war machine. Abuse of German POW's was pervasive, and often fatal. Rape was a ubiquitous feature of the Red Army's standard operating proceedure from East Prussia to the Oder.
We're doing much better now. Genghis Khan tactics are not required to support the development of the current Iraqi government, which has representation from most of the countries' major factions, some of which have militias, that are not only not fighting us, but whose leaders have officially asked us to stay.
Powell,
You obviously have no fucking clue what my position is - I was against the sanctions also - they were, indeed, a horrible crime. As I think I've made clear in this and other threads, my position is that the United States has no business at all in the middle east, and never has. They should leave completely.
What bugs me is baby killing monsters like Powell who actually pretend to care about the people in the middle east. The fact that some so called progressives are, in there own way, almost as bad, does not change the fact that every intervention by the United States in the Middle East has, on balance meant more deaths and less freedom. Contrary to his bullshit lies which even he probably doesn't believe, our current policy in Iraq is helping no one. We are deliberately fomenting violence and instability to provide a justification for our indefinite presence there. It is an ongoing war crime of staggering proportions.
May Mr. Powell, Bush, Cheney, the entire political establishment, and anyone who supports any of them, burn in the fires of hell for all eternity.
"According to Larry Kaplow, one of the longest-serving US reporters in Iraq (he's been there since 2003 for Cox News and Newsweek), "...many (Iraqis) want a US pullout, but most also say it should not happen until America provides for their security..."."
And of course, the Iraqis are just as ignorant about this being even vaguely POSSIBLE as they are ignorant about wondering why after four or five years, there STILL isn't any electricity in Baghdad.
And they are just as ignorant about this as most US citizens.
Meanwhile, every OTHER poll - not cited by Powell, of course - states that up to eighty percent of Iraqis want the US OUT - and up to sixty percent approve of attacks on US troops.
Here's an example:
Iraq poll September 2007: In graphics
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6983027.stm
93% of Sunnis and 50% of Shia approve of attacks on US troops.
47% back an immediate withdrawal, compared with 35% in February.
"The poll also shows dwindling support for troops remaining in the country, even in support of the Iraqi government and security forces. Only 10% of those surveyed favour coalition forces remaining for that purpose."
Not to mention that he once again pulls out the bullshit about only a few hundred thousand Iraqis killed, when the actual figure by at least TWO studies is over a million, with one study pinning at least 300,000 of those directly on US military action.
Once again, Powell is a deliberate fucking liar.
LarryM--it's nice that you recognized the tragic criminality of the sanctions, but there's not a shred of evidence that minus regime change anything was going to be any different going forward. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
Things aren't great in Iraq, but for nearly everyone other than Sunnis who were running the place under Saddam they are much better. Certainly the nutrition and water purification deficit that killed so many of the most vulnerable Iraqis under sanctions has been substantially fixed. The real question is, "were things better under Saddam?". Most Kurds and Shi'ites, who comprise more than 80% of the population, seem to consider this question a cruel joke by ignorant foreigners.
Most Western opinion polls in a place like Iraq are meaningless, but I imagine that in general nearly everyone would prefer us out. We will be leaving at a pace and in a manner determined in consultation with the Iraqi government, which is by far the most representative and legitimate one in the Arab world.
The casualty figures are of course very difficult to determine, and highly politicized. The Iraq Body Count figure is surely too low, although not as far off as many think given the fact that Iraq has by far the most vibrant free press in the region. But on the other extreme, we have some studies based on a few hundred interviews that float numbers more than ten times this while the authors baldly state their political bias and hopes for their study to influence elections. It seems to me that the recently released UN study is by far the most credible as it has a huge sample, and relies on pretty good Ministry of Health data on things like death certificates and actual bodies in morgues over time.
You should be more polite, Hack. I'm the only one here who makes any response at all to your ranting, and I'll probably stop as you continue to be primarily parroting gossip and innuendo from the anti-American fringe.
Powell lies again:
"It seems to me that the recently released UN study is by far the most credible as it has a huge sample, and relies on pretty good Ministry of Health data on things like death certificates and actual bodies in morgues over time."
In fact, the UN/Ministry of Health study was criticized heavily for NOT relying on death certificates, and being conducted by non-neutral observers (i.e., the Ministry of Health).
The Ministry of Health is also KNOWN for under-reporting Iraqi casualty figures going back years.
Read here:
Counting Iraqi Casualties -- and a Media Controversy
The author commissioned the "Lancet" study recently attacked in a National Journal report and by the Wall Street Journal. He calls the criticism a "hatchet job," fraudulent or based on innuendo.
By John Tirman
http://www.marketingymedios.com/eandp/columns/shoptalk_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003711142
Money Quotes:
"Another survey, this one undertaken by a private U.K. firm, Opinion Business Research (ORB), found more than one million dead through August 2007. Yet another, a much larger house-to-house survey was conducted by the Iraq Ministry of Health (MoH). This also found a sizable mortality figure—400,000 “excess deaths” (the number above the pre-war death rate), but estimated 151,000 killed by violence. The period covered was the same as the survey published in The Lancet, but was not released until January 2008.
The ORB results were almost totally ignored in the American press, and the MoH numbers, which did get one-day play, were covered incompletely. Virtually no newspaper report dug into the data tables of the Iraqi MoH report, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, for that total excess mortality figure, or to ask why the MoH report showed a flat rate for killing throughout the war when every other account shows sharp increases through 2005 and 2006. The logical explanation for this discrepancy is that people responding to interviewers from the government, and a ministry controlled by Moktada al Sadr, would not want to admit that their loved one died by violence. There were, instead, very large numbers of dead by road accidents and “unintentional injuries.” The American press completely missed this."
"The two principal authors, Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts, parried the fraud charges effectively on their web site and in letters to the editors, but of course these are rarely noticed as much as the original charges. Those charges were wholly speculative and at times based on small irregularities in the collection of data, hardly a crime in the midst of the bloodiest period of the war. For example, some death certificates were not collected from respondents; about 80 percent of the time they were. (In the Iraqi MoH survey, death certificates were never collected, making their claims about violence v. nonviolent causes unconfirmable.)
In any case, the many peer reviews of The Lancet article, including one by a special committee of the World Health Organization, gave the survey methods and operations passing grades.
Munro then went on the Glenn Beck program and suggested the Iraqi researchers were unreliable (“without U.S. supervision”) and that the Lancet authors “made it clear they wanted this study published before the election.” Both of those assertions are untrue. Beck then repeated these allegations on his radio program, and added that there was no peer review of the fatality figures, another falsehood, and “we’re getting it jammed down our throat by people who are undercover who are pulling purse strings, who are manipulating the news.”
The charge, repeated in all these media, that the Iraqi research leader, Riyadh Lafta, M.D., operated “without U.S. supervision” and was therefore suspect is particularly interesting. Munro, in a note to National Review Online, asserted that Lafta “said Allah guided the prior 2004 Lancet/Johns Hopkins death-survey,” which he also had noted in the National Journal piece. When he interviewed me he pestered me about two anonymous donors, demanding to know if either were Arab or Muslim. A pattern here is visible, one which reeks of religious prejudice.
Munro had also ignored the corroborating evidence I sent him, the 4.5 million displaced (suggesting hundreds of thousands of fatalities, drawing on the ratio of all other wars); estimates of new widows (500,000 from the war); and the other surveys done in Iraq suggesting enormous numbers of casualties (ABC/USA Today poll of March 2007, showing roughly 53% physically harmed by war)."
"The treatment of the MoH survey that week often noted its death-by-violence number was one-fourth of the Lancet figure -- forgetting, again, that total war-related mortality were much closer in both, and congruent with other surveys."
Powell is an unmitigated piece of shit for lying in this manner.
And this article makes it clear why:
What is the real death toll in Iraq
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/19/iraq
"Estimates of the Iraqi deaths caused by Saddam's regime amount to a maximum of one million over a 35-year period (100,000 Kurds in the Anfal campaign in the 1980s; 400,000 in the war against Iran; 100,000 Shias in the suppressed uprising of 1991; and an unknown number executed in his prisons and torture chambers). Averaged over his time in power, the annual rate does not exceed 29,000.
Only the conservatively calculated Iraq Body Count death toll credits the occupation with an average annual rate that is less than that - some 18,000 deaths in the five years so far. Every other source, from the WHO to the surveys of Iraqi households, puts the average well above the Saddam-era figure. Those who claim Saddam's toppling made life safer for Iraqis have a lot of explaining to do."
So does this fucking troll Powell.
[The UN says that the sanctions folks like Larry M usually tout as "working" killed half a million Iraqi children, and about an equal number of other innocents among the old and infirm]
it doesn't of course. The accepted figure is 350,000 for the entire period 1991-1998, with the death rate much lower in the period 1998-2003 because of the success of the oil-for-food program. The "half a million" figure is largely Saddam-era propaganda, based on one study.
Thanks to dsquared for an "accepted figure". I'd appreciate a source.
I think UNICEF still stands by its accounting, but I'll defer for the sake of argument to your figure of 350,000 innocents, with an undetermined additional number between 1998-2003 mitigated by the "success" of oil-for-food. It's a huge number, and pursuant to a program that counter-productively tightened the regime's grip on power. And of course we'll just pass over the toll of routine police-state repression that was the norm for Ba'athist Iraq. This was working?
Hack, you need more objective sources. "He said, she said" is not science.
Comments closed April 06, 2008.
| 
Heads in the Sand
I feel bad for the Iraqis who were killed in the attacks.
Posted by LarryM | March 23, 2008 10:48 PM