A Mind That Suits What doesn't kill me, makes me laugh... usually.



Monday, November 17, 2003 :::
 
Okay, I'm disgusted. I subscribe to an e-mail service that delivers, whenever it shows its miserable head, the allegedly funny cartoon diatribes of Ted Rall. They are not funny, and they are not accurate, at least the ones I can stomach reading. One claiming that the US was keeping Jessica Lynch under wraps preceded by one whole day, or close to it, a page long investigative piece recounting of the whole story in the Washington Post, which included attempted interviews with Pvt. Lynch, who claimed amnesia. And who had signed a contract for her own book.

Yup, that nasty secretive old US government.

I used to read it regularly, but I admit that now I often just delete the thing without reading it, so I have no idea how often Mr. Rall pulls bloomers such as that one.

But today he cited something called the Iraq Body Count website, so I checked it out. Now, the "civilian body count" is the dog that hasn't barked in the whole story of the war. Remember how "Shock and Awe" was supposed to inflict damage on poor innocent civilians? Well, the poor innocent civilians had had quite enough of Mr. Hussein. They understood the fliers helpfully dropped at the behest of Sec.Rumsfeld, and so they moved away, to give the US a cleaner shot at the military targets. The only estimate I have seen for the civilian death toll during the first part of the war was less than 100. So there was silence--rather than any form of apology--from the left on that one.

(I add that I have now poked around their sight, and they maintain the number to be between 7500 to 9500. I have my doubts about that number, so I am going to work through their data base. This internet news sites are tricky. I am reminded of two myths, one using nearly identical methodology. The first was that we killed more civilians in Afghanistan than were killed on 9/11, the implication obviously being that the war was therefore unjust. That body count was completely sunk by the redoubtable Joshua Muravchik with an article in the Weekly Standard. The other was the "systematic attempt to purge Black voters from Florida rolls" before the 2000 Election. The Miami Herald--a wholely owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party of Florida in intent if not in law--was completely unable to find any evidence of such things. So my leftwing friends will have to accept the fact that if Reuters and the New York Times haven't glommed on to in their rush to discredit George W. Bush, it probably ain't so.)

Ahh, but now they have a new argument. By taking the routine number of bodies that made their way to the morgues of Baghdad and comparing it to the number of corpses being handled since April 9, they come up with the figure of around 1500 extra violent deaths caused by "the break down of law and order" since the US invasion.

What they are of course leaving out is the 1.5 million corpses that never made it to the city morgue. Dividing by the 24 miserable years Saddam ran the place, I came up with 1700 extra corpses PER DAY.

Oh, that nasty US. And what a paradise Iraq was before the "breakdown of law and order."

And of course, as the website admits, most of the recent deaths that matter to the people who run the website were caused by Iraqi on Iraqi violence. And this blog has hardly been shy about stating over and over again that the Defense Department bears responsibility for the routine violence that plagued Baghdad and Basra in the months after the first phase of the war, because there were not enough troops. But Amb. Bremer has actually got much of that under control, and a recent but ignored report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies praises the way that US forces on the ground have been able to change from the inexcusable policies of our first month to the ones now in place, which are working.

But they need more troops and personnel to carry them out.

Which means that many of the corpses now making their way to the Baghdad morgue are victims of the deliberate attacks of Saddam loyalists. Those grim numbers should be added to Saddam's column.

Where all memory of them would fade at the Irag Body Count. Because the people who run it don't really care how many people die. They care only about discrediting the US.

What no one has been able to show is any widespread desire on the part of the average Iraqi for the US to leave until they have a free economy and a stable government. And that alone should tell us how to view the Iraq Body Count.

(I add that I have now poked around their site, which did not advertise a "body count" for the war, but in fact contains one. They maintain the number to be something like 7500 to 9500. Given their "morgue report," that range of numbers needs to be 6000 - 8000. I have my doubts about even those number, so I am going to work through their data base. This internet news sites are tricky. I am reminded of two myths, one using nearly identical methodology. The first was that we killed more civilians in Afghanistan than were killed on 9/11, the implication obviously being that the war was therefore unjust. That body count was completely sunk by the redoubtable Joshua Muravchik with an article in the Weekly Standard. The other was the "systematic attempt to purge Black voters from Florida rolls" before the 2000 Election. The Miami Herald--a wholely owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party of Florida in intent if not in law--was completely unable to find any evidence of anything like that. So my leftwing friends will have to accept the fact that if Reuters and the New York Times haven't glommed onto it in their rush to discredit George W. Bush, my inclination is to say that it probably ain't so.)


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 3:13 PM


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