My good friend and nemesis-in-chief, BB, posts one of his long comments in reply to my last piece on the Iraqi election. He focuses on evidence of Iraqi deaths due to violence in order to refute my contention that the recent election was a sign of victory in Iraq. That seems to me to confuse two questions: whether the war was good policy in the first place (on which I have taken no position), and whether we have won it (which I say we have). I don't know how to say whether this war was "worth it," but I do know how to say that it was better to win it than to lose it.
But let's look at BB's case. The long quote he posts is typical of MSM reporting on the human costs of the war: list every possible death and lay them all at the feet of Dubya. This is not an unreasonable stance. If Bush hadn't invaded, Muqtada Al-Sadr would never have had the chance to kill so many of his countrymen. So I guess you can say Bush was responsible for all the carnage committed by Al-Sadr, Al Qaeda, etc., in Iraq. But that carries a judgment that is never stated: that Saddam's tyranny was a good thing because it kept the Iraqis from killing each other. That's a harsh judgment, but it might be a sound one. Strange that BB and others who have to believe it, to believe the other things they believe, never seem to want to actually say or even think it.
But it is also telling that BB's quote relied heavily on the Lancet study of Iraqi war fatalities. It is from this source alone that BB gets his favorite stat (Killing over 2% of a countries population is not the path to freedom!). BB often accuses me of being ignorant of a lot of really important things. Strange that he doesn't know that the Lancet study has been totally discredited. The National Journal (no right wing rag, that one), deeply embarrassed Lancet, one of the most prestigious medical journals, by taking apart the study. You can read a summary of this story in a post of mine last January. Let me summarize it:
The study published in Lancet was based on surveys of a mere 47 "clusters" of households. It worked like an opinion poll, which is not an accepted method in this kind of research. Exactly which households were surveyed, where they were, and how they were selected is unknown. That's because the authors of the study refused to turn over their basic data when the study was questioned. A refusal to reveal the data on which a study is based is one of the surest signs of academic incompetence, if not outright fraud. If all that weren't enough, it turns out that all the data was gathered by a former member of the Saddam regime, Riyadh Lafta. It was his job, back when his boss wasn't hiding in a spider hole, or dead, to make a case that the sanctions on Iraq needed to be lifted because they were killing children. In other words, he was a propaganda minister for Saddam. The study had a number of American coauthors, but apparently they exercised no supervision over Lafta while the data was gathered.
This is the kind of research that critics of the war are willing to accept without question. After all, if your one criteria of truth is "Bush = Bad," what more do you need? I don't know whether the Iraq war was the right thing to do at the time. I have my doubts. I don't know whether it was worth the costs in lives and treasure, or even how to try to answer that question. But I do think that what is going on right now before our eyes, millions of Iraqis freely voting, is more reliable than a study rigged by one of Saddam's creatures. I am also sure that the humiliation of George W. Bush, however much that might satisfy the emotional needs of a lot of Americans, is less important than the promise of democracy in Iraq.
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