I was for the Iraq war back when it started – a fact that I don’t go around blatantly advertising, but also one that I wouldn’t deny if asked (a la Kerry). Certainly things haven’t gone as smoothly as I would have hoped, but whenever someone starts to make me think that maybe it was a mistake, I reflect back on why I thought it was a good idea in the first place. Every time, I’ve arrived at the same decision I did the first time.
And here we go again. This whole death toll thing that Erik brought up got me to thinking, because I had been assuming that despite all their complaining, Iraqis were doing better than under Saddam. But this assumption, I realized, had more to do with the way I lean politically than any factual evidence. So I thought I had better figure this one out.
Well, it turns out that, even if we took Erik’s arguments at face value, fewer Iraqi civilians are dying in Iraq now than under Saddam. But Erik’s numbers are ridiculously skewed (“Iraqi’s deemed enemies”?!?) to try to make his argument make sense.
More realistic numbers put the death tolls somewhere between 25,000 and 45,000 people a year. An excerpt for those who don’t wish to read the whole thing:
Coldly taken as a daily average for the 24 years of Saddam’s reign, these numbers give us a horrifying picture of between 70 and 125 civilian deaths per day for every one of Saddam’s 8,000-odd days in power.
But thats just the beginning. The thing that is really nasty about what Erik is doing here is that he is blaming the United States for the deaths caused by Terrorists that Saddam harbored and criminals that Saddam ordered released before he was removed from power. In the words of Erik’s favorite website, IraqBodyCount.net, the reported death toll “includes civilian deaths resulting from the breakdown in law and order, and deaths due to inadequate health care or sanitation.”
Add on to this that Erik takes this website’s highest estimate to do his calculations, and goes out of his way to find a ridiculously low death toll under Saddam – all to try to prove what? That “Finding the difference between Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush” can’t be done?
Well, for most of us, Erik, the differences – and there are many – ain’t that hard to see.
For starters, even your darling John Kerry had the chance to vote in favor of invading Iraq before Bush could do anything. This is as opposed to Clinton, who never even mentioned operation Desert Fox until it had happened. Oh, and there’s that little thing that comes up in about a month, where a few people do that voting thing to decide wether to keep him or ditch him. If it were that easy with Saddam (and if he’s really not such a bad guy, as you claim), then we wouldn’t be in this whole mess to begin with.
Saddam was put into power by the United States, and perhaps for that reason also, this war is a burden the United States had to carry moslty by itself. And that brings me to the final point: No matter how for or against this war you may be, you have to realize that the enitre situation was unneccesary. If the United States hadn’t been meddling with foreign governments in the first place, supporting dictators like Saddam that were somehow “less bad” than some other threat, or at least “stabilizing forces” in their region, then we wouldn’t have to be cleaning up after ourselves now and for years to come. The best long-term policy is the one that the Libertarian Party endorses – and that policy was best summed up by Thomas Jefferson: “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”
John Stossel is an anchor of ABC’s 20/20. His book Give Me A Break is the best introduction that I know of to the Libertarian perspective. If you’ve ever heard Stossel report, you should immediately hear his voice come through as you start reading this book. He gets down to business pretty quickly, but he doesn’t get bogged down in it, so you will always be wanting to read more.