It’s the war that has fueled international hatred of our government. It is an illegal war. It was promoted, started and sustained on a pack of lies. Bush invaded Iraq and opened pandora’s box. Hussein held the country together with an iron fist. Bush removed Hussein, decommissioned the Iraqi army, flushed the Bathists from power and the country fell into chaos. 600,000 deaths and more to come, countless more to come. This is a tragedy of epic proportions. Yet, we can all sleep easy cause Bush meant well . . . .

Our government hasn’t been internationally popular since long before Operation Iraqi Freedom. We are a superpower and that naturally breeds resentment among other countries. Operation Iraqi Freedom was certainily NOT an “illegal war” as you put it. Due process was followed both in beginning and in sustaining our efforts in Iraq. The Iraqi people under Saddam Hussein were expressly forbidden from having anything approaching WMD power, and although none were found, we had intelligence that implied that they were there. Even if they were not there, the Iraqi government’s initial resistance at having United States forces conduct a search is certainly grounds for suspicion. Action was required of the situation and taken. Meaning well and doing well are certainly two very different things, and in this day and age it’s incredible that anyone can “sleep easy.” Mistakes over the course of the war were certainly made, but to imply that George W. Bush is a murderer for making the decision to lead our country into war is ignorant.

http://mymiddleast.net/index.p…..;Itemid=26

Thank you.

As regards your contretemps with Jeff (see 177) please note my comment: “While we are responsible – these are deaths that would not have occurred had we not invaded Iraq – one should not state that the coalition has killed three quarters of a million Iraqis.”

Setting the UNDP survey against the Johns Hopkins / Lancet survey is something of an apples and pears comparison. The latter attempted to do a before-and-after comparison of death rates; the former was a living conditions survey in which deaths are a small subsection and its import lies in comparisons not over time but with the living conditions of other countries; its “war-related deaths” category is much more narrowly defined and would necessarily exclude most of the “excess” deaths shown in the Lancet survey.

There are acknowledged problems with both surveys, although some of the best known are spurious (a comparison of mortality rates in Iraq and, for example, the UK, shows the UK to be in a much worse state – but despite the war the most important factor here is the average age of the population, and while the UK has an aging population, 39% of Iraqis are under 15). For example the UNDP surveyors, unable to believe their amazingly low infant mortality statistics, resampled and then raised their estimate (for some reason they did not resample death rates in general).

But the main point to be noted here is that while the two surveys have been used in partisan attempts to refute opposition talking points, those involved know that they were’nt counting the same things and see no reason to get involved in the mudslinging.

Jeff @ 157:

The problem with your argument is that you’re assuming that the HRW Saddam stats and the current Iraqi government’s post-invasion death toll numbers are legit and the Johns Hopkins/Lancet study is not. If you will visit the two links I added in my update, you’ll see that there are serious, serious questions about the validity of the HRW numbers, far more than about the JH study.

Please don’t go pointing out microscopic specks in somebody else’s eye whilst ignoring the two-by-four sticking out of your own.

tdhcheri @ 167: The reason this is news again is precisely because the British government has admitted that it cannot be dishonest and attack the study’s methodology the way Bush did and does. And if you really want it to sink in with people, you’re not going to wait for the MSM to catch up — you’re going to send this out to all your friends and relations. Right? Much better to do something than to sit around and be cynical.

You’re confused and making a totally irrelevant point. My 157 had nothing to do with HRW’s numbers. I had an earlier post making the different point that the comparison with Saddam’s reign, as a moral matter of putting things in perspective, is foolish, since that’s no standard at all, so that it’s not like even if you could show that fewer Iraqis have died as a result of the war than under Saddam, it would be a moral argument that somehow the deaths for which we are largely responsible are okay.

But my comment at 157 had nothing to do with HRW. At most, you touch on one issue I raise, which is the Lancet study’s low estimate of sanctions-era death rates, as a baseline or whatever. But even if you were to throw that out, there remain a number of problems with the Lancet study.

And if you think those are specks, you’re just uninterested in actually learning anything. You can dispute them, but you’re the one who brought up the issue of their method and implementation to begin with, and those turn on what you’re now condescendingly calling specks.

What’s the log in my eye anyway? That it needn’t be 600,000 Iraqis dead to say it’s horrible and atrocious? That 100,000 Iraqi dead as a result of our war is not acceptable? That’s a log in my eye?

Nice argument.

That does raise an interesting question. Just how many more Iraqis have been maimed or wounded, relative to the number killed?

The Bush administration has been downplaying the number of Americans maimed or wounded since Bush started hostilities with Iraq in 2003. We must assume that the death count of Americans killed in Iraq is accurate, over 2,000, but who knows with the “creative accounting” of the Bush administration (kind of like Enron) what the wounded/maimed American total is. Guesstimates about the number of Americans wounded, maimed, falling ill or committing suicide in Iraq range anywhere from 25,000 to upwards of 60,000. Who knows?

So, how many Iraqi citizens, since war began, have been maimed, wounded, fallen ill or committed suicide? The figure must be in the millions if the number of Iraqi dead is somewhere near two-thirds of a million.

And then let’s add in the number of Iraqis who’ve either fled from Iraq or been displaced inside Iraq.

I’d guess that a combination of these three totals, the dead, the wounded, and the displaced, would be anywhere from 6 to 9 million Iraqi citizens, marking a pretty sizable chunk of Iraq’s population. But then, no one will ever know the exact amount. Iraq is a big country with a lot of sandy, desolate stretches just perfect for unmarked graves.

Don’t forget the million or so – including ~500,000 children – that died during the Clinton years as a result of sanctions. Clinton has as much blood on his hands as Bush does.

We can all thank Bush for mercifully ending the Clinton/UN sanctions. OMG if it weren’t for Bush the Iraqis would be suffering horribly from those inhumane sanctions! Thank you Mr. Bush, thank you! No wonder the Iraqis greeted our troops with kisses, candy and flowers . . . .

Comparing George W. Bush to Saddam Hussein is comparing apples to oranges. Although Bush has certainly blundered in Iraq, the Iraqi casualties are products of WAR. Those lives lost at the hands of Saddam Hussein were very literally at his hands. His orders were directly responsible for the deaths. Bush is not a bloodthirsty killer, he is not maniacal, nor does he want to kill Iraqis. The United States in Operation Iraqi Freedom has far exceeded its responsibility as a nation at war with Iraq already in staying in the country and attempting to assist the Iraqi populace in rebuilding. Attributing all the casualties of war to George Bush is a mistake, especially when comparing the nature of those casualties to those attributed to Saddam Hussein. Never once has Bush said, “Yanno fellas I really don’t like what that family’s doing over there. Get rid of them for me,” as Hussein has done countless times. What the author of this article has done is take what was a real news article and spun it into an emotionally charged issue, the author’s prerogative, but we certainly don’t have to buy into it. The tragic loss of life in Iraq is nothing to make light of, and our current president certainly has many things that he can be harshly criticized for, but to attribute the casualties in Iraq to his hands only serves to fuel undeserved national and international hatred of our government.

It’s the war that has fueled international hatred of our government. It is an illegal war. It was promoted, started and sustained on a pack of lies. Bush invaded Iraq and opened pandora’s box. Hussein held the country together with an iron fist. Bush removed Hussein, decommissioned the Iraqi army, flushed the Bathists from power and the country fell into chaos. 600,000 deaths and more to come, countless more to come. This is a tragedy of epic proportions. Yet, we can all sleep easy cause Bush meant well . . . .