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Stranger than
fiction
US military intervention into Iraq has actually saved
thousands of lives
By Don Polson
09/07/07 "
Red Bluff Daily News " -- -- President Bush saved
the lives of almost 300,000 Iraqis, mostly children! How?
Read on.
Since the whole issue of "dead Iraqis" has become part of
the latest permutation of the "Bush lied, people died"
tripe, my July 30, 2005, 'News and Views' is particularly
relevant. At that time, a British medical journal, The
Lancet, was prominently quoted by war opponents because it
published the calculations of scholars (anti-war, of course)
from Johns Hopkins University, estimating Iraqi civilian
deaths.
The "100,000 civilians died" myth was thus born, based on
shabby methodology that even I could poke holes in. You see,
their actual figure of "98,000 extra deaths in the
post-invasion period (through July, 2005)" was arrived at -
you're not going to believe this - by surveying Iraqis for
anecdotal (word of mouth) reports.
I translated their formula so readers could see that they
were "95 percent confident" that between 8,000 and 194,000
civilians died during that period. I wrote "This pathetic
attempt at quantification is what passes for objective fact
to those on the left. Iraq's own Health Ministry put
civilian fatalities at less than 4,000. The Project on
Defense Alternatives estimated 11,000 to 15,000 Iraqis were
killed in the war, only 3,200 to 4,300 of those being
civilians."
The Iraq body count reported as many as 25,000 civilian
deaths through that July. They used news media reports that
were tallied by anti-war organizations with an obvious bias
to maximize the deaths. Moreover, their own analysis said
that U.S.-led forces accounted for a little more than
one-third of the deaths, with crime/terrorism/insurgent
activities (Iraqi-on-Iraqi) accounting for the rest.
I just checked the latest report at the iraqbodycount.org
website and, through July 17 this year, they total between
71,302 and 77,852 "reported civilian deaths resulting from
the US-led military intervention in Iraq" which by now is
overwhelmingly "Iraqi-on-Iraqi." So, less than 80,000
through July 17 - remember that as you read on.
I then wrote, "A much larger point is the utter hypocrisy of
the anti-war crowd. In the 12 years of sanctions, imposed by
the U.N. to pressure Saddam on weapons compliance, up to one
million Iraqi civilians died, many of them infants. That
figures out to about 83,000 dead per year while Saddam used
money from approved oil sales to build palaces and starve
his people (of food and medicine).
"Can the anti-war left show how they expressed appropriate
outrage, at the time, over the hundreds of thousands of
deaths Saddam caused? I think not!"
In light of all this, I say with 100 percent confidence,
that President Bush, by removing Saddam and thereby ending
the sanctions, is responsible for almost 300,000 more Iraqis
being alive, mostly children, than would have been under
Saddam. Do the math! And, quit with the Bush-bashing,
"sophomoric, disingenuous" cheapshots.
Don Polson has called Red Bluff home since 1988, is a
past president of the Tehama County Association of Realtors
and is a licensed Realtor. His column runs Monday. He can be
reached by e-mail at
donplsn@yahoo.com
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