Iraq Is Not "Violent" Today
One of my pet peeves about the way news is reported in this country is that the mainstream media often are incapable of providing the appropriate comparisons that make the news understandable. If I say my son is tall because he's 4'7", that statement is either meaningless or a joke or simply wrong unless or until I tell you that he's 7, so you can compare him to all the 4'3" 7 year olds -- only that comparison makes the raw data meaningful. If I say Milwaukee is violent because it has 150 murders a year, that statement is only meaningful if a comparably-sized city, say, Kansas City, has 100 murders a year. You get the idea.
Iraq is not "violent" today. Let me say that again: Iraq is not violent today, unless the word "violent" is drained of all of its meaning by being yanked out of the context of meaningful comparison. It's just not, and the mainstream media is incapable of reporting it. Here is the appropriate comparison for perspective from a blurb from USAID's Iraq page (hardly a right-wing source):
The United Nations, the U.S. State Department, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch (HRW) all estimate that Saddam Hussein's regime murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people. "Human Rights Watch estimates that as many as 290,000 Iraqis have been 'disappeared' by the Iraqi government over the past two decades," said the group in a statement in May. "Many of these 'disappeared' are those whose remains are now being unearthed in mass graves all over Iraq."
Elsewhere the same story estimates 400,000 bodies in mass graves. OK, so it's somewhere between 290,000 and 400,000 over the past 20 years. That's 15-20,000 a year, every year.
And here's the grisly report from Human Rights Watch, complete with pictures.
And, of course, that's not counting the 5,000 children a week who the Left told us were dying under the Oil-for-Food program and the UN sanctions through the 1990s. That's 250,000 a year! (In October 2001, Chris Suellentrop in Slate asked "Are 1 Million Children Dying in Iraq?").
And, again, that's not counting the hundreds of thousands or even millions estimated dead in the two aggressive wars that Saddam and the Baathists started in the 1980s against Iran and the 1990s against Kuwait.
And, finally, that's not counting the dead in Israel from suicide bombers paid bounties by Saddam.
As we look toward next week's elections in Iraq, we have to forget about what the mainstream media will be telling us, and remember: There is much less violence, much less death and destruction and despair in Iraq and the Middle East today than before we toppled Saddam, and the bulk of the violence, unlike the violence caused by the murderous oppression of Saddam's thugs, is justified violence by American soldiers against those same thugs (in the "just war" sense of the word). There is less violence. Keep saying it. There is less violence.
And there is infinitely more hope.
God bless America!
Iraq is not "violent" today. Let me say that again: Iraq is not violent today, unless the word "violent" is drained of all of its meaning by being yanked out of the context of meaningful comparison. It's just not, and the mainstream media is incapable of reporting it. Here is the appropriate comparison for perspective from a blurb from USAID's Iraq page (hardly a right-wing source):
The United Nations, the U.S. State Department, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch (HRW) all estimate that Saddam Hussein's regime murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people. "Human Rights Watch estimates that as many as 290,000 Iraqis have been 'disappeared' by the Iraqi government over the past two decades," said the group in a statement in May. "Many of these 'disappeared' are those whose remains are now being unearthed in mass graves all over Iraq."
Elsewhere the same story estimates 400,000 bodies in mass graves. OK, so it's somewhere between 290,000 and 400,000 over the past 20 years. That's 15-20,000 a year, every year.
And here's the grisly report from Human Rights Watch, complete with pictures.
And, of course, that's not counting the 5,000 children a week who the Left told us were dying under the Oil-for-Food program and the UN sanctions through the 1990s. That's 250,000 a year! (In October 2001, Chris Suellentrop in Slate asked "Are 1 Million Children Dying in Iraq?").
And, again, that's not counting the hundreds of thousands or even millions estimated dead in the two aggressive wars that Saddam and the Baathists started in the 1980s against Iran and the 1990s against Kuwait.
And, finally, that's not counting the dead in Israel from suicide bombers paid bounties by Saddam.
As we look toward next week's elections in Iraq, we have to forget about what the mainstream media will be telling us, and remember: There is much less violence, much less death and destruction and despair in Iraq and the Middle East today than before we toppled Saddam, and the bulk of the violence, unlike the violence caused by the murderous oppression of Saddam's thugs, is justified violence by American soldiers against those same thugs (in the "just war" sense of the word). There is less violence. Keep saying it. There is less violence.
And there is infinitely more hope.
God bless America!
posted by PDB at 5:32 PM
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