It is as I said: Bill Maher, on this week’s “Real Time,” brought up the Lancet report showing that “we’ve killed 600,000 Iraqis.” This is outright misinformation, catching on as conventional wisdom. The issue is not simply the veracity of the number, but the allocation of responsibility for the slaughter. The report shows that the majority of killings can be attributed to… well, it doesn’t say, but we can surmise it’s Sunni insurgents and Shia death squads, government-run and otherwise.
It was wrong for Bush’s crony capitalist administration to plunge Iraq into this hell. It is wrong now to fulminate with rage against the U.S., as Lancet editor Dr. Richard Horton does, while saying nothing about the moral depravity of the Iraqi killers — or even allying oneself with forces such as Stop the War (UK), which has propagandized for the Iraqi killers. This is not peace activism.
I don’t get Bill Maher sometimes. He’s given equally flattering, obsequious interviews to Benjamin Netanyahu and Noam Chomsky. He has a lively show, he’s funny, sometimes on the mark, sometimes quite clueless. Now he’s taking this line that Saddam made the trains run on time, that fewer people died under Saddam, etc. The awful Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Insitute fired back at Maher with bluster rather than the hard facts she could have — that Saddam killed nearly 200,000 Kurds between 1987 and 1989 alone, massacred the Shias in enormous numbers, bumped off political opponents routinely for years and years… you get the picture. Maher is empirically wrong, yet he keeps insisting we “look at the facts.” Hopefully one of his future guests will attack this idea that Saddam-style “stability” meant comparatively little death. It’s revisionist garbage.
However, the death toll in post-Saddam Iraq is of course climbing, precipitously, disgustingly, and life for the average Iraqi is undeniably more dangerous. The keep-your-head-down option – the defense mechanism that defines life in a police state — is no longer even on the table. Everyone is a target, all the time. Rightists and liberal hawks always ask, “Would you be happier to see Saddam in power?” No, not happier. But now thousands of freelance Saddams — and worse — are raging across Iraq with impunity. And they’re looking to export their madness. I can tell you I’m not happy about that.
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