Hitchens On The Moral Cowardice Of The Lancet Study
Our good friend the Hitch takes on the Lancet study, but from a different angle than other critics: he doesn’t see a need to dispute the figures, but rather the imputation they leave behind:
There have been several challenges to the epidemiology of the Lancet/Johns Hopkins team concerning their definition of a population sample. And it’s been noticed that Dr. Richard Horton, the editor of the magazine, is a full-throated speaker at rallies of the Islamist-Leftist alliance that makes up the British Stop the War Coalition. But I see no reason in principle why anyone who endorsed the liberation of Iraq, and who opposes the death squads of the Baathist/jihadist “insurgency,” should want or need to argue that the casualty figures are any lower. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that they are correct. We then enter an area of evidence and reasoning where epidemiologists are not the experts.
…The sanctions against Iraq were imposed because, for the second time in a decade, Saddam Hussein had forcibly occupied the territory of a neighboring state. (The number of Iranians and Kuwaitis killed as a result was quite horrifying.) In the meantime, his regime undertook a planned campaign of extermination in Kurdistan and conducted indiscriminate massacres in the south. Saddam laundered oil-for-food payments through the baby-formula market to help finance his palace-building, while Iraqi children were starved or stunted. His successors and allies did not allow one day of peace after the invasion before launching a hair-raising campaign of murder and sabotage and consciously inciting a civil war. The Lancet figures are almost certainly inflated, not least because they were taken from selective war-torn provinces. But there is no reason why they may not come to reflect reality more closely. It is a reminder of the nature of the enemy we face, and not only in Iraq, and a very clear picture of the sort of people who would have a free hand in Iraq if the coalition were to depart.
We should never forget, despite the horrifying carnage brought forth by the ‘insurgents’/terrorists, the type of regime that was overthrown. History may look at our management of the Iraq War rather harshly, but even if we withdrew all of our forces today, that wouldn’t decrease the unqualified good of removing Saddam Hussein from office…
every time someone scratches the surface of this organzation, it would appear someone has been channeling josef goebbels.
I think it would have been a service to the people who were opposed to the war, and ‘heartened’ by the exagerated numbers of dead, to have had the media tell them up-front who this organization was representing.
Reading the headlines, does not equate to to reading the actual news.
You would enjoy reading the portrait of Hitchens in the current issue of the New Yorker.
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News and notes from the MSM and the blogosphere:
– The talented RightWingSparkle is leaving the blogosphere, to pursue volunteer work, which is – as you’ll see from her post – something she finds immensely rewarding. Here’s wishing h…
Well, since they have on on-line edition, I will definitely seek it out (btw, another great argument for buying the Complete New Yorker on DVD, besides owning every issue, is every year you can purchase an update disk for about twenty books that contains the entire year since the last update…I got my first update disk the other day)…
Nuts – it’s offline only…guess I’ll have to wait until next year’s update disk!…
I’d rather not cut and paste my own blog post on this verbatim, but I’m only planning on basically retyping it here as it is, so here you go:
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Christopher Hitchens, joining the long line of people who attribute to others what they themselves are guilty of (a line greatly lengthened by those who supported the Iraq invasion I should say) accuses the authors of the Lancet study of “moral idiocy” for failing to accurately distinguish in their study between those who were killed by the evil insurgents and those killed by the unfortunate tendency of precision bombs to kill whoever they’re dropped on, insurgent or innocent. In doing so, he misses the point of course. The point of the study is to count the Iraqis who died who otherwise would not have died had we not invaded. That is because the death of every Iraqi man, woman and child at the hands of an insurgent or terrorist or militia member or precision bomb or American soldier or ciminal gang can ultimately be laid at our feet, because the conditions in which all of these people are dying would not have existed but for our moronic and useless invasion. Hitchens does this because he has a tremendous psychological need to neither be wrong nor to any degree guilty of the heinous act of using his words to help produce this war and these deaths. Either way Hitchens reveals not simply a moral idiocy, but a lack of a moral consciousness in his willingness to subvert reality (repeatedly) in an effort to convince others and himself that we have no reason to feel any bitter pangs of regret for this war.
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Or in short, if Hitchens is unable to accept that hundreds of thousands have died ultimately because of our choice to invade motivated by our own weak fear of terrorism, then he has no standing to comment on the war or it’s “progress” any further and should stick with writing about his old socialist days.
Yes, Xanthippas, of course – and tell me, where do the 180,000 murdered Kurds and countless tens or hundreds of thousands of others killed and tortured by the brutal regime of Saddam fit into your little moral calculus? What price, exactly, do you place on the value of not dreading the visit of the secret police in the middle of the night? Where do you fit in the free elections, the purple fingers, the free press, and the ability to think and do as one pleases?
You war opponents, you who are so smug and high and mighty – where were you when the Kurds were being slaughtered? I’ll tell you where Christopher Hitchens was – on the ground, in Kurdistan, while you and your ilk bemoaned the ‘cruel sanctions’ that you so easily grasp at now, as Hitchens points out, as ‘having hemmed Saddam in’…hemmed him in with no one to kill but his own countrymen (and of course, the Israelis who died at the hands of the suicide bombers whose families received $25,000 in cash from Saddam’s bloody till).
You have all the retrospective answers and no foresight, no vision. Where you would take the Iraqi people? Back to the days of Saddam? How many would go with you? Not many at all, I wager…no matter the bloodsheed, no matter the carnage, those who taste freedom seldom yearn for the whip…
Check out the WSJ op/ed page for a detailed explanation of why the Lancet study is not credible:
“655,000 War Dead?”
by Steven E. Moore
“Back to the days of Saddam? How many would go with you? Not many at all, I wager…no matter the bloodsheed, no matter the carnage, those who taste freedom seldom yearn for the whip…”
I’m tempted to go Arendthian on you.
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Nice.
Yes, yes, I have to fix that…
Glad to know it’s not some setting screwup on my FireFox.