Delayed Vindication
CHICAGO BOYZ
By James R. Rummel on War and Peace
Shannon Love was taken to task by the anti-war left way back in 2004. The reason why he drew their ire was because he dared to question the wisdom of a suspicious study that appeared in the Lancet. The study claimed that about 100,000 civilians died in Iraq during the first year after US forces invaded.
Why was this suspicious? Mainly because the authors of the study laid the blame for the deaths at the feet of the Coalition, the number of deaths were ten times higher than any other credible estimate, and because it was released just in time to effect the 2004 US elections.
(If you are interested in the back and forth, this post is a roundup of all essays discussing the study.)
Strategypage reports that the Iraq government has just released the findings of a study of their own.
"The government has released data showing that 110,000 Iraqis have died, mostly from sectarian and terrorist violence, since 2003."
So the 100K figure is finally correct, only five years after it was first reported. And the Coalition forces didn't cause the majority of the deaths but terrorists, criminals, and blood feuds are to blame.
Does this matter now, five years after the fact?
It does because it is yet another example of how the Left gets the major issues of the day wrong. By any reasonable measure, a great deal of their credibility should have been flushed away by the vitriolic partisanship they exhibited through their attacks on Shannon. Their desperate grasp of anything that might have justified opposing the invasion of Iraq were acts of emotion, not reason. The fact that they were willing to allow emotion to color their perceptions of reality so completely, and how they were willing to defend their position even when the facts were arrayed against them, is nothing less than insane. The real world doesn't matter, only what they want the real world to be matters.
Unfortunately, I doubt the evidence that they were hopelessly off base will make any impact. They will still make the same tired arguments, still stroke themselves as being morally superior, and still insist that black and white are reversed.
That, too, is a sign of insanity. |
