Latest news on Iraqi casualties–the ORB study, reinforces Lancet. 1.03 Million excess deaths.

http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=88

I overestimated # of deaths, but then I didn’t ignore Fallujah.

I’m not quite sure what you mean by “had absolutely no control over the data gatherers;” do you mean that the data gatherers consistely lied about everything they did? How does this differ than any other survey ever taken? The data gatherers had some autonomy; it’s the way the world works. Are you complaining that the data was aggregated such that particular households couldn’t be identified, for perfectly reasonable reasons?

Any objection to the Orb study?

You might have misunderstood me too; maybe I didn’t make it clear enough that I wasn’t necessarily advocating invading Russia or China in the late 40s. I don’t know if that would have been better. You bring up all kinds of good reasons why it might not have been a good idea.

I think you could make Crocker or Petraeus into Democrats. I’m not sure about Petraeus, but it seems pretty obvious Crocker was against the invasion at the beginning. He helped William Burns write a memo for Colin Powell warning about all kinds of unpleasant aftereffects of the invasion during the run-up to the war. It would be a pretty easy pivot for a Democrat to say, we never should have gone, but let’s make the best of a bad situation. Call it the Pottery Barn policy. We broke it, we should fix it. I suspect, in fact, that is Crocker’s exact position.

On the larger point, I can come up with dozens and dozens of things I think Bush did that are wrong, that I strongly disagree with. But I don’t hate the man. I try to understand what moves him, and my view of him so radically diverges from the way many of his other critics depict him, I really think he is the most misunderstood (misunderestimated?) politician since Truman, or maybe even Lincoln. They are blinded by the hatred and will never acknowledge any good he has done; they won’t even concede him good intentions, which I think he has in spades. “Never impute to malice what can be explained by simple incompetence.”

Fear not. Plenty of statisticians dispute those numbers, too. And in January, the National Journal finally got the authors of the Lancet study to admit that they had absolutely no control over the data gatherers and couldn’t vouch for the veracity of the raw data, so the million plus number of casualties is a fairy tale. Look it up if you want. And if you google Iraqi diaspora, you’ll see that your numbers re: refugees are similarly inflated.

In March, 2003, Iraq had an estimated population of approx. 28 million. You claim 4 million have left the country, so we are down to 24 million. If we assume that 10 people are injured for every fatality, we have 12 million dead or injured, or half the population. Do you really believe that?

“Stalin was our ally in World War II. Why the hell would we turn our guns on him? He sacrificed millions of his Russians to destroy the Germans. If it were not for the Eastern Front, we would not have been able to take France from the Germans.”

One word: Gulag= more dead Russians than dead Jews. Stalin did sacrifice Russians, especially the ones who didn’t want to fight. And the ones who he didn’t like. And the ones that were smart. And the ones who weren’t Pavlovian dogs.

Wiser men? Shame, shame.

As for Korea- a country divided and perpetually pointing guns North and South is best, isn’t it?

Again your moral compass confuses me. You don’t get it, sir.

1. Apply morality to the lives of Iraqis.

3. See your #6 add to it the more current polling that the majority of Iraqis would like to see Americans stay in some capacity for one reason or another. You are arguing for whom? If the U.S. were not to try and secure the country in some way, you imply that there would be no vacuum, no opportunism by any other parties to sieze power, oil, you name it from the country?

4. More speculation based on speculation. Who is arming the tribes? Hint: look East. Hint: watch news.

5. Are you advocating we go in? All of the sudden your big moral foundation is crumbling with that big fat “So?” to start of the sentence. Admit that your arguments are based on self-interest and let’s move on.

6. See your #3- everything is connected- you say through time in one space, I say through time and all space.

7. You’ll have to explain yourself here, first in the context of Vietnam, and second, see your #3- how connected everything is- explain yourself in terms of the region. I think the blunder is 1) in the policy that put us in Vietnam, not the order, 2) the policy and procedure on the ground in Vietnam, and 3) the lasting effect.

If he were to come out in favor of petting puppies, you would see through this immediately and oppose it with every fiber of your being, understanding it to be an illegal arrogation of the power of the Presidency to transgress upon the sacred personal space of canines, no doubt all part of a dark Karl Rovian conspiracy to make Halliburton more money. They’re going into dog food now, don’t you know?

I think you do misread people like me (or let me just speak for myself). If Bush were to do the right things, then I would support him. As he keeps mucking up, I cannot in good conscience give him any support at all. It’s just that simple, Jeff.

My purpose here is not to defend that policy, but just to observe that this should have some natural appeal to some liberals. Enough liberals to forge a new bipartisan consensus.

It is a reprehensible policy and ineffectual. Liberals (even the anti-war left) aren’t against wars, Jeff. Their against, as Barack Obama said, ‘dumb’ wars. We never should have gone into Iraq. Staying in Iraq exacerbates our problem. The best solution is to start packing it up.

I mean, it could be that Patton had a point about us going to finish off Stalin at the end of WWII, and maybe Macarthur was right we needed to sock it to the Chinese in the Korean War

Actually both were utterly in the wrong and we can only be grateful for wiser men discarding such ridiculous proposals.

Stalin was our ally in World War II. Why the hell would we turn our guns on him? He sacrificed millions of his Russians to destroy the Germans. If it were not for the Eastern Front, we would not have been able to take France from the Germans.

And China? You want a land war in Asia? You’re not going to win if you go into China.

If they were right, then we could have spared the world from a hundred million deaths and the greatest crime ever perpetrated on the human race, which is the (attempted) implementation of communism.

And again, you’re not seeing the bigger picture. If we would have gone into both Russia (1945) and China (1952), we would have massacred tens of millions of Russians and Chinese. What would we do when we would have gotten bogged down? You think Truman wouldn’t use the nuclear weapon again? What you advocate here is reprehensible. Absolutely reprehensible.

As for Crocker and Petraeus, no, I don’t believe they are democrats or moderates or liberals. You honestly think that George W. Bush would allow someone even close to tinged by liberalism to be in charge of Iraq?

Forgive my frustration throughout this whole post. I think I’m going to take a break from commenting here. After six years now, so many Americans still just don’t get it.

Disease, 0? Lots of those deaths are from disease; it’s not easy to stay alive when your infrastructure has been bombed back to the, uh, iron age, anyone?

Humiliation? We’ve lost, we’re hated; where, just back in 2001 we were loved. only possilbe score 8.

Imperialism? What? Full scores! Why else would we invade a sovereign nation that hadn’t, you know, waged war on us. Contrast and compare with WWII.

Incompetence? Huh? 1? Winning hearts and minds, these days, are we? 7. Still. Just ’cause Petraus is a supremely good employee (his job) doesn’t mean that we didn’t take troops from where they were actually needed to face our real enemies (hint the actual Al Quaeda) to bolster those darn other enemies (hint, there’s an election coming up, and McCain is all about Iraq).

Cmon. We are screwing up. Get a clue.

1. Yes, because those are what we are fighting for. The standards which we espouse. Morality and legality. Or is that just silly propaganda?

2. Agreed.

3. The current situation in Iraq does NOT stand alone. Nothing stands alone. Everything is tied together. If you keep thinking it stands alone you will fail. This is why Americans can’t seem to grasp why the Iranians, for example, might have such a hatred of the United States. See, they don’t see it through the “just now” lens. They look back and say, “You know what, those Americans removed our democratically elected leader back in the fifties and installed the repressive shah.” Iraqis may not realize that it was the CIA that placed the Ba’ath Party in power, but they know from other experience (and from other parts of the Middle East) that the United States tends to muck up, sow chaos and then come in to claim they will clean up and rectify!

The situation may have drastically changed, but it is wholly tied to our going in in the first place. It is solely the reason why Americans continue to be attacked. Because we’re there. Because we went in. It doesn’t matter if it is 2008. It doesn’t matter if it will be 2012. We are attacked because we went in.

4. Frankly, I see no reason to support the surge. a) The Bush administration could not get enough troops to actually accomplish the stated goals (you still need in the range of 400,000 to 500,000 combat troops to accomplish the stated goals—political suicide to endorse, of course). b) The point of the surge was “political reconciliation.” But if you look at all our actions, there was very little in the way of getting the various parties and factions to reconcile. In fact, we were doing opposite things, like arming the various tribes. What do you think those various tribes are going to do with those weapons? Do you think they’re going to hand them over to the national government when all is done? Puhlease! c) We were still killing Iraqis. Never a good sign for a successful counterinsurgency, and something even General Petraeus (who wrote the counterinsurgency manual himself) doesn’t seem to get—you cannot kill Iraqis and expect to win a counterinsurgency among Iraqis!

5. So? There are atrocities in the Sudan. Why are you not advocating we go in?

6. Ah, the domino effect. I’m sorry nasamomdele, but that is a discredited theory.

7. Not really. Leaving Vietnam was not as great a blunder as going in. Leaving Iraq will not be as great a blunder as going in.

Was that on topic?

Indeed it was. :)

In the military, they say that “hope is not a strategy.” And I would add a corollary: In politics, hatred is not a policy. In fact, it’s even pretty bad politics. As DKL pointed out, it killed the Republicans during Clinton.

Now, it is true that the Chomskyite far left, which believes that American power abroad can never be benign, and the Buchananite far right, which is happy to let the rest of the world burn, could unite along a policy of isolationism. But there are just not enough revanchist hippies and Know-Nothing Republicans to forge a working coalition. And furthermore, there are too many “wise men” (and this includes Albright and Rice; I mean no gender exclusion by my term) who will end up in powerful positions who will have a natural instinct that they know just how to manage a particular sticky situation overseas; I doubt they would be able to resist intervening. No, I am looking for a centrist bipartisan post 9/11 foreign policy that is also realistic about the human foibles of people in power.

Rather than you guys, I was thinking about Democrats like Vice President Gore, who (as recounted in Richard Clarke’s book) as they were puzzling over the legalities of extraordinary rendition. According to Clarke, Gore came late to this meeting, listened for a while about the pro’s and con’s of rendition, and said, “The guy’s a terrorist? Nail his [butt].”

Or I am thinking about Jane Harman, and other House Democrats, when they were briefed on the interrogation techniques, encouraged the CIA to “push hard”. With a bipartisan consensus, even if such things are determined to be illegal, laws can be changed, executive orders can be rescinded or rewritten. (I am NOT, please understand, making a comment about whether such things are a good idea, or if they are moral. We’ll go there some other time.)

The NYT columnist Tom Friedman is the archetype of the guy I am thinking of when I say “realist” foreign policy comprised pro-Saudi and pro-Israeli foreign policy. He is both, and initially supported the Iraq invasion, I believe, and a good part of Bush’s program. No longer.

Where did all these people go? I think the only explanation is that their fear, their perception of the seriousness of the threat, went down over time. People upset about Iraq, who scream that Al Qaeda wasn’t in Iraq before 9/11, fail to grasp what Bush’s new foreign policy was about. It was never just about Al Qaeda or even terrorism; still less about WMD proliferation, though these were all aspects of a larger whole. Fundamentally, it was about what Bush believed to be the sources of (Islamic) terrorism; in his view this was our overly cynical, “realist” policy of propping up dictators in the name of “stability”. He said this might have flown during the cold war, when we had bigger (Russian) fish to fry, but now, rogue states, failed states, and Islamofascism were the big scary fish.

My purpose here is not to defend that policy, but just to observe that this should have some natural appeal to some liberals. Enough liberals to forge a new bipartisan consensus. More than just Joe Lieberman. I’m not sure where the failure lies, exactly, but I have to wonder if it’s as simple as Bush had the misfortune to be a Republican. When George Kennan wrote his seminal article about “containment” of Communism, Truman was in office. He was also terribly unpopular, perhaps even more unpopular than Bush, but his policy of containment was largely followed until the fall of communism. The saying is, “Only Nixon could go to China,” maybe we have now learned that “only a Democrat could go to Iraq.”

Do I sound indifferent to what form our bipartisan post-9/11 foreign policy should actually take? I guess I am, so long as it has a chance of being notionally effective. I mean, it could be that Patton had a point about us going to finish off Stalin at the end of WWII, and maybe Macarthur was right we needed to sock it to the Chinese in the Korean War. If they were right, then we could have spared the world from a hundred million deaths and the greatest crime ever perpetrated on the human race, which is the (attempted) implementation of communism. But I don’t know. In hindsight, containment eventually worked, and it had enough bipartisan support to sustain itself for two generations of politicians. I’m not sure the American people had the stomach to march to Moscow or into China, even if that could have destroyed communism.

Sure, the left was less enthusiastic about this policy than the right, in general, but there was enough to keep it going.

My advice for the Democrats (and believe it or not, I am one. Says it right here on my voter card! I don’t believe it sometimes; probably the only way I could pull such a thing off is because I live in Utah, but even here I’m starting to wonder; it seems to have been taken over by a bunch of expat Marin-county scolds) is you would be a lot smarter to get this whole Iraq thing off the table. Everybody knows domestic policy is where all the action is anyway; Presidents only turn to foreign affairs when their political capital at home is exhausted.

I would bet anyone $100 (or I would bet, if I wasn’t a good Mormon boy) that both Petreaus and Crocker are Democrats. They talk and act a lot like Democrats to me. Or rather, were Democrats before they were treated so savagely by them on the Hill. What the Democrats should do is cut out all this shrill rhetoric and try to get Iraq off the front pages and let Crocker and Petraeus finish their jobs. Then, they should recruit one or both of those guys to run for office. By my lights, their platform of vigorous foreign policy abroad, their popularity for saving our bacon in Iraq (if they manage to pull it off, however may be necessary to define success either upwards or downwards) would allow Democrats a strong mandate to push through all the domestic programs they want. I mean, Republicans are naturally skeptical of government programs, but not Democrats. If people believe Petraeus can clean up the mess in Iraq, then who better to implement National Health Care, for instance?

To bring this somewhat back on to topic, I think the domestic political consequences of the War of 1812 were actually quite mild. Manifest Destiny kept chugging along.