I've seen this math before, but it bears repeating again. Katie at the Resplendent Mango offers up an accounting lesson to the folks at Win Without War:

If there was one thing I could drill into the heads of the loony leftists (pointy things not withstanding) it would be the fact that we are not necessarily at peace just because we're not at war. Nor is that faux-peace necessarily better than war. By some estimates, 11,000 Iraqis have died from unnatural causes in the past 14 months. As opposed to approximately 36,000 a year under Saddam. Now, I understand that the Left believes that the US is evil as a matter of faith, but I fail to understand how 25,000 people not dying in the past year, people that would have either starved, or been raped and killed, or dismembered, or buried in mass graves, or some combination thereof, is a bad thing.

Be sure to read the rest of Katie's point.

UPDATE: For reader Miles Davis, who asked about the 36,000 per year figure that Katie used -- according to the BBC in 1999, she's incorrect. In fact, the BBC reported that continuing sanctions killed half a million Iraqi children in ten years alone, or 50,000 per year just in children -- while his Oil-For-Food program, which was supposed to take care of those children, instead lined the pockets of Saddam and a large number of UN and Western diplomats and politicians. Bear in mind that this number does not include the deaths that Saddam caused directly, which include the 300,000 in mass graves that were filled with Shi'a who attempted to overthrown him in 1991.

Before you place the blame for sanctions on the West, bear in mind that the sanction regime was demanded by the UN as an alternative to physically removing Saddam from power and to pressure him to reform and fulfill his obligations under the cease-fire agreements and UNSC resolutions. It was part of the "containment" strategy that Al Gore railed on about earlier this week. He failed to do any of that; Saddam and only Saddam was responsible for the continuation of sanctions.

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I saw a couple of things today that tie in to my theme of ‘”peace crimes”:457’. First, via Best of... [Read More]

Tracked on June 2, 2004 1:38 PM