February 15, 2005
WE DIDN'T EVEN NEED LITTLE BOY? BONUS!:
Hiroshima Mon Amour (John Chuckman, 15 Feburary, 2005, Countercurrents.org)
The most profound reason for rejecting favorable judgment of Bush's policy comes from a brief thought-experiment. Iraqi losses have been convincingly measured at a hundred thousand dead. Hundreds of thousands more were maimed or wounded. Millions were reduced to no means of earning a living. The total loss and devastation are comparable to America's dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and likely exceed it.
So we've achieved for the Iraqis what we did for the Japanese, ushering them into the age of liberal democracy, at the cost of what just one bombing run in WWII did? Where's the downside? Posted by Orrin Judd at February 15, 2005 11:10 AM
Does anyone here remember the (in)famous essay "Thank God for the Atom Bomb" by Paul Fussell? It had a profound influence on me at the time I was graduated from school, going against the disarmament grain as it did. Fussell makes some of the same points as OJ. The essay led to the biggest letters-to-the-editor contretemps I have ever seen (perhaps Berlinski's The Deniable Darwin is close).
You can read this worthy essay at:
http://www.ux1.eiu.edu/~cfib/courses/Fussell.pdf
Not only that, but Chuckman's assertion that the war dead has been reliably estimated at 100,000+ (he must be referring to the Lancet study) is not credible in my opinion.
Posted by: Bruce Cleaver at February 15, 2005 11:38 AM"Iraqi losses have been convincingly measured at a hundred thousand dead."
Mr. Chuckman is too easily convinced. As mentioned by Bruce, the Lancet study is the only one I am aware of claiming this number, and IIRC it gave a range of 8,000 to 192,000, with 100,000 being the mean of these extremes. With such a wide variance, the methodolgy can not be considered sound. There is even less basis for the figures cited.
However, given such credulousness, Mr. Chuckman has convinced me he is incapable of even moderately complex or subtle moral and ethical reasoning.
Posted by: jd watson at February 15, 2005 12:05 PM
"Iraqi losses have been convincingly measured at a hundred thousand dead."
When I read that, I stopped. No point in reading further when you know the author is going to base his arguments on fantasy. The result is as useful as a mathematical proof that starts with the assertion that 0 > 1, no matter how intellectually rigorous and specific it may be.
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at February 15, 2005 12:45 PMSad how some commentators still quote that Lancet study. The "IraqBodyCount" web site pegs the civilian casualty count in the range between 15,941 and 18,200 -- tragic, but nowhere near 100,000.
Posted by: Patrick O'Hannigan at February 15, 2005 1:41 PMIt just gets worse. 100K dead is in fact more than were killed at Hiroshima, so if you take that as a the number of Iraqi dead, it's not likely to exceed Hiroshima, it already does. For some odd reason people think the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the deadliest bombing raids of the war, but that's simply false.
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at February 15, 2005 2:32 PM