Ted,

Great article, as usual.

What the Coalition did by going to Iraq was the most moral decision of this short century, getting rid of a cruel murderer and giving Iraqi's an opportunity to live in a civilised western democracy.

It wouldn't matter if there were 650,000 deaths, although the figure is preposterous, even if going by the exaggerated daily estimates.

One thing that really irks me is that the Americans, and British, and too a much lesser extent the other Coalition partners like Australia, are blamed for the inherent racism, tribalism, of the Iraqi people.

The fact that they can't get it together and use this opportunity afforded them as the Japanese and Germans did after WWII, and the South Koreans after the Korean was, comes back, as I said, to their bigotry.

Those commenting that at least Saddam Hussein kept all this sort of stuff in check, although this is nonsense anyway, the murders were just behind closed doors, the terror was always there.

The Iraqi Prime Minister claimed only last weekend that if Iran & Syria stopped funding the insurgency, as well as arming militias and insurgents, the Iraqi forces - without Coalition help, could get control of the situation after three months.

The only thing the west are guilty of about the Iraq war is that they didn't anticipate just how bigoted, racist, and intolerant Iraqi's would be toward each other.

In my view, the troops should pull out to the outskirts of the major towns, let the Iraqi's control it, and make sure the oil is produced, arms aren't smuggled, and so on.

At $4 billion per month for the war those Iraqi's owe the Coalition big time.

It all comes down to the fact that there is no good will in such societies, seen even in diasporas in the west where they have emigrated with sky high crime rates.

Let Iraq be a lesson to those on the left, for it is the very reason the west must deter democracy in this volatile redneck region.

I find it utterly incredible that at this late stage, the late Sen. Joe McCarthy can find defenders. No, it's impossible to deny that during the Cold War, the USSR had spies all over the place, just as did the US. But "world domination"? On 1 January 1990, the issue of Time magazine which made Gorbachev its Man of the Decade carried an accompanying article with the headline "Rethinking the Red Menace" by Strobe Talbott. Concluding, Talbott pointed out:

"[Western diplomats and other experts] now say they doubt that Gorbachev's Kremlin or any imaginable successor's will undertake foreign adventures while the home front is in a state of such crisis, as it will be for a long, long time to come. A new consensus is emerging, that the Soviet threat is not what it used to be. The real point, however, is that it never was. The doves in the Great Debate of the past 40 years were right all along."

Unless I am much mistaken, Mr. Lapkin, this is the 21st century. The Cold War is dead and gone, together with its rhetoric. To try to revive it to fit fit modern problems such as terrorism, the Iraq blunder and so on is at best foolish, and at worst, just plain crazy.

Benjamin history lesson
Germany hitler was voted in.
Japan has only ever had one party in power so it is not fully functional.
Korean has only had freeish election in the last few years. I could go on about the rest of your post but pointing out your factual error would do little to move to having a rational pov. Yes you can have a rational pov that is different to mine but the key requirement here is to have a grip on the facts and that is something you do not have.

If getting rid of evil dictators is their game then why havn't we got troops in Burma?

As said by other posters, the number of casualties isn't particularly relevant. Even if it's just 50,000 that's enough.

Time for a pragmatic assessment of the options on Iraq.

1. Pull out now, witness chaos, a civil war of sorts, before a warlord seizes power, which is still fragemented and disparate outside the cities, similar to the situation in Afghanistan.
Kurds, Shia and Sunni are at each others throats, and the new leader of Iraq is probably sympathetic to Iran, and in favour of a sharia state.

2. Pull out further down the track. The only real difference here is that the warlord that seizes power has a better trained security force, and there is probably less bloodshed as he ascends the throne, through the security force will either quickly fragment or rally under their new leader.

There is a third option - the US could theoretically place a dictator in power, though this would have echoes of Hussein, and we all know how spectacularly that went.

I'm amazed that the US took on this war, which was nothing less than a complete and utter distraction from their already dubious 'war on terror.'
In fact, it's worse than a distraction because it will turn what once once a comparatively secular (if not horrendous) regime into a sharia one.
Say what you will about saddam, and yes, he was a brutal tyrant, but he didn't have sharia law and for this reason he and al-qaeda had a hostile relationship.

Makes you wonder who the new leader will be once the smoke clears.

Ted

In your last post you mentioned the UK deaths in the second world war. Yet again you are selective in your quoting. We are talking about civilian deaths. The figure for civilian deaths in the UK is 67,800. Note the UK was never invaded.

Perhaps a comparison with Russia is a better one, 11,500,000 this puts civilian casualties into context in a country facing invasion. The Iraqi civilian death rate is totally consistent with a country facing an invasion.

Don't like Russia as a comparison:

Poland 2,200,000
Indonesia 4,000,000
Germany 1,840,000
China 7,000,000

The figures are entirely consistent. Shame your spin is not.

Steve:

Your dichotomy between civilian and military casualties only serves to prove my point.

Almost 400,000 of those 450,000 casualties were military, incured during savage frontline fighting that spanned the globe from Burma to Belgium. Yet you are prepared to argue that Iraqis over 3.5 years have suffered over 150% the casualties incurred by the WWII British military over 6 years?

The conventional war in Iraq that relates to your "invasion" argument lasted only three weeks. And when you add a relatively small number of major engagements - like Falluah - since, the implausibility of the Lancet study becomes yet more apparent. Sorry, but none of this even remotely equates to Normandy, Dunkirk, Italy, N. Africa, the air and sea wars, etc...etc...etc...

And your examples of Russia, Poland, etc... ignore the salient difference between them an Iraq. In E. Europe civilian deaths were largely caused by Nazi policies of racial genocide that collided with Soviet policies of scorched earth withdrawal. Now unless you are prepared to accuse US troops of acting like Nazi Einzatzgruppe, your analogy falls apart from its own lack of weight. And if you make such a comparison, its very absurdity brings about the same effect.

So yes, I find the Iraq Body Count project's casualty figures to be much more plausible than those of Lancet. And in fact, Lancet's increasingly erratic and politicised behaviour has come under criticism over issues completely unrelated to Iraq.

The [London] Times June 18, 2005

'SCAREMONGERING LANCET ACCUSED OF CAUSING HARM TO HEALTH AND WASTING MILLIONS

By Mark Henderson

Nobel prizewinners in the Royal Society attack on editor over publication of flawed research

BRITAIN’S premier medical journal is endangering public health by publishing unfounded scare stories, 30 of the country’s leading scientists say today.
Poor editorial judgment at The Lancet has fuelled panic over issues such as the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, hormone replacement therapy and genetically modified (GM) crops, the eminent medical researchers charge in a letter that the journal has refused to publish...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1658807,00.html