The Wages Of Spin

There is much hand-wringing and statistics-mongering over the recent estimate of the running death toll in Iraq, as a direct result of our unwarranted invasion, which is about the most polite way one can put things at this late point. Expert statisticians such as noted future MacArthur Genius Grant winner Michelle Malkin loudly proclaim their misgivings at the notoriously high estimate of over 655,000 dead. At that rarefied level of death, one gets into tautological arguments over methodology and then, as some sort of rhetorical buffer, the inevitable "Saddam was worse" charge is lobbed somewhat injudiciously.

Well, then. Once again, it appears that we are dancing around the wrong bonfire. The false comparisons of Saddam's murderous behavior are almost too easily put to rest -- even giving the benefit of the doubt that the flat Stalin statistic of one million is accurate to ascribe to the Hussein mafia, it took him over two decades to tally that figure, versus some 42 months for ours. Now, it's true that it is also a false equivalence to attempt to conflate Saddam's furious malice with our noble if incompetent scheme of "liberation", but it's also not as unfair as the liberators might pretend to think to point out that had we left awful enough alone, hundreds of thousands of innocent people would not have met an awful, undeserved fate. Whether the actual toll is one hundred thousand or the six or seven posited by statistical regression analysis elides the larger point, which the liberators are understandably trying to avoid.

It's a gruesome moral calculus, but one that is necessitated by the mere act of attempting a verifiable accounting. Because once you've taken it upon yourself even to dismiss the estimate as too high, if you are at least intellectually honest with yourself (if not the rest of the world), you have to ask yourself what is "it" worth -- and what "it" is in the first place. All these terms that get chucked around like rocks skipped across the pond, indifferently, mindlessly, must be defined at some point. What are we actually trying to achieve, and how realistic are our professed goals? What is "success"? Is it merely having a standing Iraqi security force? What about the likely prospect of such an army devolving into sectarian death squads, engaging in revanchist ethnic cleansing (as has been happening)?

More to the point, how many people have to meet their fate at the business end of a power drill to make George Bush and his noisy little claque of basement keyboarders feel better in their projected certitude? Even though some five thousand people have wound up in the morgue and in the street just in the past couple months, they are unwavering in their blindered equivalences, and their abject refusal to accept statistical probability. It's all worth it for them, because they were never asked to sacrifice anything in the first place. They have no real skin in the game, just the onset of carpal-tunnel and a lot of empty 2-liter bottles of Mountain Dew to clean up.

As for Oedipus Tex, the estimate of thirty thousand -- which was generally considered rather low even back when it came out -- is apparently still his personal benchmark, when he can be bothered to revisit it in the first place. Particularly troublesome are his blasé assumptions about what Iraqis are "willing" to put up with.

I am amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they're willing to -- that there's a level of violence that they tolerate.

They're not "tolerating" it -- everyone with the means to leave is doing just that. The people who remain are stuck. Bush's condescension is upstaged only by his utter cluelessness about the whole operation. His inability to describe even basic terms of what needs to occur before not only we can get out, but that Iraq doesn't then become an Iranian proxy overnight, only cement the impression that he's just running out the clock before he can fob this off onto the next administration.

And now that the British are going to be leaving, that means that the southern section surrounding Basra -- already a nascent Iranian enclave -- will soon become our problem as well. Do we just scoop up as many juvenile delinquents and skinhead nutjobs as we can, to avoid a draft, and set them loose in the pressure cooker of Basra? Is this more of that "forward thinking" Bush is so famous for?

Just the "press conference" alone is so completely without any real value, you could spend the next week fisking pretty much every assertion, if not literally every single sentence. A cursory reading of the whole thing will illustrate that, as well as the fact that as with most things Bush, it's just not worth the time.

The main thing to take from the estimate is not its accuracy, but its implications. The "real" figure may be "only" 100,000 or even less, though I can't imagine a remotely realistic estimate at this point of less than 75,000. And that doesn't even take into account the maimed and wounded, the soldiers and civilians who are saved by the wonders and advances of medical technology, but have had their lives and bodies forever altered.

And for what? So Bush can feel tough and show us all how principled and godly he is? So the warporn enthusiasts have more wanking material, telling us how "serious" they are? If there were a realistic, attainable strategic objective to all this, I could see it. But the fact of the matter is, we're on the verge of turning a bloody dictatorship that, for all its faults, was the technological and commercial leader of the region, into a bloody fundamentalist theocracy backwater, where everyone with any skills and practical ability has gotten the hell out.

If they're lucky, and if we all step in and help, Iraq might get back on its feet in a generation. And who knows, perhaps like the Vietnamese, they'll move past what the Stratego players of this administration wrought on their country and forgive us. It's certainly more than we would do for them, if the roles were reversed. The toxic bloodlust of the past five years has demonstrated at least that much.