PJ Media

Ugh.

Despite statments to the contrary, the only attempts to look at the numbers are those done by people who feel the report is flawed. One does not need to support the war to believe the study is flawed. Unlike Rigobera Menchu, you are NOT entitled to your own truth.

It does not take an expert to be able to say that a plane crashed. Nor does it take an expert to do simple arithmatic. Occam’s Razor, in fact, hints that if you can reasonably disarm a complex argument with a simple counter-argument, the simpler argument is probably the most likely. It’s not always true, but a pretty good rule of thumb used by all sorts of people whose guesses must actually count in lives, money or some other scarce resources.

Moreover, it is a logical fallacy to support an argument simply because a) you’re inclined to agree (or disagree with it), b) because an expert makes it.

So appeals to authority are out, unless there’s a way to verify the authority’s claim. There is none in this case, at least supplied to us by the author.

The study – despite the desires of those who wish to support it – does not tell us anything about alternatives, even if the study was accurate. For example, somebody here mentioned MacNamara’s comments re: Viet Nam. What MacNamara’s comments don’t tell you is a) the truth, b) what the cause of those numbers actually was, c) what the alternatives were.

He guesses 3.2 million died. The commenter – like so many – assumes that those are because of America, neglecting that a) Viet Nam was at war long before America was involved, b) that many if not most of those caualties were inflicted by the Vietnamese on one another, c) how many of those casualties resulted from postwar behavior, d) how many of those casualties were deaths, e) how many resulted from idiotic leftist agricultural policies, f) how many resulted in starvation not just because of things like Agent Orange, but because armies made up of boys who should have been in the fields were taking in supplies on the hoof, g) Viet Nam was primariliy – wait for it – a civil war. That’s why the vast majority of Vietnamese immigrants are from the South of Viet Nam, and why it’s so hard to find a North Vietnamese-style bowl of pho outside of San Jose.

Full Disclosure, for the Hippie Morons: I’m Vietnamese; and you probably helped keep over 80 million people imprisoned in a totalitarian state for 3 decades.

Naturally, neither the real nature of the casualites or the results occupy any tenancy on the land of the liberal mind.

Not that that bothers the left. Like so many Cambodian deaths that resulted from left-wing ideas, those are the eggs ya gotta break to make your beautiful omelet.

Now, back to what I was saying.

The study, in a sense, maintains that while Saddam was bad, the situation is worse. Those advocating this position are essentially stating that Saddam in power – with his hundreds of thousands of bodies – was a better situation than now. That is, the murderous dictatorship was better than the shot at democracy being spoiled by the locals and natives… and fervently opposed by those who would rather get a pyrric victory against Bush at the cost of Iraq’s future (see previous comments re: Viet Nam). This is an argument for tyranny.

There goes the whole, “It’s America’s fault for supporting dictators” pablum. Unless, of course, one is supposed to believe that these people were ready for democracy 25 years ago, but not today.

Alas, some people never tire of the chickenhawk arguement. There are, hate to say, two problems with that argument in this context. (There are many simply in reason, but we’ll set that aside.) In this context, going to Iraq to fight or to do a body count of your own is irrelevant to whether or not this study is faulty. This is not a lab. You can’t reproduce the experiment, because you can’t control the materials… only the methods. Shocking as it is for those who earn their bread stirring up race/class/gender grievances, people are not the same, regardless of how brown we may be, or how smooth the skin around our eyes. Regarding method, the author does not actually supply much instruction.

But moreover, the assertion that one is obliged to disprove the veracity of an argument is not only juvenile, but, again, faulty reasoning. It is up to the one proposing an argument to prove the validity of the argument. Flipping it around is requiring that one disprove a negative, and that is not logically allowed.

One way to prove the validity of the study, would be to actually go to Iraq in all your peace-waging ways and find the bodies. Or provide a plausible explaination for where the bodies are or how they were disposed of. It is not enough to maintain without evidence that there was a massive conspiracy to cover up all the bodies, involving the Red Cross, the U.S. Government, the Iraqi government and so on and so forth.

We can’t even keep the smallest details secret. It is foolish to believe that we could keep all these bodies secret. The sheer numbers discredit that.

Given the coverage of events in Iraq, such as a roadside bombing that kills 6, it is simply implausible to believe that so many bodies would just be disappearing, waiting for that moment when a guy comes in with a survey to be revealed.

The problems of translators are many. For example, we state that there were death certificates of 80% of deaths. So we’ve caught the Iraqi government – which can hardly maintain regular water and power – has printed hundreds of thousands of these things, yet is also telling us they don’t have hundreds of thousands of these things.

Is it possible that the proof doesn’t exist in anything approaching the surveyor-translators’ assertions? Is it possible that a “death certificate” is a photograph or a sternly, spoken assertion of the truth? Where are the death certificates? Is there any verification from whatever office in Iraq prints these?

If Iraqis routinely commit reprisals for the killing of 13 people at a wedding, is it not equally probable that the deaths of hundreds of people daily would result in a lot more of these sorts of killings? Is there any tangible evidence of such things to a degree comensurate with these supposed levels of mayhem.

There are so many questions here and so many more. I’d like to see those defending the study answer some of those questions or counter any of the assertions I’m making with evidence, logic and/or facts. Bear in mind that “You’re just a rethuglican nazi fucktard racist Amerikkkan bastard” is not an argument, but, at best an assertion, and more likely merely evidence of dementia in need of medication and, possibly, restraining apparel.