The miracle in Iraq

It's a miracle.

No Iraqi civilian has died a violent death since May 2003.

Ok.  Technically?  Tens of thousands have ceased to exist in bloody and unnatural ways.  But that's nothing to get upset about.  It's even a good thing.  Know why?  Because if we hadn't invaded and they hadn't been killed as a result of the invasion and the Civil War we've unleashed they might have been killed by Saddam Hussein.

Much better that they were blown up on their way to buy bread than that Saddam might have had them disappeared.

So much better that if they'd had the chance before they were blown up they'd have probably thanked us for arranging for them to die that way instead of leaving them to maybe be murdered by Saddam.

Saddam might have tortured them too.

So their deaths don't matter.  Not in the grand scheme of things.  They might as well not have died for all the harm it did them...or saved them from, possibly.

Not only that, but in the future, when the Mission is finally, truly accomplished and peace and tranquility reign all over the Mideast, and democracy flourishes in Iraq, Israeal is safe forever, and social and political liberalism have been expanded throughout all the oppressive parts of the world, it will be shown that all these people did not die in vain.  Their deaths will have been worth it.  A small price.  And as we all know from the movies any death that serves a higher purpose is not to be mourned.  It's hardly even a death.  It's even better to have died than to have lived.  A death that is better than a life isn't really a death, then, is it?

Why mourn for a death, any number of deaths, that aren't really deaths?

No, the only deaths worth mourning, the only deaths that matter, are the ones Saddam caused before we invaded and the ones he might have caused if we'd left him alone.  Why, he might have killed millions.  He was a Mideastern Pol Pot, you know.

Or a Hitler.

Or Stalin.

Some historical mass murderer, at any rate.  Saddam could have been another one of him, whoever he was.

If you want to mourn dead Iraqis, those are the Iraqis to mourn.  The ones Saddam killed.  Those and the millions I believe he would have killed in his prisons, the millions and millions more after that he'd have caused to die when he finally got around to starting World War IV, as I'm pretty sure he would have, if he'd had the chance.

What about them?

Why doesn't your heart bleed for them?

Don't you agonize over their deaths?

I do.

I agonize.

Comments

[Ken Muldrew]

The Lancet study assumed the death rate under Saddam as a baseline so that it could measure how many Iraqis have died during the war that wouldn't have died otherwise. Extrapolating to the present from that study gives about a million dead. So we're definitely in Pol Pot territory, but it has nothing to do with Saddam.

Who would have thought, 16 years ago, that the fall of the Soviet Union would have been one of the worst catastrophes to befall the United States in her entire history?

[Frenchdoc]

Can we all just agree that liberal hawks are all just a bunch of pompous self-serving, self-centered, self-aggrandizing, self-deluded war-lovers (as long as it takes place far far away and allows them to pontificate from a safe location)?