Corporal Jeffery Goldberg is pissed.
See, on his Salon blog, Glenn Greenwald wrote a scathing critique of Goldberg through the lens of the Dave Weigel-Washington Post affair. The post, on how Goldberg’s rush to judge Weigel is emblematic of flaws throughout his writing, got a lot of coverage (as catalogued by Mondoweiss).
So Goldberg took to his Atlantic blog defending his reporting by citing his most notorious achievement: the Iraq War.
While Greenwald makes many excellent points about peculiar brand of journalism practiced by Goldberg (the Mideast reporter who, despite being an IDF veteran, decries everyone else as “partisans”), he does return to the Iraq War. Curiously, Goldberg, recounting a recent e-mail exchange with an Iraqi pol, runs through justifications for the 2003 invasion — though he insistently refers to it as his “early support for the Iraq war” [my emphasis]. He extends an invite from his e-mail buddy, Iraqi Kurdistan PM Barham Salih, to visit and talk to everyone in Iraq who supported the U.S. invasion:
If [Greenwald] were to meet with representatives of the Kurds — who make up 20 percent of the population of Iraq and who were the most oppressed group in Iraq during the period of Saddam’s rule (experiencing not only a genocide but widespread chemical gassing) — I think it might be possible for him to understand why some people — even some Iraqis — supported the overthrow of Saddam. […] I could also arrange a visit to Najaf or the equivalent, where Greenwald could meet with representatives of the Shi’a, who also took it on the chin from Saddam.
Yes, Corporal Goldberg, Glenn Greenwald could very well travel to Iraq with you and meet all types of people there who supported the war. But there are at least 600,000 Iraqis who, I imagine, are not too thrilled about the way it all turned out and with whom Greenwald will never get a meeting.
One could also dredge up some Iranians — from within and without Iran and, yes, of all political stripes, classes, ethnic groups, and religious affiliations — who might support a U.S. invasion of the Islamic Republic. Does that mean that Goldberg is also ready to lend “early support” to that war?
Jon, you can try and minimize the number all you want, but the simple truth is that the U.S. government was directly responsible for the death of 100,000s and the destroying of an entire country for absolutely no reason. It was frankly criminal. The rest of the world knows this and the U.S. will never be looked at in the same way again. We are no longer the beacon of good we once were, if we ever were. The U.S. will never recover from this.
The U.S. committed far more crimes and was responsible for far more death than Saddam ever was, putting aside the Iran-Iraq war. So the excuse that the U.S. did good by getting rid of a dictator is bullshit. Not much has changed in Iraq. The country is now a sudo dictatorship and there would be far less deaths in Iraq if Saddam was left in power.
What the U.S. did to Iraq is one of the worst travesty in modern history. And for what?
The cost both in terms of for the Iraqi people and for the U.S. was not worth the zero gain.
The worst foreign policy blunder ever and a very big criminal act.
I will agree that ranges and margins of error are, generally speaking, not the same as guesses. However, if one reports a range of 700,000 to 1.4 million (double the lower estimate) then one is operating in a fluid manner to say the least. My own view would be that the data is bad to begin with. You can disagree, that’s okay with me.
I frankly doubt that the ORB survey was conducted properly; furthermore, I don’t believe that many of the respondents necessarily answered truthfully. Can I prove that? No. Can you prove that I’m wrong? No. You want to believe high figures, in my opinion, because of your ideological slant. Your use of terms like “warmongers” is a dead giveaway.
I don’t assert categorically that the higher figures are wrong. What I’m saying is there is no really good evidence to support those figures. You and Gharib could be 100% right that at least 600,000 have died. I prefer to suspend judgement on the totals, because I don’t find the data you cite convincing. Again, it really doesn’t matter to me whether you can accept my view or not. I am ready to change my mind, when and if I see convincing evidence. That’s as far as I’ll go.
On the deaths by violence issue, I’m not denying that “nonviolent” deaths are a byproduct of the devastation wrought by war. However, it’s very hard to determine whether so-and-so would have dropped dead of a heart attack in a peaceful Iraq, or whether he died from war-related stress. There are more clear-cut cases than that, I admit, but then we return to the question of the reliability of the data.
Whether you like it or not, I wanted to discuss the question of how many deaths by violence — casualties in the strictest sense — have occurred since 2003. In a sense this entire contretemps arose because I (mis)interpreted Gharib’s figure to mean this category of fatalities. Apparently (though he hasn’t been heard from) he meant deaths in the broader sense. Which brings me full circle again: I don’t trust the data on non-combat fatalities. You can call me an ignoramus from now till doomsday; I don’t care and I’m not going to change my view. If I ever see anything that convinces me you’re right, I’ll be the first to admit as much. But the data that’s out there doesn’t convince me.
As regards the bombing of infrastructure, etc., mentioned this morning, let me repeat first of all that I am not a supporter of the Iraq war. Having said that, if we were at war I would certainly bomb and attempt to destroy the enemy’s power grid, even in summer in a hot country. If that’s illegal, I wonder why no U.S. commander or airman has been tried and convicted for it by an international tribunal. We’ve certainly bombed such targets many times. And if you the think the destruction, deliberate or not, of a sewage system by bombing is going to put somebody in the dock, you’re mistaken.
Now, if a sewage system is knocked out by bombing and cholera breaks out, and people die, would I consider those deaths as being caused by the war? I would, certainly. Again, I’m not saying that there haven’t been Iraqis killed as a byproduct, as it were, of the war. I’m saying that the numbers claimed are all over the place (Gharib: 600,000, ORB, maybe 1.4 million, others give other totals), and that indicates that no one has a good handle on the data. You lefties prefer high numbers because it fuels your righteous indignation; I prefer to wait and see if reliable data ever emerges.
@ Scott: The epidemiological studies will capture some of this, as they compare death rates before and after the invasion. Jon I’m sure is horrified, like most of us, by the US targeting such things as sewage plants, etc.
I’m beginning to hope that Jon, if he can take a breath and actually look at the evidence, will come around. The ORB work is extensive, rigorous, and not disputed. It deals explicitly with VIOLENT DEATHS, based on interviews with hundreds of Iraqis.
Interesting: the first survey produced a wide range for the number killed violently: 733K-1,446K. The follow-up survey, which added 600 rural households, did not increase the number, but did narrow the range considerably: 946K to 1,120K. The mostly likely figure released by ORB (1033K) sits right in the middle of both ranges.
I’ll provide the text Jon is looking for:
“Gosh folks, I was completely wrong. The estimates of hundreds of thousands of violent deaths have all the evidence to support them. I ridiculed the high numbers, but now that I’ve been shown the extensive evidence, I concede I was uninformed.”
To be fair to Jon, the scientific and survey research showing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dying violently has received almost NO coverage in the west. This is quite predictable from a propaganda model for the corporate press, if its job is to parrot the framing of those in power. But a reasonably accurate telling of the story of US aggression should include the simple fact that the hundreds of thousands died violently under the US invasion/occupation.
I did some checking on the Lancet study you found so compelling. Turns out that Gilbert Burnham, the guy who headed it up, was questioned by the American Association for Public Opinion Research about his methodology. He gave “only partial responses” and was eventually censured by the Association for “violating basic research standards.” The guy was later sanctioned by Johns Hopkins.
I’m pissed at myself for wasting so much time trying to make it plain to you jokers just what I was trying to say. I should have just taken a minute to refresh my memory instead. The fact is, you guys were and are just blowing smoke out of your asses.
I’m spending too much time with leftists these days. One tries to get them to think instead preening themselves and spouting their cockamamie ideology. But why bother? It’s like trying to teach a donkey to talk.
Michael Connor writes:
“You should quickly fire off a statistical rebuttal of the ORB methodology to an academic journal — as soon as you get it published, you’ll have a leg to stand on.”
Someone has already done that:
http://w4.ub.uni-konstanz.de/srm/article/viewArticle/2373
“The ORB work is extensive, rigorous, and not disputed. It deals explicitly with VIOLENT DEATHS, based on interviews with hundreds of Iraqis.”
As can be seen in the article above, nothing could be further from the truth. It is not really rigorous, it is less extensive than other studies that have given much lower numbers (see section 7), and it is highly disputed (read: completely discredited). Also, as discussed in the article, the claim that ORB’s numbers are exclusively for violent deaths is not supportable either (see section 5). But that’s probably one of the least of its problems.
At the link below there’s a pretty good summary of this paper and another paper by one of the same authors about the notorious “Lancet study” that claimed 600,000 killed back in 2006. In short, that paper finds that the Lancet study data was fabricated.
http://www.straightstatistics.org/article/how-many-have-died-iraq