No, I think you are correct in essence. However, as you noted in your aside the Lancet study (afaik) didn’t look at the WHOLE period of the sanctions…only the last few years. When, as you note, things were a bit less draconian. Even then there is some dispute as to how accurate the Iraqi records were…and how much, um, fudging Saddam et al had done to make them look better than they in fact were.
I did a bit of research and the 3 million childrens deaths I stated earlier was off by a factor of 2…or even a bit more. Most of the estimates I read put it more in line with 1-1.5 million. Children. I don’t know of any studies done on how many adults could be added to that…but I’m fairly sure its a non-zero number. And those numbers aren’t being attributed to Saddam.
The death figures from the Iran/Iraq war are equally fuzzy…Saddam and the Iranian’s weren’t know for their close record keeping on petty things like the number of deaths of their respective soldiers. Still, I think a ball park estimate of an additional million deaths would be on the concervative side…and this only counts the battle casualties. Again, I’m fairly certain there was a non-zero impact on the civilian populations of both Iran and Iraq.
Then there was the attempted anexation of Kuait by Iraq. Again we have battle deaths AND a non-zero impact on both Iraqi and Kuati civilians. Also, there was the period when Saddam siezed power initially. This would have had a non-zero impact on the civilian population as well (not to mention all those Iraqi’s who were put against the wall to pose for gun fire).
Yet none of these are counted. Afaict the OP only counted the deaths from Saddam’s putting down of revolts between the first Gulf War and the US invasion of Iraq. This seems…skewed. Of course, from my perspective at least half of the deaths FROM the US invasion of Iraq can also be layed at Saddam’s feet…as I don’t clear the Iraqi leader or the Ba’athists of blame. They played their part in this fuck up as well as Bush et al did.
If I believed in hell I would say Saddam is roasting away there as we speak…and that there is a nice warm cell near by saved for our good friend GW as well. Chaney of course will be in charge, so he has nothing to fear.
Another flaw in simply using raw numbers may be in comparative populations. I mean, guys like Pol Pot don’t get in the big time lists because there weren’t all that many Cambodian’s for them to wack, whereas your big league guys like Stalin and Mao had a lot more folks to work with. Hitler usually gets the most evil rap (well, him and Bush), but really he was a piker compared to Stalin and Mao…unless we consider comparative populations! I still think Stalin is going to be the champ but I think that Hitler MIGHT be able at least squeeze into second place (not sure how this will effect GW Bush’s own standing…he might get an honorary ‘most evil’ tagged on him…just to show the world still cares).
I think we can safely put Saddam’s death toll somewhere between 1 million to, say 5 million. Thats probably concervative on both ends, too be sure, but I think its fair enough for this test. When we look at those numbers compared to Iraq’s actual population (28 million IIRC) then we see that his percentage of wackage is pretty high (there is a flaw in all this of course…I’m just having some fun now). Getting out my trusty dusty calculator that looks like aprox. 3%-17% of the total population wackage by Saddam during his illustrious carrer. Hell, the top reading might just bring him up into the big time ranks.
Bush on the other hand has a death toll of something between 73,000-650,000. That looks to me to be something like .2%-2.3%…and this is only if we make the assumption/concession that Bush is responsible for all the deaths that have occured in Iraq…that Saddam is completely blameless and innocent.
So, since the whiskey is telling me to continue, I think we can do a final quantitative calculation to settle this once and for all.
Saddam’s average death count over his carrer (in Evil Death Units): 10% (or 10 EDU)
Bush’s average death count over his carrer (In Evil Death Units): 1.25% (or 1.25 EDU)
Something we American’s can be quite proud of! Our batshit crazy president has ONLY managed to kill off an average percentage (average between two separate sources at polar ends of the scale) of 1.25% of the Iraqi people! He might not be as evil as Saddam…but we at least have a leader that’s on the charts with leaders from other nations around the world!
Next week maybe we could compare Johnson to Ho Chi Minh and see how that works out. This one could be a close one…depends on how we parse who’s at fault and how we divide up casualties. Stay tuned…
It would appear that the OP does not intend to defend his thesis. That’s probably wise. May I suggest that we let this thread go to the graveyard, where it belongs, unless he comes back and participates?
It wasn’t meant to be a direct comparison, just pointing out the fallacy of claiming that anything that happens - that wouldn’t have happened but for my actions - is my (moral) responsability.
But while we’re on the subject, I don’t think you can give bush sole responsability for the iraqi deaths in the conflict – surely some blame must lie with the insurgents, no?
And as for moral responsability, I don’t believe that people are morally blameworthy for unintended consequences (although I think it still makes sense for society to punish criminals, irrespective of intentions). And I for one believe Bush and co really were naive enough to believe that Iraq would function normally during an occupation.
Are we counting the deaths inflicted by the abortive Kurd uprising after Gulf War I in Saddam’s score?
Another factor to consider is the idea that all the deaths in the civil war being fomented by the Iraqi insurgents, al Queda, and Iran, are presumed to be due to the power vacuum after the exit of Saddam.
Saddam would not have lived forever in any event. Ergo, whatever deaths would have ensued after his departure from this mortal coil offset some portion of the deaths that happened after his ouster.
And of course, all the deaths in the current civil war are being incurred in pursuit of a moral end (some kind of better government in Iraq, and reduction of the threat to Iraq’s neighbors), whereas all the deaths inflicted by Saddam were in pursuit of an immoral one.
And, I assume, every other President who did not prevent Saddam from committing mass murder. Etc., etc. - whoever was President during the 90s is responsible for the mass famines in North Korea, the engineered famines in Ukraine can be laid at the door of the President when that happened, Carter did not prevent the invasion of Afghanistan, and so on, world without end, amen.
No - if you incite a people to rise up and then sit on your hands then you are directly culpable. Not stepping in to right the whole world’s wrongs is not the same although I note Clinton beats himself up a lot about Rwanda.
Every President who armed Saddam, particularly the ones that gave him his chemical and biological weapons industry, share culpability. And that would be Reagan and probably Carter. And probably a whole bunch of British and European leaders too.
Can’t we just agree that they’re both evil, mass murdering war criminals and be done with it. Even if the Bush supporters can succeed in making a case that their guy should be rated slightly lower on the genocidal maniac list than Saddam Hussein (something I don’t grant, I’m just saying hypothetically…), is it really that much of a victory.
I think of Bush as history’s dumbest monster, not the greatest.
Given that SH was being supported by the U.S. at that time, it’s probably safe to conclude he wasn’t “evil” then (at least, not to the U.S., or, at leaster, not evil enough to be considered our enemy). At the very least, as the U.S was supplying Iraq in order to assist them in that war, I think the U.S. (though not Bush Jr) bears at least partial blame in those deaths.
Any meaningful comparison, such that one can be made, should be done during the time period 2000-2007 (the time during which Bush Jr was in a position to manifest his evil, if you will; we know little about the evil that may have been in his heart during the time prior to his presidency). We can thus compare the relative evil of both men during that period (allowing for trends in SH’s evil, given his ability to do evil was effectively removed during the 1st half of 2003). Or, we can perhaps compare SH’s evil ways from 1996-2003 to Bush Jr’s from 2000-2007, to give both an equal time frame for actual, rather than theoretical, evil acts.
And yes, I’m only partly serious. Or perhaps I’m only partly joking… At any rate, I’m not a big fan of either man.
Well, I for one can certainly agree that they are both ‘evil’. I think they are (well, in Saddam’s case were) both stupid as well. As too ‘mass murdering war criminals’ I only think that lable applies to Saddam. Bush is a US president…that means he’s limited in what he can and can’t do by the other brances of our government and ultimately responsible to we, the people. If HE’S a ‘mass murdering war criminal’ then so are the congress and sentate…and so are all of us as well since initially ‘we’ all supported this invasion (the majority in both the house and senate as well as the majority of the American people I mean). Saddam and the Iraqi government didn’t work that way…so the actions of their government were more directly tied to the whim of Saddam, making him far more culpable than Bush for the slaughter.
This doesn’t let Bush off the hook…but it does tend to spread out the blame. That’s why I have no problem agreeing to the ‘evil’ lable for Bush as well as Saddam. I think the entire discussion is silly…trying to quantify who is more evil than who is a distraction. And this constant attempt to put Bush on the same plain as Saddam (or Hitler) does the anti-war crowd no service IMHO. It just makes them seem out of touch with reality. Why isn’t it enough that Bush is a terrible president that has taken us to a very bad place in Iraq? Why does he have to be bigger than life in his evil? Why the exaggerations for effect? And why can’t the anti-war/rabidly anti-Bush crowd see that it has done them no service in the past to go down this route? I mean…we’ve been seeing this kind of Bush=Hitler for what? 6 years now? After a while this exaggerated screeching just fades into the background noise and is dismissed as the foam flecked rantings of the fringe. Even when they DO have important things to say they are dismissed because of this crap. They have simply cried wolf a few too many times…
I understood the US contribution to be all dual-purpose stuff, so it is a bit more than misleading to blame Saddam’s chemical and bio-war on the US. Which shifts the moral responsibility back to the user, not the provider. I don’t hold a car salesman culpable if the client runs people over instead of driving to work.
YMMV, particularly if the car salesman is Republican.
Well, ‘evil’ is a subjective term…so the metrics would be my own. Ok?
I’d say Bush’s ‘evil’ acts stem from a desire after 9/11 to capitalize on the situation by pushing for a war we didn’t need with Iraq…and pushing for a war in such a way that it has failed miserably (trying to do an invasion on the cheap, making incredibly stupid assessments of the situation, etc).
At some point things go beyond ‘wrong’ or ‘dumbfuck incompetent’. Whether this is in the realm of ‘evil’ is subjective…and my subjective assessment is that if there WAS a hell, Bush would have a nice toasty room there. YMMV.
I’m not sure I’d call Bush’s decision to go in without adequate resources evil, since I suspect he let Rummy make the decision, and that he was incompetent to truly judge the dispute. However, seeing the deaths, and seeing things go to hell, and not replacing Rummy a lot earlier than he did or changing course - now that is evil.
A commander is not necessarily morally culpable for an atrocity a subordinate commits. If he knows of such, and does nothing, then he is culpable of any subsequent ones, at the very least.
Firstly, a numbers game was exactly the opposite of my intention. I really wanted to make an assertion like this: if Saddam is evil because he killed massive numbers of civiliians, then Bush must also be evil since he also killed massive numbers of civilians. I only brought in the numbers to head off an easily predictable response. In many threads, certain people automatically assume that Saddam was guilty of far greater crimes than Bush or the Americans have inflicted or ever could inflict against the Iraqi people. I wanted to debunk that assertion. By the most reliable data, the American invasion caused more deaths and more pain than Saddam’s regime. Maybe the most reliable data are wrong and the American invasion caused slightly fewer deaths; perhaps there will never be a 100 percent authoritative answer. But the American invasion has definitely resulted in enough death, suffering, torture, disruption, and ruin to classify as a major crime against humanity.
Hence the nubmers are not what I want to debate. It’s true that we could assign more deaths to Saddam than the ones I listed in my first post. It’s also true that we could assign more deaths to Bush from places other than Iraq. What I care about is why some people refuse to acknowledge the results of Bush’s invasion, and why some people refuse to assign Bush the moral responsibility for the results of his invasion.
