Of course, a significant difference is that one third of Iraqi deaths have been caused by our soldiers.

Historians will have a field day looking back at Americans' reactions to this revelation.

In their demented ways, the wingnuts might come off better. They're in screaming denial mode: "Not credible." "Absurd." "Utter garbage" !
Their hysteria connotes a genuine fear that the numbers might be right.

But how cool, almost indifferent, the Dems have remained is unsettling.
I think I understand: 650K dead is pretty bad, but there's an election and there are more important things to talk about: Hey, George Allen may even have gotten a parking ticket when he was 22!

Dems scream bloody murder when a GOP congressman has unsupervised cybersex, but says nothing about murdering 200K. Have we lost our moral compass to *that* extent?

Ikenberry and Slaughter seek the moral high ground with their treatise on Liberty under Law,
but if slaughtering 200K people (no pun intended) is not factored into their discussion, what moral value does it have?
When the main proponent of liberal internationalism (ie, the US) commits mass murder, how do we deal with it? Do we move on? Do we offer reparations? Do we apologize? Do we ask the UN to impose sanctions on us?
Do we do what we would expect any other nation to do under the circumstances?

No need to invoke Kant to point out the obligation any foreign policy has to address the moral implication of committing mass murder.

I know it's election time. But as a previous commenter said: if I found out that my brother killed 100 people I would drop whatever I am doing and deal with it.

TPM Cafe's motto is: "Politics, ideas & lots of caffeine." It's not: "Any goddamn topic, regardless how trivial it is, that will get us Dems back in power."

Or maybe it is and I misunderstood.

Sorry for the rant.

The basic methodology used to obtain that 600,000 or so number of deaths in Iraq is to find the difference in the death rate before the war and during the war.  Therefore, if there had not been a war none of those 600,000 or so would have died.  So, it isn't 200,000 that "we" killed, it is 600,000.

Wars kill people.  We started a war with no rational justification.  We killed 600,000 or so Iraqis with no rational justification.  What more can be said about that?  I'm sorry? 

Hoppy in Sacramento

Bill Durston is running for Congress in California's 3rd District. He is adamantly opposed to continuing the war.

Most everybody is except...

Looks like you will need to keep looking, Hoppy in Sacramento.

Here is what Mr. Durston himself says on his website:

As the Representative of California’s 3rd Congressional District, I will work to bring our troops home promptly, safely, and honorably from Iraq. [My emphasis]

"Peace with honor" ring a bell for you? Know how many lives that defeat with disgrace cost?

Bill Durston's statement is refreshing, exciting and promising. It is far more direct than most anyone else. Which means I bet he is going to lose. Just guessing. I have no knowledge whatever of his race otherwise.

Parsing the statement shows the usual qualification that means war will continue for at least sometime even if a whole herd of Bill Durston's fill the House.

I was a soldier in Vietnam when the Viet Cong first began shooting at Americans. I was on a bus they blew up. I watched for years as the damnable war proceeded and was able to do nothing. And now I hear that JFK was against the war. I got worse injuries from a crazed JFK fan than from the Viet Cong bomb. I had just explained the nomination of JFK meant we were in for a costly war we would certainly lose.

Just as we made a South Vietnam ripe for plucking by the North as a monolithic society by destroying disparate elements, we are making certain a theocratic monstrosity will be created in Iraq.

Where is the honor, Hoppy in Sacramento?

Certainly wish Bill Durston good luck. Beats most anyone else.

Best, Terry

We started a war with no rational justification.

It wasn't started to defend America against an invasion, nor against any other kind of attack against your territory - and most certainly not to fend of an attack that could have caused a proportional number of civilian deaths in your country.

The aggression was un-proportional, just like, for instance, the recent destruction and killing in Lebanon.

What more can be said about that? I'm sorry?

It's still your country.
You still have Freedom of the Press and Liberty of Speech.
You still have democracy.
You still have a responsibility for the decisions your country has not yet taken, as well as for your opposition against, or support for, those decisions effectuated.

When will you fix your Constitution to ensure this doesn't occur again?

Thank you for any contribution  you make to Bill Durston's campaign.  I am not in his district, but I still donate as much as I can to his campaign, work the phone bank every Tuesday night, attend any events he needs more warm bodies at, and talk up his candidacy every chance I get.

His website is written to not arouse intense opposition to him, as every astute politician has learned is wise.  In person, and in speeches he makes his outright opposition to the Iraq war very clear.  However, no one will, if elected, insist upon instant withdrawal of American troops from Iraq.  No retreat can be successful unless it is an orderly one, and that does take time.  Remember, there are also thousands of American civilians working in Iraq (to remove as much of that countries wealth as is possible?), and they too have to be removed safely. 

Hoppy in Sacramento

Of course I wish you luck!
But I do more than so.
I wish you strength to seek and address the underlying problems that causes your nation to drift dangerously close to a maelstrom into the depth of fascism.

I'm thinking of the meal I ate in Tivoli; reindeer in a berry sauce. Wish we had reindeer. (Cattle ranchers resist.)

There are some problems with our constitution, primarily the parts that allow a minority of the voters to select the president and most of the Senate.  There may have been a justification for the Electoral College back in the 18th century, but there is no justification today.  There may have been a good reason for the Senate to be an equal house of Congress, even though not democratically elected, but there isn't today.  (No state with fewer voters than live in an average city in California should be able to have the same number of representatives to the Senate as California has.)  Those problems are a major reason the yahoos select our president and run the Senate. 

Hoppy in Sacramento

What is worse is the brain drain. Notwithstanding the loss of life and property during the American Civil War, the U.S. population and industrial capacity increased during the war. In contrast, because of the Iraqi security situation, there is every inducement for the Iraqi professional class to leave, and many of them are doing so. When you lose your doctors and engineers, the suffering will continue long after the fighting is over.

This is not to say there wasn't much honor in the WWII Resistance of other European countries, but the Danish saving of their Jewish population gives great moral standing.

[Well, the Finns use to remind that they too have reason to be proud of their safeguaring their small Jewish population, and their low number of civilian deaths 1939-45, 2,000 similar to the Danish figure, despite their long harsh wars - but their combat losses were some disastrous 2.6% of the population.]

Resistance is not a national characteristic. Consecutive defeats through the centuries, from the Thirthy Years War and on, have learned the Danes better.

Other nations have reason to be proud of their resistance, but had to pay a price in lifes. The Danish Resistance Museum is there just to remind us that there actually were some exceptional freedom fighters - even in Denmark.

The Finns were incredible in fighting the Soviets. Perhaps it might have been somewhat different had Stalin not purged most of his senior officers, but not enough historians seem aware of the brilliance of the Finnish commander, Marshal Mannerheim.

Soviet troops, who thought they understood winter, called the Finnish ski troops ghosts -- appearing out of nowhere, attacking, and disappearing. It was only by applying overwhelming numbers did the Soviets prevail.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

By now you know Olaf's from one member of the Coalition Of The Willing - Denmark. I'm from another - Australia.

Bush was an obvious phoney right off to just about anyone who wasn't American (as well as to most of the 20-odd% of Americans who twice voted against him). But look at the fertile ground distinctive to the US national makeup from which Bush's GOP sprouted - the flag idolatry, the free pass for wacko pseudo-Christianity, the exceptionalism, the gun-happiness, the hypercapitalism, the savvy and gall to successfully market anything however useless or toxic, the easy can-do assumptions, the plutocratic extremes, the abnormally high incidence of stupid-but-nevertheless-articulate, the poverty of the minimum wage earner, the navel-gazing of schools and media, the red states that still haven't gotten over Abraham Lincoln, never mind Martin Luther King.

In short, the US was a big worry before Bush and will remain so after him. Which is not to say that millions of Americans don't share our concern. Best of luck guys - you'll need it.

Anyhow, we've also got to somehow explain our own national flaws for supporting our own miniBushes before and during their joint war crime that was and remains Iraq. For us, that's harder. It's easier to spot other countries' demons than one's own, but a few things are clear even to us. We're full of toadies who'd follow the US anywhere out of a fearful narrow short-term view of our their own self interest. Xenophobia and religio-cultural bigotry are rife here as well. Oh yeah, and we spawned Rupert Murdoch. Special apologies for that.

I think Terry has it about right here. Here is an article in Counterpunch lays out Rahm Emanual’s apparent strategy of promoting stay-the-course or soft-on-withdrawal candidates.

64% of the Democratic candidates in the 45 closely contested House Congressional races OPPOSE a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.

Here is another Counterpunch item analyzing this. I was reading this yesterday and wondering why we have not heard more about this in the blogs, at least. Does the Dem leadership (other than Dean) still think this is the only way to win? Are Dems going to be Republicans lite for the foreseeable future?

With some, they haven't quite agreed that things were over in 1865. I always find it amusing, being a Yankee boy, to have grown up hearing 1861-1865 called the "Civil War", and then visiting the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond. Some of the very proper volunteer guides refer to the "recent unpleasantness between the States".

Going further south, it's the "War of Yankee Aggression". There is a tale of a Northern professor, on her way to a conference in Atlanta, being pulled over by a police officer for speeding.

Apparently, he was very pleasant at first, suggesting "Ma'am, we aren't very familiar with people that move so fast in these parts."

It is not clear what she was thinking when she replied, "How about William T. Sherman?"

As she waited, in the lockup, for the judge, she did say the deputies were very nice, and even brought coffee to her cell.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

With all the blather about promoting democracy, coalitions, liberal internationalism or whatever, the fact of the matter is the only allies worth a damn are those that speak English as a native language. From my neo-isolationist perspective, we should stop invading and stop defending everyone else.

Keep in mind that the American civil war was fought largely with single shot rifles and a variety of small cannon. Compare that to a civil war fought with automatic weapons, 500 pound satellite-guided bombs dropped from F-15s, and IEDs made from the hundreds of tons of explosives scavenged from abandoned munitions depots.

Even after factoring in improvements in medical care, we'll be lucky if the bloodshed in Iraq's civil war is merely as bad as it's American counterpart.

The civil-war-to-civl-war comparison is long overdue. Remember the favorite excuse of '04, that the fighting wasn't throughout the country but only in a few areas? How many counties in the U.S. at any one time were seeing war-related violence in, say, 1862?

And if you really want to find a parallel in the two civil wars that is instructive, ponder the legacy of America's Reconstruction era.

Or if your tastes run more to irony, consider the Americans driving around with Confederate battle flag sticker on their vehicle and a "Support Our Troops" ribbon. Their insurgency: good. The Iraqi insurgency: evil. The whole civil war comparison really is rich in lessons, large and small.

The ~ 600K estimate of Iraqi deaths seems more plausible when put in the context of the estimate published by the Lancet, 18 months in to the war. That estimate was roughly 100K. We've had another 24 months since then; looking at the death rate reported by morgues, it's obviously accelerated, running about two and a half to three times the rate it was then.

Use the rate of increase in reported deaths to extrapolate from the numbers in the Lancet study, you're going to get something in the several hundred thousand - someone with more time and patience than me might be nice enough to crunch the numbers. I'm fairly sure it would come somewhere in the potential interval cited in this latest study, and might converge fairly closely with the highest confidence interval.

Bo Raxo
--
"Bother," said Pooh as Satan pointed out the small print.

Re: All these casualties were soldiers. Something which is true only for a limited number of Iraqi deaths reported.

Civilian casualties are not known in the American Civil war. In the early years of the war they were probably minimal, but in the last year or two they were probably quite enormous, especially in the wake of Sherman and Sheridan's marches where people would have starved and perished of disease in great numbers.