Mass graves

Posted by Chris

The latest fuss is about Tony Blair's claim that 400,000 mass graves have already been uncovered in Iraq, when in fact "only" about 5000 have been so far uncovered. Kevin Drum has this to say:

I suppose the politically correct stance is that murder is murder, and quibbling over numbers doesn't change the fact that Saddam was a monster. Which is true enough.

But the fact is that, yes, it does matter, in at least two ways. First, it matters because part of the humanitarian case against Saddam was that he was not merely a garden variety nasty dictator, he was arguably the #1 nastiest dictator on the planet. If he wasn't, it does weaken the emotional case for intervention, just as very high numbers strengthen the case for intervention in the proto-genocide currently taking place in Darfur.

Second, and perhaps more important, is the question of whether Tony Blair (and apparently the U.S. government as well) flatly lied about this. This was not a case of intelligence estimates, after all, it was a categorical statement that 400,000 bodies had actually been found by actual troops digging up actual graves. How could he have been off by a factor of 80x?

Needless to say, this wouldn't matter if it were the only exaggeration surrounding the war. But it's not. There was no WMD, no collaboration with al-Qaeda, no 45-minute missiles, no mobile bioweapons labs, no regional military threat, and now it turns out that even the humanitarian case wasn't as clear cut as they suggested.

Is there anything left that these guys told the truth about?

It's important to be fussy in demanding that politicians stick to the truth when they make claims of this sort and of this importance. Failure to complain makes it that much easier to stray from the truth the next time around. But I really wish that Drum had meditated a bit more on this post before he hit "publish". Indeed, it's almost surreal to watch Drum go from this point to raising the possibility that "even the humanitarian case wasn't as clear cut as they suggested."

There is abundant evidence that tens of thousands, and perhaps even hundreds of thousands died during (or as a result of) the uprisings in the South at the end of the Gulf War. U.S. fighter pilots watched overhead as Iraqi helicopters poured napalm over large groups of people. The carnage was documented well enough that we don't need the confirmation of bodies dug up from mass graves to know that many people died. See, for example, the documents on human rights watch's website, the testimony of survivors, or simply observe the condition of the South by the time the U.S. military invaded. The South had been brutalized, and Saddam Hussein had almost achieved his goal of draining the Southern marshes in order to forever deny his enemies in the South a sanctuary if the fighting resumed.

All this has been established, and moreover established by human rights groups which are extremely critical of the Bush and Blair administrations, and so don't have the ideological axe to grind which might lead them to inflate their estimates.

Also, there's an easy explanation for how Blair might have been so wrong. It's entirely possible that 400,000 people were killed by the regime since the Gulf War. The mass graves that have been so far discovered provide some further evidence for those killings. Blair might simply have mixed these up. I don't have a high opinion of Blair's personal integrity, but that doesn't mean that everything that comes out of his mouth is a nasty lie.

The humanitarian argument for the Iraq War fails - or so I have argued repeatedly. But it doesn't fail because Saddam Hussein has turned out to be a sadly misunderstood guy. That judgment isn't up for revision simply because Blair misdescribed one piece of evidence, or even if he lied.

Ugh.

Posted by Chris at July 19, 2004 02:40 PM