WB: Catching Up With Saddam – Moon of Alabama

October 13, 2006

WB: Catching Up With Saddam

Billmon:

The moral of the story, I guess, is that you don’t need to be an inhuman monster to cause an inhuman amount of death, destruction and suffering. You don’t even need evil — ignorance and arrogance and incompetence can manage the job quite nicely. But, as I’ve said before, it does requires a rare combination of those qualities to take a situation like Saddam’s Iraq and make it worse.

Catching Up With Saddam

Posted by b on October 13, 2006 at 04:05 UTC | Permalink

Comments

The “Boxer Day” Tsunami killed a quarter-million in a day.
…I’m surprised the current occupants of the White House didn’t declare war on the ocean.
–oh, wait.

Posted by: Darryl Pearce | Oct 13 2006 4:21 utc | 1

The chutzpah of the MSM colomnists is incredible:

As the security situation in Baghdad has deteriorated over the past month, there has been growing talk among Iraqi politicians about a “government of national salvation” — a coup, in effect — that would impose martial law throughout the country. This coup talk is probably unrealistic, but it illustrates the rising desperation among Iraqis as the country slips deeper into civil war.

The rising desperation and coup-talk is obviously in W-DC. Is this the preliminary official justification for such a coup?

Meanwhile, top officials of the Iraqi intelligence service have discussed a plan in which Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki would step aside in favor of a five-man ruling commission that would suspend parliament, declare martial law and call back some officers of the old Iraqi army.

That would be Mr. Cellophane – a 100% CIA asset.

Posted by: b | Oct 13 2006 5:07 utc | 2

Vivé la Directoire!

Posted by: Rowan | Oct 13 2006 5:14 utc | 3

From Ignatius:

Some are said to support the juntalike commission, which would represent the country’s main factions and include former interim prime minister Ayad Allawi — still seen by some Iraqis as a potential “strongman” who could pull the country back from the brink.
Why not cut to the chase? Take Saddam out of the dock and elevate to the job he knows so well how to do.

Posted by: Meteor Blades | Oct 13 2006 6:25 utc | 4

Second paragraph mine, not DI’s.

Posted by: Meteor Blades | Oct 13 2006 6:26 utc | 5

Second paragraph mine, not DI’s.

Posted by: Meteor Blades | Oct 13 2006 6:26 utc | 6

The figure I’ve used for these calculations is that Saddam was killing a
few hundred people a year. That was from one of the international human
rights organizations around 2002. Most of his total score was racked up
in the war with Iran or operations against specific groups (Communists,
Kurds, Shiites in 1991) who were a threat to his power. In 2003, they were many
years past. There’s no reason to think he would have had similar threats or
have had the resources to respond so brutally. By this analysis, the true
baseline for Saddam over 3.5 years is perhaps 2,000.
This has troubling implications for the moral calculus, but since I was
a math major I have to follow the numbers where they lead. Always the
numbers.
It should be noted that maintaining demographic records is a normal
function of civil government, which we are abligated to carry out under
the Geneva Convention concerned with occupation. Early on, we announced that
we weren’t going to waste time keeping track of no steenkin’ A Rabs.

Posted by: Roger Bigod | Oct 13 2006 7:08 utc | 7

Americans Are Stupid, and Newsweek Intends To Keep It That Way (Wonkette) It’s not here fault, or is it? The ptb have spent the last thirty years dumbing them down from our education system, to our public airwaves…

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Oct 13 2006 7:56 utc | 8

Well, that should have been in the open thread, but I mean, Saddam, Iraq, DPPK what’s the fucking difference…/snark

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Oct 13 2006 8:07 utc | 9

@Roger Bigod Your figures seem about right for Saddam it was never an ethnocentric, or racist or even sectarian thing; just about staying in power. Toward the end after he had forced most people to accept his ‘model’ of a political structure or stay in Iran, the murders would have been in the low hundreds per year.
He is a bad bloke no doubt about it but probably less bloody than many Latin American or South East Asian sock-puppets(say Somoza or Marcos) that amerika used to prop up back in the day.
Many of the the legends about his mass murders came outta the drawer next to the one marked “Saddam Hussein WMD”.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Oct 13 2006 9:55 utc | 10

But I thought the number was impressive, particularly when matched against the much more conservative (so to speak) total of 44,000 to 49,000 deaths listed by Iraq Body Count — a figure based, as the name implies, on actual toe tags, not the baseline projections used by the Johns Hopkins team.

Hardly.
Iraq Body Count only lists reported deaths, and then of those, only those deaths reported online, and of those, only deaths reported in English, and finally out of those, only deaths reported by “approved” websites where each article was posted with a unique archived URL.
They themselves point out that “[i]t is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media. That is that sad nature of war.” And so while a noble cause, by now by their own admission they have not counted “many if not most” of the deaths. I would then suggest to cite their statistic as even a possible realistic figure in an argument is really shitty math at the best, and pro-war propaganda at the worst.

Posted by: Pyrrho | Oct 13 2006 9:59 utc | 11

When you say “you don’t even need evil” do you mean that America in not? Strange little word. I used to think it was meaningless.

Posted by: DM | Oct 13 2006 10:26 utc | 12

I always thought *evil* was mythical, something to scare little children with, like the bogeyman. Now it’s a matter of fact: bush is an evil, inhuman, monster + ignorant and arrogant. And the horses he rode in on.

Posted by: beq | Oct 13 2006 11:55 utc | 13

What is “evil” anyway? Is it to INTEND to do harm, to gloat in sadistic pleasure at the suffering and destruction of others?
In my opinion, there is biographical evidence that Shrub is evil in this very strong sense of the word (blowing up live frogs as a kid, mocking the prisoners Texas executed while he was governor, etc. etc. etc.)
But I would argue that doing evil goes beyond that, to treating others as mere instruments to one’s goals – a “depraved indifference” to their suffering. And even a conscious intention to do good is not enough to get one off the hook – an egregious example being the Spanish Inquisition. In that broader sense, it is clear the entire Bush gang is evil (admittedly, in this they are not so unique).

Posted by: mistah charley | Oct 13 2006 12:07 utc | 14

@b #2
That would seem to be laying the groundwork for the post-election chapter of this nightmare, along with this:
Baker’s Panel Rules Out Iraq Victory (NY Sun!!)

Mr. Baker in recent days has subtly been sounding out this theme with interviewers. On PBS’s “Charlie Rose Show,” Mr. Baker was careful to say he believed the jury was still out on whether Iraq was a success or a failure. But he also hastened to distinguish between a Middle East that was “democratic” and one that was merely “representative.”
“If we are able to promote representative, representative government, not necessarily democracy, in a number of nations in the Middle East and bring more freedom to the people of that part of the world, it will have been a success,” he said.
That distinction is crucial, according to one member of the expert working groups. “Baker wants to believe that Sunni dictators in Sunni majority states are representative,” the group member, who requested anonymity, said.

Plus ca change…

Posted by: Bea | Oct 13 2006 12:11 utc | 15

@anna missed & all…
Oops, just realized that the wider implications of the Baker group report were already discussed in the OT thread… hadn’t been following that. I didn’t mean to repeat your points but I agree with you that this is VERY worthy of our attention… and I agree with how you see it as an arabist solution as well.

Posted by: Bea | Oct 13 2006 12:51 utc | 16

Billmon says this but to see the numbers in the study these numbers are worse then they look plain than if you look at the trend.
The study has four periods
I. Jan’02-Mar’03 (prewar)
II. Mar’03-Apr’04
III. May’04-May’05
IV. Jun’05-Jun’06
The “death per 1000 people” rates for the periods are:
I. – 5.5
II. – 7.5
III. – 10.9
IV. – 19.8
The “excess death per 1000 people”, i.e. war-realted rates are thereby
I. – 0
II. – 2.5
III. – 5.4
IV. – 14.3
Obviously there is a trend, i.e. it is getting worse fast.
The study ends June 2006. Some 100 days ago. With a excess mortality of 14.3, some 100,000 people have additionally died of war related causes.
These people were not counted in the study.
If one extrapolates the trend dynamic visible in the mortality rate, an excess mortality rate of 18-20 can be assumed for the last 100 days. This represents 140,000 people who died of related causes since the study was finished.
So we are now at a rate of 500,000 per year dying of war-related causes in Iraq. In the US such a rate would mean 5.7 million dead per year through violence, hunger, lack of medicine, food etc.
But to pacify your rage a bit, let me assure you that genozide is indeed finite. Given the trendnumbers, and “don`t change the course”, Iraq will be literary empty space some 10-15 years from now.

Posted by: b | Oct 13 2006 12:51 utc | 17

@b #17 & Billmon (thread)
Thanks so much for the great analyses… they leave me speechless and utterly depressed though. I wish there was a way to get these numbers more visibly out into the public debate. Can you guys write this up and publish it somewhere else as well? I would like to see this plastered on every front page in the country.

Posted by: Bea | Oct 13 2006 12:56 utc | 18

Is it possible/credible that James Baker, the Bush family consigliere, will actually lend his name to a report that says that victory in Iraq is not possible? Would he be kind enough to do it before Nov. 7?

Posted by: montysano | Oct 13 2006 12:58 utc | 19

“I don’t like the numbers. They are not credible. Look these people are scientists and some are foreigners who want to discredit a great American effort. I have it on very good authority. Only 17 people have died from American actions. A few more might have died in the British sector. We’re going with 25 for the whole five years. I like 25.”

Posted by: della Rovere | Oct 13 2006 13:16 utc | 20

B: well, in cases where mass murders and genocides occur inside a given country, it is indeed finite and ends up when the biggest dog has eliminated the others, then usual population growth kicks in again. Unless of course another power decides to step in and wipe out the surviving winning side. Rwanda has lost a massive portion of its population, yet the country is back to population level it had before civil war, probably more nowadays than before.
Of course, all of this doesn’t mean all this isn’t heinous and horrible, and shouldn’t happen.
I’ve also seen some people doubting such a level of violence. Well, you had even higher death rates in the Congo civil war since the late 90s, with casualties in the 3-4 mio for a country twice as populated as Iraq. And that was mostly bush war, which is another name for “let’s wipe the others’ village and starve the survivors”. No need for Austerlitz or Stalingrad-scale battles to kill that many people. Just a bunch of local small-scale massacres and it’s over. The Turks and the Armenians could certainly confirm this.
Last but not least, I slightly differ with Billmon here.
With all we know about him, it’s quite fair to say that Bush is actually and at the same time ignorant, incompetent, arrogant *and* an evil inhumane monster.

Posted by: CluelessJoe | Oct 13 2006 13:23 utc | 21

@billmon
It may not seem fair to blame the Cheneyites collectively and personally for all those deaths — after all, the insurgents, and the Shi’a death squads and Al Qaeda in Iraq and even the Kurdish peshmerga have killed more, and usually killed more heinously, than the U.S. military. But those parties wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do their worst if Shrub hadn’t already done his. That’s the problem with wars of choice: Leaders who start them have to take responsibility for the consequences: good, bad or indifferent.
to add, one may also want to consider that “divide & rule” was central to the USUK policy from the get-go and remains the case.
On the other hand, USUK’s adversary, the Sunni/Baathists (along with a small element of foreigh jihadis) determined to proceed to punish the Shia to whatever extent as is required to end Shia support for the USUK occupation. This likewise remains the case.
the lead possibility for reversing this heinious scenario is a withdrawal of USUK forces. Another possibility is an event that causes the Shia to turn against USUK. Partitioning or re-structuring Iraq will not end the bloodshed.

Posted by: jony_b_cool | Oct 13 2006 14:30 utc | 22

11/9/04
Dear Sir,
The election has come and gone. That President Bush has been re-elected seems largely to have been a vote of confidence in his handling of the war in Iraq. But now that the political dust has settled, is it OK to ask why Bush never mentioned the ongoing cost of the war to those whom it affects most, the people of Iraq itself?
The Pentagon does not compile or keep records of Iraqi civilian deaths. This unpleasant task has fallen to independent groups such as Iraq Body Count (iraqbodycount.org), Human Rights Watch and most recently, that bastion of the international medical profession, The Lancet.
The Lancet has estimated that, conservatively, the number of Iraqi civilians who have died since the invasion of 2003 is 100,000 – 46,000 of them children under 15. To put 46,000 dead Iraqi children into perspective a little more sharply, there are about 45,000 kids under 18 in Chittenden and Addison Counties.
To give that figure another perspective, estimates of the civilian victims of Saddam Hussein hover around 200,000, deaths that took place in the 24 years between 1979 and 2003. Saddam was killing his people at a rate of about 694 a month. We seem to have been managing to kill 5,555 a month – no doubt a testament to the way “this conflict has been prosecuted in the most precise fashion of any conflict in the history of modern warfare,” as the Pentagon puts it. Certainly, not all these people were killed by Coalition action, but until the Pentagon decides to give us accurate figures we have to assume that the side with the overwhelming superiority in weaponry must be making the most significant contribution.
IBC, which bases its figures solely on deaths confirmed in the news media, has a current figure of minimum 14,238 and maximum 16,371 civilian deaths. So let’s split the difference: 58,000 Iraqi children, women and men dead in the past year and a half as a result of the invasion. That’s 3,222 a month. Is that more palatable?
Does this belittle the deaths of American soldiers? No. Untimely death is the greatest of all tragedies, no matter what the nationality of the victim. Is it unpatriotic to call attention to this horror? It shouldn’t be. This country is founded on the principle that all human beings are created equal. When President Bush uses the word ‘casualty’ solely to denote American deaths, he is explicitly denying that very principle. All blameless human lives are worth the same. If the President continues to believe he has a God-given mandate to be in Iraq, I suggest he dust off his New Testament and open it to Matthew 2: 13-18: the Massacre of the Innocents.
That was a letter I sent to our local Vermont newspapers two years ago – needless to say it didn’t get printed. I’m sticking it in here purely as historical reference. Horribly enough, the figures pale in comparison to those above by b and others. And I’m not sure how accurate my own butcher’s bill is: I’m crap at math. I think the final paragraph was in response to rightie breast-beating over how unpatriotic the Lancet report was, and Bush’s latest outbreak of God-bothering – and I thought that if I wagged the appropriate tail the buggers might print it. Actually, I think I’m posting this because I’m totally beset by the fact that plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose have become the words that rule us all.

Posted by: Tantalus | Oct 13 2006 14:58 utc | 23

Off the back of my scuffy cuff, I would have said at most 300 a year. That Saddam killed directly.
In line with Roger Bigod, and as he says from humanit. org. reports. Such numbers are attested to, easily look upable, they correspond, as well, with those of Iraqi expats (not those being paid to talk to the US admin), afaik (no link.)
These killings were mostly of dissidents and opponents, or people who were a threat to the regime for whatever reason, but also of their families, as well as somewhat random targets – people who somehow got up the Saddam apparatus nose, or stood in their way, or objected too loudly about a previous abduction/killing/rape, or whatever.
That is of course always the case; power must cow. People must be made to keep silent, they must know about the ‘secret’ prison, the boots in the night. Because of the control aspect, the disappearances, torture and killings, while not legally shored up/justified, or admitted to (as often done thru kangaroo courts; pretense at justice, small compensation paid for ‘accidental death’, etc.) were not secret but blatant, well understood and well known. Saddam was a ME dictator, a chief, a head of a tribe, as opposed to a potentate in a whole scale killing machine (eg. Nazis.) with all its legal apparatus, its groups, its rules and procedures, justifications and whitewash.
As pointed out, that is outside of ‘war’ situations.
Slipping over into discussion of ‘evil’, one can meet people like Saddam in the West today. On the whole, they are held in check by laws/democratic society etc. But given a small parcel of power, they will exceed it, and will leave a trail of woe and death or more prosaically financial ruin behind them, with society having little available measures for redress. They will create medieval fiefdoms where their power is unchecked (e.g. Enron; e.g. small dpt. in Gvmt. org with terrified employees who shiver at death threats and trade sex for salary), etc. These people – like Saddam – always operate in an environment that has a certain stability; stability which they will create or uphold, maintain in some way (as Saddam most certainly did.) They may overreach (often do it without caring), miscalculate, or finally be overcome by the inevitability of outside forces. Or carry on with impunity…
A paradigm change, a system shift, a new ME (for example), creating a new reality is, as the Swiss say, another pair of sleeves, that is, a whole different scene. Systemic cataclysms -beyond Strauss-, birth pangs of huge regions inhabited by millions, setting up a new world order, is entirely another matter. An order of magnitude different. And, as has been bruited about endlessly by the likes of a dazed and stumbling Rummy, a new game with new rules. (Heh. I’m reminded of ‘the end of history’ by that ass Fukuyama.) Such a revolutionary vision – and it is revolutionary, though the word is taboo in the US – rests on hubris, assumed power, fantastical hopes, crazed visions.
Saddam lost out because he was old guard and reasonable (1), and believed in a culture of dominance and negotiation from a power position, and thus appeasement as well.
Argh! too long. Anyway score cards of death are hard to figure and as all those in power judge, meaningless in the long run. Ask Maddy Allbright.
1. As a repressive dictator, of whom there are plenty about. I am no Saddam apologist.

Posted by: Noirette | Oct 13 2006 16:11 utc | 24

Regardless how one slices and dices the numbers it is impossible not to come up to the following conclusion:
No other single person, group, regime, terrorist organization and/or power mad corpocraptacular dictator has killed more people than the Bush Administration in the 21st century.
No one.
.

Posted by: RossK | Oct 13 2006 17:04 utc | 25

No other single person, group, regime, terrorist organization and/or power mad corpocraptacular dictator has killed more people than the Bush Administration in the 21st century.
Hey, the century is still young. There’s plenty of time for other U.S. administrations to get their licks in.

Posted by: billmon | Oct 13 2006 17:09 utc | 26

Dahr Jamail on Iraq Body Count earlier this year:

Learning to Count:The Dead in Iraq
…
By the time George Bush cited IBC’s data in his famous public statement that “30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis,” IBC had gone from being an important part of antiwar propaganda to a vital agent of war propaganda, by virtue of vastly understating the actual number of civilians killed in the Iraq war. IBC data became the tool of choice for the Bush administration and the U.S. corporate media to refute the growing public awareness that the Iraq war was in fact killing well over a hundred thousand innocent Iraqi men, women, and children.
For the Bush administration and its well-paid public relations firms, the greatest coup was perhaps that not only do the IBC numbers vastly low-ball the actual civilian casualties in Iraq, but that IBC appears to be an antiwar site! The Bush administration could not have paid to manufacture better propaganda.
…

Posted by: Alamet | Oct 13 2006 17:19 utc | 27

billmon–
But it just might be a lunatic your looking for?
Am I right?
Or am I just crazy?
.

Posted by: RossK | Oct 13 2006 18:43 utc | 28

I know that it will be history, and we will all be dead, but I wonder what imagery will be conjured up to future generations by the phrase The Evil Empire. Will this be the chapter on the USSR?

Posted by: DM | Oct 13 2006 19:44 utc | 29

“Will this be the chapter on the USSR?”
Quie possible. For forty five years the USSR protected us from “The Evil Empire”.

Posted by: pb | Oct 13 2006 20:25 utc | 30

@Noirette, liked your mini essay on sociopathic dictator-wannabes in micro-empires (in embryo as it were) within societies that claim to be democratic. thought provoking. something I have often wondered about. are theirs the ranks from whom the commissars and senior thugs are quickly recruited when the political weather shifts to the Right?

Posted by: DeAnander | Oct 13 2006 22:42 utc | 31

“In case you haven’t noticed, we are now almost as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis were.” — Kurt Vonnegut, 2004

Posted by: Pyrrho | Oct 13 2006 23:14 utc | 32

pb–
😀
For years many people, especially in the West, had thought the US shielded the rest of the world by constraining the Soviet Union. Since the collapse of the Soviets, it has come to seem that the opposite was the case.

Posted by: Gaianne | Oct 14 2006 4:22 utc | 33

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