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civilian casualties...legitimate reason to oppose the war.

How short our memories… Nov 15, 2001… two months after 9-11.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011203/cortright

Directly connecting 9-11 to Iraq… (remember that next time “the right” is accused of falsely doing so)

“The grim question of how many people have died in Iraq has sparked heated debate over the years. The controversy dates from 1995, when researchers with a Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) study in Iraq wrote to The Lancet, the journal of the British Medical Society, asserting that sanctions were responsible for the deaths of 567,000 Iraqi children.”

This, before the war… 567,000 children killed by the United States.

It’s bogus and for a variety of reasons. It’s also the main reason for Food for Oil which was immediately diverted to palaces and bank accounts by those who claimed all those children were dying.

Children died of starvation and children died for lack of weapons grade chlorine to purify their water.

Oil wealth meant that regional leaders did not have to take care of the people in their countries.

It really is no more complicated than that.

And 567,000 children… why don’t we remember those charges? Why are the years 1991 to 2000 a complete black-hole?

That number got the press. Later revisions downward didn’t.

“Sanctions opponents place the blame for Iraq’s increased deaths squarely on the United States and the continuing UN sanctions. Certainly the United States bears primary responsibility for the war and unrelenting sanctions.”

But we should have let sanctions work. Remember that. Sanctions were better.

Pointless, but better.

As we know, sanctions put no pressure on Saddam. Sanctions only work if people have a way to hold their government responsible. In an oil financed dictatorship this can not happen. And Saddam got around even direct personal financial impact by selling the children’s deaths to the world and getting Food for Oil out of us bleeding hearts.

War is horrible, but it’s far from the worst possible thing. Not-war is not enough to claim moral righteousness.

Failure to go to war kills people, too.

Comments

Ymarsakar said…
I think the Left prefers us to have the memories of animals. Neither the past nor the future matters nearly as much as gratifying your desires in the present. So long as social security is viable now, what does an animal care for the future?

For human beings that prefer to be more than animals bound by instinct, such a constraint on free will is unconscionable.
1:09 PM
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