Current mood:	grumpy
Current music:	U2 - Two Hearts Beat As One

The latest crap from Peter Phillips

The headline:

U.S. Perpetuates Mass Killings In Iraq

The United States is directly responsible for over one million Iraqi deaths since the invasion five and half years ago.

Directly responsible, eh? And what is the source for the claim that the US is directly responsible for the implied mass killing of over one million people?

In a January 2008 report, a British polling group Opinion Research Business (ORB) reports that, ?survey work confirms our earlier estimate that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict

So to support the claim that the US is directly responsible for this number of deaths, Phillips cites a study of deaths that the US is indirectly responsible for.

There is something I've noticed about left-wing anti-American propaganda (yes, there really is such a thing and this is an example of it). It regularly abuses the English language by using words in ways they were never intended to be used. We used to call that "lying", but we can let it slide if it is for a good cause, right? Here is Phillips doing it again.

A second study published in the Lancet in October 2006 documented over 650,000 civilian deaths in Iraq

The Lancet study did not document 650,000 deaths. That figure was an estimate.

The 2006 study confirms that US aerial bombing in civilian neighborhoods caused over a third of these deaths and that over half the deaths are directly attributable to US forces.

The phrase "bombing in civilian neighborhoods" is a malphemism for hitting militia targets that happened to be firing from there. Phillips is condemning the US for shooting back against armed enemy forces. He also calls the armed militiamen shooting at US forces "civilians", as that number from the Lancet does not differentiate between civilians and combatants as Phillips pretends to do. Furthermore, page 3 of the Lancet's 8-page brief of their October 2006 study lists air strikes as being responsible for 7% of all 547 deaths reported to the Lancet. That grand total of seven percent does not differentiate between strikes in civilian neighborhoods and strikes in the countryside as Phillips pretends to do.

As for whether "over half the deaths are directly attributable to US forces", the Lancet study brief lists 46% of the deaths as being from non-violent causes and an additional 7% as being from car bombs, not known as a common US munition. The combined number of these deaths can be assumed with a strong degree of certainty not to be the direct responsibility of US forces. This combined number is itself more than half of the reported deaths, making Phillips's claim logically impossible. We have not even begun to question how many of the deaths by gunshot and small explosive were the responsibility of US forces. Phillips seems to conclude that all of them and more were, as with his insinuations that everyone killed was a civilian and that 500% of all airstrikes were in civilian neighborhoods. I do not know where Phillips gets his numbers. I am citing the Lancet's own brief for the same study he cites, and it does not support his claims.

Having failed at ethos, Phillips tries for pathos with this sappy crap:

The now estimated 1.2 million dead, as of July 2008, includes children, parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, cab drivers, clerics, schoolteachers, factory workers, policemen, poets, healthcare workers, day care providers, construction workers, babysitters, musicians, bakers, restaurant workers and many more.

What, no child molesters? Not to mention the notable exception of armed combatants from the list.

The magnitude of these deaths is undeniable.

That's odd, because I've seen people deny it with a fair argument that the studies Phillips cites oversampled parts of the country where the violence is worst.

The continuing occupation by US forces guarantees a mass death rate in excess of 10,000 people per month with half that number dying at the hands of US forces?

Phillips guarantees this in much the same way that that used car dealer guaranteed you that the crunching sound when you shifted into third gear was nothing to worry about. He has an agenda to push and he is not going to let the real truth get in the way. The real truth about the number of civilian casualties in Iraq is that nobody knows the real truth about the number of civilian casualties in Iraq. The best anyone has is a series of estimates and educated guesses, few of which support Phillips's claims to absolute undeniable facthood. Here is an alternate count from the Pentagon showing the civilian death rate under 1,000 per month, less than a tenth of what Phillips guarantees. The use of words like "undeniable" and "guaranteed" is unsupportable and another word game. Note also that it is not just a death rate, it's a mass death rate. The Iraqis weren't just killed, they were killed during Communion.

Phillips describes his fantasy kill count as:

a carnage so severe and so concentrated at to equate it with the most heinous mass killings in world history.

A mass killing means to target a mass of people and kill them all at once. Phillips has so far been playing with the word "mass" to merely conjure up images of a massacre, but now he explicitly calls it a massacre, even one of the worst massacres in world history. Phillips is directly equating US activities in the generic distributed warfare of Iraq, conducted mostly by routine lawful acts of war between armed combatants, to the Holocaust, Stalin's purges, Pol Pot's killing fields, and the rape of Nanking. This is an insult to the memory of those who died in these mass killings, to those who drew and who maintain the laws of war, and to those who struggle to prevent mass killings from taking place in the future.

Still on the subject of the US's mere presence in Iraq being as bad as the Holocaust, Phillips writes:

This act has not gone unnoticed.

Recently, Dennis Kucinich introduced a single impeachment article against George W. Bush for lying to Congress and the American people about the reasons for invading Iraq.

Wait, I thought we were still on the subject of the US presence in Iraq being as bad as the Holocaust. FOOLED YOU!

The American people are faced with a serious moral dilemma. Murder and war crimes have been conducted in our name. We have allowed the war/occupation to continue in Iraq and offered ourselves little choice within the top two presidential candidates for immediate cessation of the mass killings.

The American left is faced with a serious moron dilemma. The people that are allowed to lead and speak for the left are the type of blithering, blathering morons who accuse the US of massacring 5,000 Iraqi civilians a month and who see little choice between the positions of Obama and McCain on Iraq. The smarter people on the left have long since graduated to considering how withdrawal can best be implemented as part of a strategy to stabilize Iraq and cause the least damage to US foreign policy, while the morons are still stuck in early 2003 arguing the moral case against starting the war. Most people don't complain because the morons are part of the antiwar coalition, and they pull a strong confidence act and come up with agreeable slogans. To hell with that. The left should not allow itself to be led or spoken for by morons who show zero analytical ability and less understanding of Iraq than when George W. Bush couldn't tell the difference between Sunni and Shia.

We owe our children and ourselves a future without the shame of mass murder on our collective conscience.

Quick Note: Peter Phillips is calling the US soldiers in Iraq mass murderers.

The only resolution of this dilemma is the immediate withdrawal of all US troops in Iraq and the prosecution and imprisonment of those responsible.

Here we go again with the absolutes, the blinded dualism, the idea of "you're either with us or you're against us".

Anything less creates a permanent original sin on the soul of the nation for that we will forever suffer.

If the US leaves Iraq tomorrow(*), it would create a permanent original sin on the soul of the nation that the people of the US will forever suffer. The suffering will be just as bad as how the US is suffering from its sins of the Mexican War of 1846 and the Spanish-American War of 1898.
(* - because tomorrow is not immediately, and Obama's promise to withdraw all US forces over a year and a half is not enough)

The heart of Phillips's argument, if you can call it that, is that the US and only the US is to blame for every act of violence in the country. The fact that much of the violence is caused by Iraqi factions fighting each other, and that many these groups actually do conduct massacres? That is not worth mentioning. The implication of Phillips's words is that the only ones "responsible" are the Americans, as the notion of prosecuting and imprisoning the Iraqis responsible for mass killings does not correlate with the removal of the US forces who are currently trying to carry out that goal.

The essay can be boiled down to two ideas: the US is responsible for mass killings, and the solution is to withdraw US forces. The great likelihood is that the Iraqi factions fighting each other over local disputes will continue fighting each other over these same disputes after the US leaves. If a strong level of security is not maintained, leaving Iraq could perpetuate more mass killings and worse mass killings than are currently going on.

Everybody who knows anything about Iraq knows about it being a divided country where people are killing each other over age-old conflicts. You have to ignore that to get to where Phillips is, where there is no civil conflict and the US is directly responsible for everything.