[Dean's World] Dave Price: Iraq War: Victory?

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Posted by Dave Price:
Iraq War: Victory?
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1194028650.shtml


   Andrew Bolt [1]runs the numbers:

     The battle is actually over. Iraq has been won.
     ...
     Consider: Iraq's official estimate of civilian deaths from violence
     is now about 25 a day.
     In South Africa, with twice the population, the official murder
     toll is 52 a day. That's a rate of killing equal to Iraq's.
     Do you think those murders will topple South Africa?
     And does anyone say of South Africa that these killings just prove
     freedom was not worth it?

   Hmmm, I haven't ever heard the S African situation described as a
   "civil war," though it certainly has serious problems. They're
   actually very similar scenarios: a country in which a small
   ethnosectarian minority ruled the country for a long time, to be
   replaced by a more democratic system, with a lot of bumps in the road.
   Andrew compares current violence to an estimate of Saddam-era
   violence, and actually undercounts the casualties from the Iran-Iraq
   War, which was the result of Hussein's attempt to seize Iranian
   oilfields. 500,000 is actually [2]the estimate of Iraqi casualties;
   Hussein's victims were not limited to those within Iraq's borders, as
   Kuwaitis can also attest. The total number of people killed by
   Hussein's regime is probably closer to 2 million, or about 7,000 per
   month on average.
   While post-invasion casualties have never approached those numbers,
   it's still too soon to say that the violence in Iraq won't get worse
   again, as it has before, though the new counterinsurgency strategy is
   designed to make that less likely than it was in the past. The next
   couple months should either firmly establish or destroy the trend of
   lower casualties.

References

   1. http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22689634-5007146,00.html
   2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-iraq_war