In what deserves to be a classic of its kind, Christopher Hitchens in Slate comes up with an argument against the 655,000 excess deaths estimate in Iraq since 2003: that the study forgot to deduct the number of people who would otherwise have been killed by dead insurgents among those 655,000:
Make the assumption that some percentage of those killed by the coalition are the sort of people who have been blowing up mosques, beheading captives on video, detonating rush-hour car bombs, destroying pipelines, murdering aid workers, bombing the headquarters of the United Nations, and inciting ethnic and sectarian warfare. Make the allowance for the number of bystanders and innocents who lost their lives in the combat against these fanatics (one or two, alas, in the single case of the precision bombing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, just to take one instance). But who is to say how many people were saved from being murdered by the fact that the murderers were killed first?
Who indeed? Because if one is willing to assume a sufficiently high proportion of insurgents among the dead, and a sufficiently high efficiency rate among those insurgents, then it's conceivable that the true death toll is negative i.e. the war saved lives! It's a wonder Norm Geras didn't think of this before he bailed on supporting the war -- but not into opposing it.
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