The hoopla from the war hawks and peace doves over the past eighteen months on up to the present has left me largely unimpressed. The hawks pressed their war based, in part, on claims of “weapons of mass distruction”. The revelation of which had all the drama of Geraldo Reveria cracking Al Capones’ tomb. The doves, humorously, are shocked and angry that the US government could have got it wrong.

Not content to accept the government may simply be blithering idiots on a mission, the doves have assigned evil intent and malicious design to the intelligence “failures” and are set on marking the “evil doers”. All this while turning away from the stench of fact wafting from the graves of mass decompsition in the deserts of Iraq – the graves of thousands of Iraqi citizens – men, women and children – killed by agents for Saddam Hussain.

For all the claims of impending piles of corpes if war in Iraq were to happen¹, the reality is the “civilized” nations were too late to prevent the massive loss of life. It appears Saddam Hussain has been quite efficient at providing the hidious body counts.

For those seeking a little perspective, an article by Brian Hayes in the January-Feburary, 2002 edition of American Scientist titled “Statistics of Deadly Quarrels”² may be of interest.
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¹In a letter widely distributed on the internet and attributed to Dr. Helen Caldicott (I have been unable to confirm the source), it was implied that the impending war would result in “slaughtering up to 500,000 innocents in Iraq”, and in this group, “tens of thousands of children”. Interestingly, this same letter avocates using other people (in this case, Pope John Paul II) as human shields. No word whether the author of this letter was willing to be a human shield.

²Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, Brian Hayes, American Scientist, January-Feburary, 2002, vol. 90, num. 1, pp. 10-15 / Online reference: https://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/14426/page/1;_s?&print=yes