{"id":2825,"date":"2006-10-20T00:03:19","date_gmt":"2006-10-20T07:03:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2006\/10\/20\/why-the-lancet-study-matters\/"},"modified":"2006-10-20T00:03:19","modified_gmt":"2006-10-20T07:03:19","slug":"why-the-lancet-study-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=2825","title":{"rendered":"Why The Lancet Study Matters"},"content":{"rendered":"

So why does the Lancet <\/em>study matter? To me, it matters because it reiterates something that too many Americans have forgotten: Starting wars is evil<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A chief prosecutor of Nazi war crimes at Nuremberg has said George W. Bush should be tried for war crimes along with Saddam Hussein. Benjamin Ferencz, who secured convictions for 22 Nazi officers for their work in orchestrating the death squads that killed more than 1 million people, told OneWorld both Bush and Saddam should be tried for starting “aggressive” wars–Saddam for his 1990 attack on Kuwait and Bush for his 2003 invasion of Iraq.<\/p>\n

“Nuremberg declared that aggressive war is the supreme international crime,” the 87-year-old Ferencz told OneWorld from his home in New York. He said the United Nations charter, which was written after the carnage of World War II, contains a provision that no nation can use armed force without the permission of the UN Security Council.<\/p>\n

Ferencz said that after Nuremberg the international community realized that every war results in violations by both sides, meaning the primary objective should be preventing any war from occurring in the first place.<\/p>\n

He said the atrocities of the Iraq war–from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the massacre of dozens of civilians by U.S. forces in Haditha to the high number of civilian casualties caused by insurgent car bombs–were highly predictable at the start of the war. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

According to the most recent study, published in Lancet<\/em>, somewhere between 400,000 and 800,000 Iraqis have died because Americans – both Democrats and Republicans – lost track of the incredibly basic, obvious fact that starting a war is evil<\/em>. Around half a million people are dead. Is it possible that we’ll learn a lesson from this, and not <\/em>start a war with Iran?<\/p>\n

The important point is not if the “right” number is 655,000 deaths, or 400,000 deaths, or even 250,000 deaths. The important point is that this war – and the whole idea of pre-emptive war – is a tragic, dismal failure, and one that can no longer be in good conscience defended by anyone who values human life. Daniel Davies writes:<\/p>\n

The question that this study was set up to answer was: as a result of the invasion, have things got better or worse in Iraq? And if they have got worse, have they got a little bit worse or a lot worse. […]<\/p>\n

That qualitative conclusion is this: things have got worse, and they have got a lot worse, not a little bit worse. Whatever detailed criticisms one might make of the methodology of the study (and I have searched assiduously for the last two years, with the assistance of a lot of partisans of the Iraq war who have tried to pick holes in the study, and not found any), the numbers are too big. If you go out and ask 12,000 people whether a family member has died and get reports of 300 deaths from violence, then that is not consistent with there being only 60,000 deaths from violence in a country of 26 million. It is not even nearly consistent.<\/p>\n

This is the question to always keep at the front of your mind when arguments are being slung around (and it is the general question one should always be thinking of when people talk statistics). How Would One Get This Sample, If The Facts Were Not This Way? There is really only one answer – that the study was fraudulent. It really could not have happened by chance. Anyone who wants to dispute the important conclusion of the study has to be prepared to accuse the authors of fraud, and presumably to accept the legal consequences of doing so. […]<\/p>\n

There has to be some accountability here. It is not good enough for the pro-intervention community to shrug their shoulders and say that the fatalities caused by the insurgents are not our fault and not part of the moral calculus. I would surely like to see the insurgents in the ICC on war crimes charges, but the Nuremberg convention was also correct to say that aggression was “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”. The people who started this war of aggression need to face up to the fact, and that is a political issue.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’d love to see Bush, Cheney and the rest of the gang spend the rest of their lives in prison for war crimes – because starting a war needlessly is a war crime, possibly the worse war crime of all. But there’s no chance that will happen. Power protects power, and no number of people imprisoned and tortured without trial, no number of innocent Iraqis raped and maimed and killed, will suffice to see a single powerful American held responsible for the carnage.<\/p>\n

At the least, I hope the people who supported this war might go against virtually all their impulses up to this moment and learn from their errors. Learn enough so that they won’t support the US starting yet another needless war, this time with Iran. Learn enough to condemn the evil, sick policy of “pre-emptive war,” which is just an Orwellian way of saying “let’s start a war because we damn well want to<\/em>.” The Nuremberg judges knew more about war than Bush and the war boosters ever will, because they were actually willing to learn from reality. The main result of invading Iraq – hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths – should be enough to let us say “never again.”<\/p>\n

It won’t. But it should.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So why does the Lancet study matter? To me, it matters because it reiterates something that too many Americans have forgotten: Starting wars is evil. A chief prosecutor of Nazi war crimes at Nuremberg has said George W. Bush should … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-iraq"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2825\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}