Dale Franks over at QandO destroys the argument that life for Iraqis is worse today than under Saddam Hussein:
Ronald Hilton estimates that, over the 24 years of Saddam Hussein’s rule, about 600,000 people were killed by the Iraqi government. Now, maybe I ain’t all that good at cipherin’, but by my math, if you assume that Saddam Hussein was in power for 24 years (8,646 days, including leap years), and 600,000 people were executed during that time, you come up with an average of 69.4 people a day executed by Saddam Hussein’s regime. That doesn’t, by the way, include the 1,000,000 or so Iraqis who died during Mr. Hussein’s wars of aggression agsint Iraq or Kuwait. That’s just executions.
So, Mr. Steele’s argument, essentially, is that Iraqis were better off when they had a tranquil public life with 70 people being bumped off by their own government every day, than they are now with 13 people dying in sectarian violence each day. Nevermind that, at the current rate, it will take 126 years for the daily death toll in Iraq to equal the death toll under Saddam Hussein. It just feels really unsafe.
Great read for a Sunday mornin’.