Several readers of this blog have asked me why I haven’t said anything about the tsunami. For the record, the answer is that I simply have nothing to say that isn’t obvious to everyone, and that wouldn’t sound incredibly trite. The other answer is that I am full of bile–it is killing me to see Americans so apparently full of brotherly love and concern for people killed in, or suffering from the results of, a completely unavoidable accident (an “Act of God” in the parlance), but so apparently uninterested in the people THEY ARE KILLING, directly or indirectly. I can’t let myself think about it, or I get too upset. Even worse, the re-election of Bush means they explicitly approved of this, even knowing the consequences.
If I really want to avoid thinking about it, I shouldn’t read articles like this one: Researchers Who Rushed Into Print a Study of Iraqi Civilian Deaths Now Wonder Why It Was Ignored
When more than 200,000 people died in a tsunami caused by an Asian earthquake in December, the immediate reaction in the United States was an outpouring of grief and philanthropy, prompted by extensive coverage in the news media.
Two months earlier, the reaction in the United States to news of another large-scale human tragedy was much quieter. In late October, a study was published in The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, concluding that about 100,000 civilians had been killed in Iraq since it was invaded by a United States-led coalition in March 2003. On the eve of a contentious presidential election — fought in part over U.S. policy on Iraq — many American newspapers and television news programs ignored the study or buried reports about it far from the top headlines.
Now we could pick nits about the 100,000 number, and lots of people have, but the specific number is unimportant. What’s key here is that things in Iraq are not better than they were before. Even laying aside things like Abu Ghraib, there are at least tens of thousands of people dead and possibly as many as 200,000. Even on his most super-villain day Saddam didn’t aspire to killing that many people in Iraq. And no one talks about it. That might even be the worst tragedy.
You can see a little more discussion of the Lancet study at Crooked Timber, by the way.
