Corporal Jeffery Goldberg is pissed.
See, on his Salon blog, Glenn Greenwald wrote a scathing critique of Goldberg through the lens of the Dave Weigel-Washington Post affair. The post, on how Goldberg’s rush to judge Weigel is emblematic of flaws throughout his writing, got a lot of coverage (as catalogued by Mondoweiss).
So Goldberg took to his Atlantic blog defending his reporting by citing his most notorious achievement: the Iraq War.
While Greenwald makes many excellent points about peculiar brand of journalism practiced by Goldberg (the Mideast reporter who, despite being an IDF veteran, decries everyone else as “partisans”), he does return to the Iraq War. Curiously, Goldberg, recounting a recent e-mail exchange with an Iraqi pol, runs through justifications for the 2003 invasion — though he insistently refers to it as his “early support for the Iraq war” [my emphasis]. He extends an invite from his e-mail buddy, Iraqi Kurdistan PM Barham Salih, to visit and talk to everyone in Iraq who supported the U.S. invasion:
If [Greenwald] were to meet with representatives of the Kurds — who make up 20 percent of the population of Iraq and who were the most oppressed group in Iraq during the period of Saddam’s rule (experiencing not only a genocide but widespread chemical gassing) — I think it might be possible for him to understand why some people — even some Iraqis — supported the overthrow of Saddam. […] I could also arrange a visit to Najaf or the equivalent, where Greenwald could meet with representatives of the Shi’a, who also took it on the chin from Saddam.
Yes, Corporal Goldberg, Glenn Greenwald could very well travel to Iraq with you and meet all types of people there who supported the war. But there are at least 600,000 Iraqis who, I imagine, are not too thrilled about the way it all turned out and with whom Greenwald will never get a meeting.
One could also dredge up some Iranians — from within and without Iran and, yes, of all political stripes, classes, ethnic groups, and religious affiliations — who might support a U.S. invasion of the Islamic Republic. Does that mean that Goldberg is also ready to lend “early support” to that war?
Well, rather than arguing how many angels can balance on the head of a pin, we’re arguing about how many scores of thousands died.
Love thy neighbor as thyself eh? You can fill the catacombs under the Vatican with apologies for it, but you’ll never be able to justify it.
@ Howard,
So three different studies (one published in the Lancet, another carried out by Johns Hopkins, a third (and a half) carried out by ORB) arrived independently at figures for violent deaths in the hundreds of thousands. All of them are deeply flawed, as pointed out by … allies and partners of the rival Iraq Body Count, which publishes a lower number. I’m convinced, how about you?
The records at Auschwitz recorded something like 70K deaths. The estimates of ten times that number have never been proved, and are doubtless exaggerations. Don’t call us Holocaust Deniers — just say that we mobilize to attack anything the casts the motherland in an uncomfortable bad light. The US would NEVER do anything to result in hundreds of thousands dying — just ask the Vietnamese. All THREE MILLION who died after we attacked.
@Michael:
Yes, I’m convinced because i looked at the arguments made, rather than just the identity of the persons making the argument. That is a logical fallacy called the “ad hominem”. Look it up.
And you have your facts wrong again. There aren’t “three different studies”. The Lancet and the Hopkins one are the same thing from the same people. The authors were from JHU and they published the report in the Lancet journal. (Unless you mean the Lancet one from 2004, but that only gave a figure of 100,000, of which only about 50-60% was attributed directly to violence, and gives a far lower number than the second one which did claim “hundreds of thousands”, specifically 600,000 killed in violence.
You are also wrong that the problems with these have only been pointed out by “allies and partners of the rival Iraq Body Count” (which again is just the ad-hom fallacy to begin with). If you actually read the pieces i cited, rather than reading just the author lines and using an ad-hominem to run back to your prior misinformed prejudices, you’d see they cite many other people and groups who have questioned the Lancet claims, such as the WHO, AAPOR, and many others. And while attempting to inflate the number of supposed independent studies that arrive at your desired conclusions you conveniently omit two other larger studies by the WHO and the UNDP which came to much lower numbers (note also that the numbers from the Lancet 2004 one are actually much closer to those of these two studies, rather than those of Lancet 2006 or ORB).
Facts are facts. The article i cited above put the reports you’ve been citing quite clearly in the ‘bunk’ category. You can’t weasel out of this by asserting an ad-hom.
As to your other premise:
“The US would NEVER do anything to result in hundreds of thousands dying”
Well, that’s certainly not a case I’d make. Technically, your preferred phrase of “hundreds of thousands” means anything over 200,000. Something like that may very well be true. Like Jon H said above, the IBC has recorded over 100,000 civilian deaths from violence, and they state there will be unrecorded deaths, and this does not include combatant deaths either, so like Jon above, we could assume already that this might suggest a number over 200k. The other surveys like the WHO and UNDP, which do appear fairly credible, were between 1.7-3.1 times higher than the corresponding IBC numbers for the same period according to the paper i cited about the ORB poll, so if these are taken as reasonable, then it might suggest numbers somewhere around 2-300k today. This too would all not include any numbers of people we might think have died from non-violent but war-related causes.
So you should not assume that anyone who questions some specific high number (and for good reason, read the links i gave), is necessarily out to defend “the motherland” against any claim of there having been a lot of deaths. Of course there have. It’s just that some of the *highest* claims about this are total bunk.
Anyone killed by Insurgents or Al Qadia in Iraq is counted as killed by the US.
A dishonest way of counting.
Saddam killed many more Kurds than Israel killed Palestinians.