His piece makes many, many points – casually mauling a lot of the left’s worn-out tropes about the subject on the way.<\/p>\n
The battle for Iraq always involved a grim calculus: would liberation save more people than it killed?<\/p>\n
So let’s calculate how many died under Saddam.<\/p>\n
In 1980, the dictator invaded Iran, starting a war in which at least 500,000 people died. In 1987, he crushed the Kurds, killing perhaps 100,000 or more.<\/p>\n
In 1990, he invaded Kuwait, starting a war that killed more than 23,000.<\/p>\n
On his defeat, he killed some 100,000 Shiites who rebelled.<\/p>\n
Add the mass executions he ordered, the purges he unleashed, the opposition activists he shot, the terrorist attacks he paid for.<\/p>\n
Remember also the children who died, robbed of medicines by his regime.<\/p>\n
Add them all up, and even by the most conservative count you see Saddam did not just threaten the West, but cost the lives of more than 100 Muslims a day, every day, for the 24 years of his barbaric rule.<\/p>\n
That’s four times more than are being killed in Iraq today, often by Saddam’s heirs and Saddam’s like.<\/p>\n
Was Iraq worth it? Yes. It stands, it stays, and the winning of Iraq was worth it, indeed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Read the whole thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m always loathe to use the “V” word in relation to Iraq.\u00a0 It seems like the sort of premature happiness that seems all the more galling if it’s claimed wrongly. But Andrew Bolt doesn’t mind saying it – that the war has been won. His piece makes many, many points – casually mauling a lot […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-war-on-terror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1562\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}