Wednesday, July 13, 2005

"This is a horror"

Molly Ivins comes clean:
In a column written June 28, I asserted that more Iraqis (civilians) had now been killed in this war than had been killed by Saddam Hussein over his 24-year rule. WRONG. Really, really wrong.

The only problem is figuring out by how large a factor I was wrong. I had been keeping an eye on civilian deaths in Iraq for a couple of months, waiting for the most conservative estimates to creep over 20,000, which I had fixed in my mind as the number of Iraqi civilians Saddam had killed...

...Ha! I could hardly have been more wrong, no matter how you count Saddam's killing of civilians...

...There have been estimates as high as 1 million civilians killed by Saddam, though most agree on the 300,000 to 400,000 range, making my comparison to 20,000 civilian dead in this war pathetically wrong.

I was certainly under no illusions regarding Saddam Hussein, whom I have opposed through human rights work for decades. My sincere apologies. It is unforgivable of me not have checked. I am so sorry...
OK, she made a mistake, and she apologized for it. I'm willing to accept that.

But where are the gatekeepers? You know, the ones Hillary says are supposed to stop this kind of thing from happening?