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.OK, she made a mistake, and she apologized for it. I'm willing to accept that.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...
But where are the gatekeepers? You know, the ones Hillary says are supposed to stop this kind of thing from happening?
1 comment:
Molly didn't need a gatekeeper, she needed a mathematician. After all, her only "crime" was to forget a zero or two. She needed someone to explain to her that although a zero means nothing, when
(1) it is on the right end of a string of numbers, and
(2)it is to the left of a decimal point,
then it actually means something big rather than nothing.
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