in place of congratulations for their brilliant "containment" of Saddam, Washington was blamed for UN sanctions and systematically starving to death a million Iraqi kids - or two million, according to which "humanitarian" agency you believe. The few Iraqi moppets who weren't deceased suffered, according to the Nobel-winning playwright and thinker Harold Pinter, from missing genitals and/or rectums that leaked blood contaminated by depleted uranium from Anglo-American ordnance.
Steyn went to Iraq shortly after the war began, and you'll be happy to know he followed up on Pinter's reporting:
I made a point of stopping in every hospital and enquiring about this pandemic of genital-less Iraqis: not a single doctor or nurse had heard about it. Whether or not BUSH LIED!! PEOPLE DIED!!!, it seems that THE ANTI-WAR CROWDS SQUEAK!!! BUT NO RECTUMS LEAK!!!!
Anyway, although everyone was demanding the end to sanctions until such time as they were began to demand that sanctions be "allowed to work," it seems AEI has run some numbers and it would have cost roughly the same in hundreds of billions of bucks to "contain" Saddam as to fight him. However, in terms of human cost, we've come out way ahead.
the alleged death toll of Iraqi infants [would] no doubt [be]up around six million. ItAnd how much do I love Steyn for bringing this little-discussed subject up?
would also have cost more real lives of real Iraqis: Despite the mosque bombings, there's a net gain of more than 100,000 civilians alive today who would have been shoveled into unmarked graves had Ba'athist rule continued. Meanwhile, the dictator would have continued gaming the international system through the Oil-for-Food program, subverting Jordan, and supporting terrorism as far afield as the Philippines.
The long term strategic goal was to begin the difficult but necessary transformation of the region that the British funked when they cobbled together the modern Middle East in 1922. The jury will be out on that for a decade or three yet.
By comparison, three years on, the Iraq war is looking pretty good, all things being equal.
in Iraq today the glass is seven-ninths full. That's to say, in 14 out of 18 provinces life is better than it's been in living memory. In December, 70% of Iraqis said that "life is good" and 69% were optimistic it would get even better in the next year. (Comparable figures in a similar poll of French and Germans: 29% and 15%.)
And of course the slacker Iraqis have finally answered the hippie question, "What if they gave a war and no one came?" Answer: the MSM will say there's one anyway. Not that everything's copacetic, but if Iraq doesn't work, there's still a net gain for us worked right into the Iraqi Constitution:
True, there's a political stalemate in Baghdad at the moment, but that's not a catastrophe: if you read the very federal Iraqi constitution carefully, the ingenious thing about it is that it's not just a constitution but also a pre-nup. If the Sunni hold-outs are determined to wreck the deal, 85% of the Iraqi population will go their respective ways creating a northern Kurdistan that would be free and pro-western and a southern Shiastan that would still be the most democratic state in the Arab world. That outcome would also be in America's long-term interest.
Well if I keep up like this, I'll have given you the whole column, so I'll stop here, with the point that "stability" in the world of Ba'athism, fascism and Islamicism is not desireable.
In 2002, Amr Moussa, Secretary-General of the Arab League, warned that a US invasion of Iraq would "threaten the whole stability of the Middle East." Of course. Otherwise, why do it?
