Worth Remembering

In regard to the war in Iraq - I always have this paragraph written by Andrew Sullivan back in March of 2003 in the back of my head when people argue with me that going into Iraq was a mistake:

Sanctions are inevitably the cornerstone of containment, and in Iraq, sanctions kill. In this case, containment is not an alternative to war. Containment is war: a slow, grinding war in which the only certainty is that hundreds of thousands of civilians will die. The Gulf War killed somewhere between 21,000 and 35,000 Iraqis, of whom between 1,000 and 5,000 were civilians. Based on Iraqi government figures, UNICEF estimates that containment kills roughly 5,000 Iraqi babies (children under 5 years of age) every month, or 60,000 per year. Other estimates are lower, but by any reasonable estimate containment kills about as many people every year as the Gulf War - and almost all the victims of containment are civilian, and two-thirds are children under 5. Each year of containment is a new Gulf War. Saddam Hussein is 65; containing him for another 10 years condemns at least another 360,000 Iraqis to death. Of these, 240,000 will be children under 5.

I'm always bothered by the fact that the main stream media seems to bring up Abu Ghraib at every opportunity but the children's prisons our soldiers uncovered are never mentioned.

BTW - in hindsight it is amazing that a "chimp mind" like Bush could dupe all those Democratic senators and folks like Andrew Sullivan into supporting the war. Or maybe - just maybe - we went into Iraq for the right reasons.