Asshattery

Caught about two minutes today of Fox News' biggest apologist, Neil Cavuto, sitting around with Chris Hitchens talking about why the UN report showing the Iraqi civilian death toll at an all-time high was wrong. Not that the report was wrong in any way, understand, but why it was wrong for them to put out a report at all. It was apparently wrong because the UN has done a lot of bad things themselves in the past (so they're not allowed to produce reports on anything, I guess), and also the UN never put out any reports on how many Iraqi civilians were killed under the Saddam Hussein regime.

Except the UN contributed to this report in 2002. And this USAid report specifically cites UN estimates of murders in Iraq under Saddam. And this page from whitehouse.gov cites UN reports of repression in Saddam's Iraq. And says this:

Former UN Human Rights Special Rapporteur Max Van der Stoel's report in April 1998 stated that Iraq had executed at least 1,500 people during the previous year for political reasons [...]

In 1999, the UN Special Rapporteur stated that Iraq remains the country with the highest number of disappearances known to the UN: over 16,000.

The line "Did the UN ever report death tolls under Saddam?" ran as a graphic during practically the whole segment. You immediately knew it was wrong. It took me five minutes to Google all of that. Furthermore, Iraq was a closed society then, and if the UN Special Rapporteur wasn't thrown out of the country in 1999, certainly there would have been even more reports. That was his job.

In addition to this outright lie, Hitch tried to obfuscate by claiming that most of the deaths have been caused by former Ba'athists and Saddam loyalists, when in fact Shi'ite militias are most likely to blame for the rise in violence. He managed to mention that oftentimes the kidnappers and killers are wearing facsimiles of Iraqi police uniforms they picked up off the street, which means that the difference between Saddam's Iraq and today's Iraq is mainly the authenticity of the uniforms, and little else, except there was more electricity back then, and now all sects are actively involved in the killing fields.

I hear Prime Minister Maliki will sit down with the insurgents next week to plead for reconciliation and an end to the violence, as if they're the only ones committing these acts and not the troops in his own Interior Ministry. As if Maliki even matters anymore. Iraq's over, and the few people still defending this war have no choice left but to lie about it.