In the world where things like human beings dying and being tortured in the course of senseless wars matters, the recent Wikileaks documents release is accompanied by headlines like "A Grim Portrait of Civilian Deaths in Iraq."
In Glenn Reynold's squalid little world, however, what the documents show is that the war was even more glorious than one he'd always masturbated to, and will be good news for Republicans! This is because, apparently:
so far the two biggest scoops from the latest document dump are that the infamous Lancet study was bogus, and that WMDs were found in Iraq in quantity.
Both assertions are ridiculous. The "Infamous Lancet study" is not "infamous" at all. Here it is, and here's the Wikipedia article about it (for crying out loud). Here is a roundup of the major ways in which hacks and wingnuts embarrassed themselves in "critiquing" it.
But you don't even need to immerse yourself in the statistical back-and-forth. Insty and the Insty-class hacks he's linking to are being perfect shits, relying as they are on this sentence in the Christian Science Monitor:
The reports detail 109,032 deaths in Iraq (over six years). These include 66,081 “civilians,” 23,984 “enemy” insurgents, 15,196 “host nation” (Iraqi government forces), and 3,771 “friendly” (coalition) forces. Some 60 percent of the total is civilian deaths.
It is preposterous to claim based on this that the Lancet study is "debunked," because this total is a passive count, and not an estimate, like the Lancet study. That is, the documents are direct reports of actual reported deaths. (The WL documents by the way probably explain why after the Lancet study came out Bush became reluctant to talk about death totals, though a year before he was glibly tossing around numbers like 30,000.)
The reason why you'd want an estimate for deaths in a war zone is fairly obvious, at least for an honest person willing to spend perhaps a minute thinking about it, but just to be clear, well, it is astonishingly hackish to pretend that official American sources found every corpse. To be clear: all we have now is a new lower bound. That is, unless you are a completely amoral cretin willing to spout disingenuous twaddle about dead people, what the WL docs give is is a new minimum number of deaths.
You don't need to know any math to understand this. Just a shred of what used to be called "intellectual honesty." Hell, you don't even need a conscience to understand this. But it helps.
As for the second assertion, it is, perhaps astonishingly, even more shitheaded. From Wired, a Shocking article:
Omigoodness. First, to go no farther, if one result of the Iraq war was to make (possibly Iranian) agitiators more aware of how to make WMDs... good one! But not to worry, actually. Because these "WMDs" are material known to exist, as in the case of "a 'chemical weapons' complex" where “One of the bunkers has been tampered with.” Everything else is leftover mustard from the Iraq-Iran war, usually in the form of leaky munitions.
In other words, junk. Nasty stuff, but... junk. And if I recall correctly, in the Runup to War one of the Central Claims was not "there is a lot of disused nasty stuff lying around the country that even if it was all collected in one place would not really be a threat." Cap'n Ed tries valiantly to spin this as anything other than bullshit, but, well... it was buried junk. He ultimately sighs, his head in a mist, two stones in his fist, and an impotent worm on his thigh, and concludes that it coulda been great, but as far as these "revelations" go, they're an awfully limp causus belli:
In the end, there were no good options.
Maybe, but there were sure as hell less dishonest ones.
MAS. With the Lancet study especially, it's important to remember that the "libertarian" Glenn Reynolds is deliberately spouting jingoistic pro-war nonsense propaganda. He is about as loathesome as exists.