Casual slaughters—or casual accusations of slaughters?
In an e-mail last October which I prepared in draft form but never posted, Tom S. wrote:
Steve Sailer’s frivolous attitude toward Iraq (“Iraq Attaq”) and questions of national survival have always irritated me, but now he’s done it. He has accused American troops of mass murder, not a few incidents of it, but daily incidents of it. It was in the context of a discussion of the absurd Lancet study that posited 655,000 deaths in Iraq. Sailer said:
“In July, 2006, a bad month, there were about 1,200 IED bombings against Americans. How many Iraqis died on average in the minutes following each attack? I don’t know, but, considering that Americans mostly venture around only in heavily armed convoys, I wouldn’t be surprised if our soldiers on average killed several Iraqis in the moments of terror and rage following each bombing. I just don’t know what typically happens, but the combination of adrenaline and automatic weaponry would suggest something fairly lethal would be normal.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if our soldiers on average killed several Iraqis in the moments of terror and rage following each bombing.” Think about that. No supporting facts, no eyewitness accounts, just the casual assumption that our trigger-happy killer soldiers kill thousands of Iraqi civilians per month out of rage and terror. That it is “normal” for our soldiers to massacre innocent civilians. And of course, the embedded reporters somehow never see it…
As far as I can tell, there is now no difference between the Chomskyite Left and the Buchananite Right. Both regard America as evil, American soldiers as blood-crazed killbots, and our cause as tainted by association with such an evil nation. Well, enough. I’ve read this guy for the last time.
LA replies:
At the time of that Lancet study, I pointed out in a discussion at ParaPundit how utterly ridiculous the figures were. But there was a contingent of people posting at ParaPundit prepared to believe the most fantastical things, so long as it made the U.S. look bad. Note also the attacks on my motives for questioning the figures.
Alan Levine writes:
The comment about Sailer is dead on; there is something frivolous about the man. However, that consorts oddly with his biological determinsm, indeed reductionism. He is so convinced, or says he is, that genes determine all that one wonders why he condescends to express his opinion in such transitory things as words…..
Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 11, 2007 10:04 AM | Send