Peace In Iraq: Now And Then

The American Thinker posts a very good piece about whether or not Iraq is more peaceful now than it was under Saddam Hussein. A couple of the more interesting points:

The headline I saw online from McClatchy Newspapers was an obvious parody: "As violence falls in Iraq, cemetery workers feel the pinch."

But it turned out not to be a parody, but an earnest attempt by two reporters and a group of correspondents to find a downside to the ebbing of violence in Iraq, which is claiming fewer civilian lives, month by month.

Duncan Maxwell Anderson, the writer of the story, goes into the numbers about how many Iraqi civilians were killed then and now. The summary:

If we're talking about only civilians and political prisoners, the toll for Saddam's 23 years in power was at least 300,000 people murdered; that's 13,043 per year; 1,086 per month; or 36 per day.

At that rate, if AFP's estimate is the correct one, for an Iraqi civilian, it's safer to be in the middle of a hot war under American rule today, than "at peace" under Saddam. And of course, Saddam's 300,000 political murders are a number apart from the 500,000 or so Iraqi soldiers he sent to their deaths in his bizarre invasions of Iran and Kuwait. And the hundreds or thousands of murders around the world that he caused as a financier of terrorism.

So, despite the MSM's feeble attempts to continue painting the war effort in a negative light, there can be no reasonable doubt that things are better now than before America stepped in.

There's my two cents.