Monday, October 16, 2006

How can they kill you again if they're dead?

P'ONeill catches Christopher Hitchens of Slate making a weird computation. Hitchens "comes up with an argument against the 655,000 excess deaths estimate in Iraq since 2003: that the study forgot to deduct the number of people who would otherwise have been killed by dead insurgents among those 655,000."

So, by blowing themselves up to kill masses of people or being bombed flat by us, the terrorists are saving others from dying.. because by being blown up they can't kill anybody else by ... blowing themselves up again.

I think I've got it! So with that logic, think of all the bombs that we didn't drop that didn't explode in school yards thereby saving innocent children! Think of the countries we haven't invaded thereby saving our soldiers' lives!

Actually, Bush and Cheney could actually go completely around the bend and declare war on Iran and then start WWIII by pushing all those little red buttons! But they haven't! So that's a whole world saved!

So, in reality, we have saved Iraq from itself by killing all the inhabitants to make it safe for the Iraqis to live in peace and democracy and purple fingers and voting and selling all the oil to Halliburton.....

Update 10/17: Via Atrios, Robert Farley passes judgement on Hitchens.

2 comments:

P O'Neill said...

Thanks for the link. I gave myself a headache trying to think about Hitch's logic. For one thing he's ignoring that the war created the insurgents, unless he wants to argue they they'd have killed even more people under Saddam.

ellroon said...

I ceased to even try. You could go forever on discussing things that never occurred.