Posted by: mitch | http:// | Tue Mar 25 05:43:53 2003

Barlow: "You will probably not hear about the roughly 400,000 Iraqis we killed during that bully outing. You will almost certainly not hear about the retreating column of almost 50,000 Iraqi soldiers that were incinerated on the highway from Kuwait..."

"Q: The 'highway of death'--do we know how many Iraqis were killed there? ... Atkinson: I don't think we'll ever know how many Iraqis were killed there. There were about 1500 vehicles on the highway of death, counted, destroyed vehicles after the war. And another 400 or so on another road ... it's difficult to believe that deaths on the highway of death probably exceeded more than a couple of hundred perhaps." http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/appendix/adeath.html

The 400,000 also appears to be an order-of-magnitude inflation: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/appendix/death.html

Posted by: mitch | http:// | Tue Mar 25 05:49:10 2003

Compare: 'The second reason Samudra gives for the Bali bombing was to "take revenge for the 200,000 men, women and children and babies who died without sin when thousands of bombs were dropped in Afghanistan".' http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/11/1044725746886.html

This is why I fear factual inaccuracy in antiwar polemic.

Posted by: acb | http://dev.null.org | Tue Mar 25 06:33:14 2003

Or, indeed, in pro-war polemic.

Posted by: mitch | http:// | Wed Mar 26 02:05:30 2003

Yes, I'd like to see a breakdown of this new "Saddam killed a million" factoid. I have a feeling it includes deaths from Gulf War I and the Iran-Iraq war.