Wednesday, April 09, 2003

Yesterday, from the comfort of Tennessee, Glenn "InstaPundit" Reynolds airily dismissed concerns about Iraqi civilian casualties in his MSNBC blog:

The latest Iraqi claim I could find was for 500 civilian casualties and it’s almost surely inflated. Various antiwar groups are claiming to keep count, but their numbers, as several different commentators have observed, appear to be bogus. So I think it’s very possible that Iraqi civilian casualties, too, will turn out to be under 500.

These folks seem a tad less sanguine:

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said on Wednesday it had temporarily suspended humanitarian operations in Baghdad because the situation in the city was "chaotic and unpredictable." ...

ICRC spokesman Roland Huguenin-Benjamin in Baghdad told CNN that ambulances had been unable to approach casualties in many parts of the city due to heavy crossfire as U.S. troops battled sporadic Iraqi resistance.

...The delay in reaching casualties in Baghdad could prove fatal in many cases, Huguenin-Benjamin said.

"The problem is not the lack of medicine in the hospitals. The problem is the lack of respect for ambulances and respect for casualties, to give a chance for a minimum of security for people to be evacuated," he said....


--Reuters

The Iraq Body Count, regarded as bogus by Reynolds, counts at least 961 Iraqi civilian casualties and as many as 1139 as I type this.

You know what? I don't care which side kills civilians. Iraq Body Count does (it lists only those casualties attributable to U.S. and allied military action), and so does Reynolds (he thinks Iraq Body Count inaccurately blames the U.S. and the coalition for some deaths) -- but I don't give a damn. We started this war. Every death or injury we prevented by toppling Saddam is on our ledger as a credit -- but all harm to noncombatants that wouldn't have happened if there'd been no war is our responsibility.

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