I used to live in the shadow of CDC Atlanta and I heard stories then, but they might have been made up. I had the impression they were talking about the workers on one floor of one wing. I heard similar stories later but I recall seeing the claim in print only once. I said “isn’t unheard of” because I’d heard of it.

The claims about african viruses came from my virology teacher who was pretty well respected but it was 20 years ago and he might not have been completely serious. He was british and I may have missed a lot of his nonverbal cues.

I believe it’s a serious consideration for sending large numbers of troops into central africa. I don’t know how vital a concern it is, and I believe it’s more of an issue than most civilians think.

When we send in Peace Corps guys there every now and then one of them gets airlifted out in a decontamination bubble. They take him to the CDC in atlanta, by which time he’s likely dead already, and they try to culture the virus to find out what it is and get some idea whether they can work out some sort of defense, and it isn’t unheard of they lose all the workers in a CDC wing.

With respect, j thomas, absent a few supporting links that looks like some pretty serious exaggeration to me. “Lose all the workers in a wing”—has that ever happened, even once?

I know a little about emerging viral diseases (used to do research on HIV-1), and the argument that “we shouldn’t send people into foreign countries because they might have communicable diseases we don’t know about” seems entirely bogus to me, as does your prediction of an epidemic with a 90-99% kill rate (even Ebola struggles to get that in most instances). There’s little in my experience to suggest that Central Africa, for instance, is likely to throw up more or worse emerging diseases than any other part of the world. I also don’t think that current medical technology needs any kind of improvement before we can send troops anywhere with reasonable confidence in the face of emerging disease risks. (I’m not advocating sending anyone anywhere, just saying that medical tech makes emerging disease just one of many risks rather than an overwhelming hazard to be avoided at all costs.)

…chief investigating judge told a news conference in Baghdad Saddam had been charged, with three others, with killings of Shi’ite Muslims in the village of Dujail in 1982.

The case is seen as relatively minor compared to accusations of genocide and crimes against humanity that have also been leveled at the former president. But investigators say it may be easier to prove Saddam’s personal culpability in the smaller case, leading to a swift conviction and possible death sentence.
[...]
The Dujail case relates to the killing of an estimated 140 residents after an attempt to assassinate Saddam as his convoy passed through the village, 60 km (35 miles) north of Baghdad.

The retribution is also alleged to have included jailing hundreds of women and children from the town in southern Iraq and destroying the date palm groves that sustained Dujail.

Compare to hundreds of routine murderous actions sanctioned by has-a-right-to-defend-itself Sharon, like this one for example:

July 24 2002 – Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon Tuesday congratulated his forces on the air strike that killed the military leader Hamas in Gaza, along with 13 civilians, including eight children. While the U.S. did not comment on the F-16 attack, the Palestinian Authority said it will file a complaint with the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Sharon called the raid on Gaza City that killed a total of 15 people “one of the most successful operations” to have been carried out by Israel’s forces, Israeli Army Radio said, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

What gives? Where’s the difference?

J Thomas’ point is correct. Whereas my statament about Front Page Magazine was an honest mistake you blatantly misread my statement about fascism to produce the opposite of what I meant. Thomas is also correct in that unless we have a basic commitment to honesty in terms of quotation and evidence, there really is no point in continuing this discussion.

I have no doubt that this misquote was intentional.

Unless responding to him helps you clarify your thinking, or unless you really enjoy debating honestly with a slimy misquoting misattributing bad-sourcing liar, why do it?

Tim Lambert has dealt with this issue:

This makes a misleading comparison between the Lancet number for all excess deaths (which includes the increase in murder, accidents and disease) and the ILCS number for deaths directly related to the war (which just includes deaths caused by the coalition and the insurgents).

As Daniel commented:

Since the IBC and Lancet estimates are not comparable with each other, obviously they can’t both be comparable with the UNDP (in fact, neither are).

http://timlambert.org/2005/05/lancet34/

But see the beauty of it. Nobody can pick holes in the methodology since there isn’t any.

Actually, BL wrote the op-ed for the National Post; it was reprinted in various places, including Frontpage Magazine. This should be apparent from the text underneath the Frontpage reprint that says “National Post, April 4, 2003”. (I’m not sure why you think that’s relevant, but your irrelevant error is still an error.) Still, I think we’ve come as far as we’re going to; we both agree that the Ba’ath party had fascist influences (“of that I didn’t have the slightest doubt whatsoever”!) and you don’t subsequently dispute its militarist, expansionist, dictatorial nature.

ray, it was not entirely clear from your post whether you meant saving lives in Iraq or saving lives across the world. Thanks for the subsequent clarification.

daniel, iirc the UNDP report estimated deaths at 18-29k (more in-line with IBC estimates); not sure how you get from that to 150k.

‘That was the time when the Baath Party was founded, as a kind of clone of the Nazi and Fascist parties, using very similar methods and adapting a very similar ideology, and operating in the same way—as part of an apparatus of surveillance that exists under a one-party state, where a party is not a party in the Western democratic sense, but part of the apparatus of a government. That was the origin of the Baath Party’.

That’s it! No references, no arguments, no facts!

All that I gain from this article is knowledge that BL believes the Ba’ath party to be influenced by fascism and of that I didn’t have the slightest doubt whatsoever.

(It was written for that famous scholarly journal Front Page Magazine incidentally).

As you know (or should) BL was one of the premier (and indeed only academic) flagwavers for the Iraq war. Judging by the time of his article it can’t be seen as anything but a post hoc attempt to portray Saddam’s regime in the blackest possible terms, which means the inevitable comparison to Hitler. I have quoted evidence that the Ba’athist party (in the beginning) was socialist and anti-colonialist: where’s your counter-evidence?

It is absolutely true that Hitler claimed that the Sudetenland was part of Germany: not claims that could seriously be made about Russia or, for example, the USA, other countries he declared war on. I think that those who fling around the Saddam equals Hitler meme should not forget that the ambition of the Axis was quite literally to conquer the world, and have Europe and Russia belonging to Germany, the British Empire transferred to a British puppet regime, North Africa (and through them and various friendly powers, for example in South Africa) the rest of Africa controlled by Italy, and Asia controlled by Japan, with South American neutralised by the installation of various pro Nazi puppet regimes and the USA surrounded and impotent.

Saddam on the other hand, wanted Kuwait back, and couldn’t even defeat Iran, which at that stage was in chaos. I think people who have seriously managed to persuade themselves that Saddam equals Hitler should really regain their sense of perspective.

Right from the moment of their creation the fascist states were belligerent and aggresive towards their neighbours, and continued to be so throughout their existence. Saddam on the other hand posed no threat to anyone in the ‘70s, got stuck into a disastrous failed war with Iraq in the 80s, invaded Kuwait (encouraged by the US), and after that made no sounds about invading anybody else, or posing any other kind of threat.

Are you seriously arguing that Hitler might have done the same?

‘If the police catch a murderer, it is unreasonable to claim their successful campaign was wrong due the existence of another bad or worse uncaught killer’

No but that wasn’t my point. It was to do with what attracts peoples attention. My point was specifically not that the invasion of the Congo had been posited and rejected it was that it hadn’t even been posited (not that I’ve seen anyway). The difference in police attention between the Yorkshire ripper and the Shankhill Butchers (concurrent) gives an intersting insight into the priorities of the British police at the time.

Incidentally, i notice that you haven’t picked up on my point that if Saddam was a fascist then many others are fascists too.

If this picture (http://www.pitbullsaloon.com/A_View/images/Bush&Abdullah.jpg) was published in the New York Times with headline ‘Bush walks hand in hand with fascist Saudi politician’ would you consider this fair comment? If not, why not?

If every reference to our dictator allies in the ‘war on terror’ was prefaced with fascist would you consider this fair comment?

For example if the headline to this story was ‘Bush vision at odds with fascist Arab allies’ and if the first sentence began ‘Shortly after Sunday’s vote in Iraq, President Bush called Nazi Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, fascist anti-semite Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Abdullah, and Jordan’s brutal fascist dictator King Abdullah.’ would you consider this a reasonable and unbiased description of the event? Again, if not, why not?

http://csmonitor.com/2005/0203/p01s03-wome.html

The fact that the Bush administration chose the extremely risky project, rather than the guaranteed project, which would be more effective than even the best case Iraqi invasion, suggests that ‘saving lives’ was not their motivation.

When we send in Peace Corps guys there every now and then one of them gets airlifted out in a decontamination bubble. They take him to the CDC in atlanta, by which time he’s likely dead already, and they try to culture the virus to find out what it is and get some idea whether they can work out some sort of defense, and it isn’t unheard of they lose all the workers in a CDC wing.

Get a lot of americans in there working together and you’re exposing them to a posisble epidemic that will kill 90% or more of them. Maybe 99%.

It’s going to take a lot of new medical technology before we send ground troops to the Congo. Stuff that isn’t on the horizon yet. Regardless what we think is morally right, we aren’t going to play War of the Worlds in africa.

If we’d known about iraq then what we know now, we’d have stayed out of there too. Maybe the moral thing requirement is to always do what’s right and never conmt the cost. But in practice we count the costs and also the benefit to us. We follow the Hornet-man’s Code like Captain Roadstrom, which says “Never incite a local populace unless there’s something in it for you.”

The amount of other scholars who disagree with BL is irrelevant to the strength of his conclusions. BL outlines the origins of the early Baathist party in his article. Either engage with his argument or concede the point; your empty dismissal is rather unpersuasive, as is your hand-waving invocation of bias.

I don’t see why raising other motivations for Saddam’s wars defeats my claim. Saddam may well have believed that he could get away with gobbling up territory; that didn’t make him any less belligerent or expansionistic. IIRC, Shirer or Speer (?) recounts that Nazi Germany believed it had the green light to invade Poland. So what. Similarly, (again IIRC) some Germans thought that the Sudetenland was part of Germany. This is irrelevant to the fascist nature of the regime.

Pointing out that there are other places that deserve intervention as much as or more than Saddam’s Iraq at best establishes a real-world inconsistency of the pro-war interventionist principle; it doesn’t defeat the argument that it was morally and politically appropriate to rid Iraq of Saddam’s regime. If the police catch a murderer, it is unreasonable to claim their successful campaign was wrong due the existence of another bad or worse uncaught killer. Also, it seems to depend, for its operation, on accepting the force of the pro-war principle: we accept the appropriate of ending genocidal regimes, but we want you to also get rid of these other genocidal regimes – to which the pro-war side might respond “Great! Let’s start with Sudan!” (Enter contrarian France, China, Arab states, “anti-Imperialists”, etc.)