JOHN LEO WRITES ABOUT CIVILIAN CASUALTIES — and antiwar spin.
As near as I can tell, it’s a parody of Stalin: one person killed by America is a tragedy. A hundred thousand killed by Saddam, or a million by Pol Pot, are a statistic. But even the statistics are lies, as Leo points out, and the press tend to accept them uncritically:
A New York Times article (“Flaws in U.S. Air War Left Hundreds of Civilians Dead”) relied heavily on the findings of workers with Global Exchange, which the times identified as “an American organization that has sent survey teams into Afghan villages.” In fact, Global Exchange is a hard-left, antiwar, pro-Castro group whose numbers on war victims should never be taken at face value. Many groups on the left repeatedly insisted that civilian deaths were scandalously high. But that’s what they say during every war. Typical headlines included “Civilian Casualties Mount in Afghanistan” (the World Socialist Web Site) and “U.S. Raids Draw Fire for Civilian Casualties” (Common Dreams News Center).
The most publicized analysis came from Marc Herold, a professor of economics and women’s studies at the University of New Hampshire, who claims that between 3,700 and 4,000 Afghan civilians died in the war. Herold, an antiwar leftist, says the U.S. military is mostly white and willing to drop bombs on populous areas, thus “sacrificing the darker-skinned Afghans.” Admirers credited Herold with meticulous and original analysis of many sources during 12- to 14-hour days on the Internet. Some people loved Herold’s numbers because they were said to show that the United States killed more innocent people in Afghanistan than Osama bin Laden killed in New York. But several analysts accused Herold of questionable and ideological treatment of the numbers: double counting, confusing combatants with noncombatants, and, in the words of one commentator, “blind acceptance of deliberately inflated Taliban accounts.”
Other less publicized estimates of civilian deaths in Afghanistan are far lower than Herold’s.
And why, I wonder, are they “less publicized?”
UPDATE: Here’s more on Marc Herold’s, ahem, flawed methodology.