Back to the real question... How mmany lost lives would make you admit you and yer buds were wrong??? (Bobert)

What a stupid question to ask, Bobert. If someone was for that war why should one particular number of dead people invalidate the prior reasons? That is just as stupid as some Mudcatters asking immediately after the war whether those who were against the war were not glad then that Hussein could no longer torture his opponents. One could be glad about that (McGrath has pointed that out) but still be against the war. Would there have been a lowest number of war deaths that would have made you change your mind about the war afterwards? Say fewer than Hussein killed in half a year? Would you then have said it was worth it? No, and you would have been right.

You have that softheaded thinking I often observe in left leaning people in which the soft heart dictates the brain. The number of war related deaths can and must be discussed in a purely rational way without any involvement of emotions. Just the facts, Mister. The evaluation thereafter may and should involve the heart as well. What is and what we infer from that should be serial processes without the second step influencing the first.

You jump to the highest number for propaganda purposes in the same way as Bush insists on the lowest number. Bush does not realise that a low number does not make that (in my eyes) stupid war any less stupid. You do not realise that a high number does not invalidate the reasons someone had for a war before it had started.

Which is the highest number of deaths that should have told the allies in WWII that they better had given in to all of Hitler's wishes? If there are good reasons for a war in the minds of the supporters they accept that in that war and its aftermath people will die. To tell them that people have died has no effect.

I'm not a pacifist and I accept people dying in a war. I was for the Afghanistan war and against the Iran war for different reasons. The number of deaths in both wars has no influence on my positions.

I wish we could sometimes discuss facts separated from political leanings. I'm fed up that I can predict from knowing the political leanings of Mudcatters which number they will accept blindly in questions of war, politics, environment without looking at the quality of the data.

I'm fed up as well about the usual sequence of arguments I see in Mudcat lefts. (I tend to watch their arguments more closely for I have the bias that they should be the better arguers for I share much of their world view) Whether it was war deaths, deaths of starving children in Iraq from the sanctions before the war (that's forgotten now), or deaths from DU munition from the first Iraq war.

(1) Someone posts an outrageously inflated number from a blog, or (the Lancet study) the highest serious estimate. (2) This number is criticised. (3) The Mudcat lefts doubt the motives of the critics instead of addressing the methodological or technical issues (4) After some search the critics find better counter arguments against the first estimate than just conservative blogs. (5) Now the Mudcat lefts say that it doesn't matter, for even the lower numbers are much too high to be acceptable. (6) They post that those who debate the numbers have sinister motives or are paid by doesn't matter who.

You have a good heart, Bobert (no irony here), but you and several other lefts here don't realise when the time in a debate comes where only the head should be used.

I close with a very slightly adapted quote ("Why I do not attend case conferences") from Paul Meehl, psychoanalysist and statistician, in a rant against the social workers, nurses and fellow psychologists with a soft science background:

While there is surely no logical connection between having a sincere concern for the suffering of the individual...(roughly, being "softhearted") and a tendency to commit logical or empirical mistakes in diagnosis...and the like (roughly: being "softheaded"), one observes (people) who betray a tendency to conflate the two.

Wolfgang