Author: Jonathan Schwarz

When the new Lancet study came out estimating excess Iraqi deaths at 655,000 since the war began, America’s right wing knew one thing right away: it was wrong. That was certain.

Unfortunately, they then had to go to the trouble of deciding why it was wrong. And keeping an all-encompassing fantasy world functioning is hard work. Reality is a powerful and remorseless foe. So you can understand why Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review didn’t quite feel up to it. She outsourced the job to someone working on Capitol Hill who emailed her this:

The article below will be a story today, even though it shouldn’t…Even Human Rights Watch said the earlier report by these same researchers was “certainly prone to inflation due to overcounting.”

Now, the Human Rights Watch part is true. Here’s the passage from an October 29, 2004 Washington Post story:

“The methods that they used are certainly prone to inflation due to overcounting,” said Marc E. Garlasco, senior military analyst for Human Rights Watch, which investigated the number of civilian deaths that occurred during the invasion. “These numbers seem to be inflated.”

But:

Mr. Garlasco says now that he had not read the paper at the time and calls his quote in the Post “really unfortunate.” He says he told the reporter, “I haven’t read it. I haven’t seen it. I don’t know anything about it, so I shouldn’t comment on it.” But, Mr. Garlasco continues, “like any good journalist, he got me to.”

Mr. Garlasco says he misunderstood the reporter’s description of the paper’s results.

And:

Few reporters, apparently, understood what the study actually said. Fewer still called Garlasco after he himself had time to read it. “I hate the interview I did for The Washington Post,” he says. “I was on the train, I hadn’t read the report yet [when the Post’s reporter called for comment]. In general, I’m not as negative as that [Post] report made me seem. This is raising issues that are not heard of much in the U.S.”

This is not incredibly difficult information to come by. If you search Google for “Garlasco Lancet Iraq” you’ll find Garlasco’s repudiation of his original statement in four out of the top five results. (The other is the original Washington Post story.)

So, you might ask: how on earth could this Capitol Hill staffer be unaware of this? I mean, wouldn’t you expect someone at the center of power would know the MOST BASIC INFORMATION about a gigantic war he helped start?

Well, you’ve obviously never constructed an all-encompassing fantasy world. It doesn’t matter if there are four pieces of evidence demonstrating the difference between your fantasy and reality. Or four hundred. Or four million. All you need is ONE piece of evidence saying that the world’s as you desire it to be. Once you’ve got that, everything else can be ignored forever.

Still, an important aspect of fantasy worlds is that it’s easier to maintain them when there are others inside with you. That way you can all swap stories about how the sky is green and rain falls up. “Did you hear?” you can say to your friend Kathryn Jean Lopez. “Even Human Rights Watch says the sky is green. And Amnesty International just admitted that rain falls up!” Then Kathryn will wander off and deliver this important information to the other fantasy world residents. Best of all, the others may eventually repeat this back to you, without you realizing you originated it. And so you will sleep well at night, certain in the knowledge the sky is green and rain falls up.

Then you will all live happily ever after, right up to the point you finally destroy America.

You know what makes me mad? When people don’t realize I’m busy and don’t need my brain cluttered up with lots of superfluous names and dates and numbers. That’s why I’m grateful to Frederick Jones:

More than 600,000 Iraqis have died by violence since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, according to a study released today by researchers at Johns Hopkins University…

Frederick Jones, a spokesman for the National Security Council said “many experts” found that a 2004 study by the same group “wildly inflated the findings.” That study said the war had caused 100,000 Iraqi deaths.

You see? Mr. Jones could have blathered on and on for hours, naming the specific thousands of extremely qualified experts who came to that conclusion about the earlier study. But he knows I don’t have time for that kind of nonsense! All I need to hear is that these many experts are out there, showing we haven’t killed any Iraqis during this war. In fact, I suspect these very same experts have found we’ve actually caused several hundred thousand dead Iraqis to be resurrected.

Thanks, National Security Council—for keeping my brain secure!

Today is Dennis Perrin’s birthday, and he’s feeling wistful:

While watching “The West Wing” the other night, I caught the episodes where the Ann Coulterish blonde reactionary is invited to join the White House legal team, and her struggles to be taken seriously by the liberals who staff it, when not weathering their unveiled contempt. Of all of Aaron Sorkin’s political fantasies, this one actually rang true for me, though, as usual, it’s the über-good liberals of the “Wing” who ultimately embrace their ideological opposite, showing us once again just how unflinchingly loyal they are to their inclusive values. Sorkin can’t pass up angelic displays like that. And when the faux-Coulter informs her rightwing friends that her new liberal co-workers are “patriots”? Oohh. The chill, the spinal chill . . . what better or purer endorsement?

All that heavenly imagery and rhetoric aside, I did connect to this storyline, simply because I experienced something like it, though at a more mundane level.

In the Summer of ’92, I was hired as the Managing Editor for New York Perspectives…

The rest of the story, involving the political and personal evolution of a once-hardcore Reaganite, and his early death, is here.

There’s a pretty good story in the New York Times today about Luis Posada Carriles. Posada helped plan the bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 in 1976, killing all 73 people aboard. Posada snuck into the U.S. last year, and the Bush administration is looking for some nice country for him to go to while trying very hard to make sure he’s never prosecuted for, you know, terrorism. Lots of people are mad about this:

Roseanne Nenninger Persaud, whose 19-year-old brother, Raymond, was one of the passengers who perished, recently wrote a letter to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales urging him to brand Mr. Posada a terrorist.

“It feels like a double standard,” Ms. Nenninger, who was born in Guyana but has since become an American citizen, said in a telephone interview from New York. “He should be treated like bin Laden. If this were a plane full of Americans, it would have been a different story.”

But that’s where Ms. Nenniger is completely wrong. If he did it right, Posada probably could have killed 73 Americans with about the same reaction.

It’s not that the U.S. government wants us dead. You can’t even say, exactly, that they’re indifferent. Rather, it’s that if you made a list of their top 100 priorities, whether we live or die would be about #96.

So if Posada had blown up a plane with 73 Americans aboard, and it played into one of the U.S. government’s higher priorities, then there would be such loud weeping and wailing the heavens would shake. The president would lay a wreath at the grave of each and every one, the New York Times would publish op-eds from relatives demanding JUSTICE. Etc.

By contrast, if Posada had blown up a plane with 73 Americans aboard, but it couldn’t be used to advance one of the U.S. government’s higher priorities—and particularly if it actually conflicted with one of the government’s higher priorities—it wouldn’t be a problem. There would be no wreath-laying, no NY Times op-eds. In fact, by now it would be just as forgotten by most Americans as the actual Cubana Flight 455.

Think I’m kidding? Well, foreigners are already welcome to run over Americans with U.S.-made bulldozers.

They’re also welcome to torture and murder Harvard graduates.

And it’s no problem if they want to kill Americans on the streets of Washington, D.C.

The only thing that matters is whether you kill Americans in a way that provides a pretext for other things the government wants to do. If so, then it’s THE GREATEST CRIME EVER COMMITTED. But otherwise, from the U.S. government’s perspective, killing Americans is A-OK.

This is from Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy by William Greider. It was published in 1992:

The contemporary Republican party seems brilliantly suited to the modern age, for it has perfected the art of maintaining political power in the midst of democratic decay…

As men of commerce, Republicans naturally understood marketing better than Democrats, and they applied what they knew about selling products to politics…

The conduct of contemporary electoral politics is like what would happen if an automobile company decided to fire its engineers and let the advertising guys design the new model. The car they package might sell. It just wouldn’t run very well.