a placeless world

"I acted because I was not about to leave the security of the American people in the hands of a madman. I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein."
— George W. Bush.

How do we gauge what makes a "madman?" Is the killing of innocent civilians a good measure? I think it is.

Let's tally up Saddam's civilian victims.

The dictator killed 22 comrades who opposed his ascent to power after the 1979 coup.

Then there were the 300,000 killed during the Iraq-Iran war, at least some of those must have been civilians. Oh heck, let's just count all of them as civilians. And though both sides fought with vigor (and with U.S.-built weapons) we'll blame all the deaths on Saddam, because he's bad. That's 300,022 dead civilians.

Then there were those pesky Kurds. Anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 of them. Let's go with 100,000, OK? Now we're up to 400,022.

And who can forget the 1,000 Kuwaitis killed in the first Gulf War? That makes 401,022.

Then there's all those other Iraqis, dissidents and the like. There were probably about 50,000 of them killed, but a New York Times columnist once said said it may have been as many as 200,000, (and we all know that New York Times columnists always try to play down the threat Saddam posed, so that’s probably a very conservative number anyway.) That brings us to 601,022.

And let's not forget that murderous "prison clearing" fiasco of 1999: Human rights groups say hundreds of prisoners were killed, but who can trust them to accurately assess prison abuse? Conservative columnists say as many as 1000 died, so just for fun (because talking about thousands of dead people as if we were counting jellybeans is quite fun, don't you think?) let's say it was 1,000 prisoners. That's 602,022

And we will never forget the 2,792 people who died on Sept. 11. George W. Bush said Saddam had ties to the terrorist who attacked us on that day, so let's blame those deaths on him.

Saddam’s total: 604,814.

Now then, Saddam was in power for 24 years. That's 288 months. 604,814 divided by 288 is…

More than 2,100 civilians killed per month.

Sounds pretty damn mad to me, but to be sure we should compare with other world leaders. Responsible leaders. Leaders with honor, integrity and humanity.

Mr. Bush, for instance.

The United States military has reported as many as 13,000 civilian causalities in Iraq since the inception of Bush's war there. Some leftist wackos place the number closer to 55,000, but we can all trust the United States on this one, right? Let's use Uncle Sam's numbers.

For the time being, let's completely forget about the civilian costs of our "terror fighting" actions in Afghanistan. Sure, many thousands have died there, but we lost 3,000 people in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington D.C. on Sept. 11, and most of the terrorists were from Saudi Arabia, which is kind of in the same general area of the world as Afghanistan, sort of. And besides, most of us have forgotten all about that war anyway. So we won't add any of those dead civilians.

So that's 13,000 dead civilians in the 16 months since the war began, or a rate of 812 dead civilians per month for Mr. Bush.

The numbers don’t lie. Per month, Saddam killed more than 2.5 times the number of civilians than Bush. That makes Saddam more of a madman, in my book.

Ergo, Bush was right to lead his nation into war under the correct premises that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, maintained close ties with terrorists and was a madman.