Flit

IT'S IMPORTANT TO KNOW YOUR

IT'S IMPORTANT TO KNOW YOUR LIMITATIONS, COLBY

"Everybody has a level at which they stray beyond their competence. Mine, for instance, is pretty much outside a two-foot radius around this chair..."
--Colby Cosh, giving himself room to move.

SEE, THIS IS WHY YOU

SEE, THIS IS WHY YOU CAN'T TRUST SLOW-MOTION ANEURYSM MAN

The trouble with Bill Quick, you see, other than his occasional Wookieish rages, is his frequent seizing upon the one point of view that most suits his own preconceptions, a single tenuous data point in some cases, and his defence of that as the final truth in contentious debates, against all logic. For instance, his firm argument today that no more than 100 or so people must have been killed in Baghdad during the whole Second Gulf War, based on a single quote from a British newspaper.

Den Beste has already taken him to task. (I personally think SDB's estimates are a bit high, but at least they're not ungrounded in common sense.) Quick's rejoinder (found in his own comments) is more or less that he'll keep believing his chosen source, dammit. I'll simply add this. There is general agreement that a 17-hour rescue mission in Mogadishu in 1993, involving only several hundred Americans with light weapons, managed to kill an absolute minimum of 350 Mogadishu inhabitants, armed and unarmed (other estimates are higher... this is the Somali one.) Quick's thesis, is that a fight in the heart of Baghdad that lasted several days, against far more heavily armed and numerous Americans, not to mention all the aerial bombardment of the preceding two weeks, still killed less than half that many.

That's simply not sustainable. Therefore, whether through some error in translation or some other mistake, Quick's source cannot be reliable on its face... no matter how much Quick might feel otherwise.

NB: Note also how Quick in his comments refers to an estimate of 9,000 dead Iraqi soldiers in Gulf War One. Unfortunately, as even the source he links to clearly states, that's actually an estimate of Iraqi dead up to the point the ground campaign BEGAN... rather a different thing. It's not even in fine print... Quick once again sees only what he wants to see.