A Reader Response to my post on Sr. Joan and the War

"You raise good points at "Mirror of Justice" in discussing Sister Joan Chittister's transparently manipulative column about the Iraq war and how the rest of the world viewed the recent presidential inauguration.

You might also have mentioned that the casualty figure that Sr. Chittister cites ("over 100,000 civilian dead") differs by several orders of magnitude from other figures. The web site "Iraq Body Count," for example, is no friend of the Bush administration, but it pegs the "high" estimate of civilian deaths caused by military action in Iraq at 17,723.

This, of course, is considerably less than the 100,000 figure we got from Sr. Chittister, with(conveniently) no attribution.

While pondering casualty counts in the light of just war theory, it might also help to consider the number of people that Saddam Hussein's regime had killed every month, realizing that for all the instability in Iraq at the moment, coalition forces have indisputably put a stop to that.

Best,

Patrick O'Hannigan"

One further comment:  If I am reading the Iraq body court website correctly, the 17,723 civilian deaths include those who died from U.S. military action and those who have died at the hands of terrorists, including suicide bombers.