Fumento: Good on AIDS, Not-So-Good on Iraq

While Michael Fumento has done a great deal of good work on debunking various AIDS myths (e.g. that it is going to kill huge swaths of the U.S. population, that it is an "equal-opportunity" epidemic), his articles on Iraq leave, I think, a lot to be desired.

First, I do not notice a lot of numerical analysis of the metrics of the war (e.g. casualties, fatalities). Second, he seems a little too eager to believe whatever the government proclaims (i.e. that Zarqawi is the leader of the insurgency, and he uses the highest estimates for the percentage of foreigners in the insurgency (10% rather than saying between 4 and 10%). Third, he either seems a little too trusting of the goodness of our allies, or else he doesn't care if there are massacres carried out against Sunni Arabs:

Iraqi [i.e. Shiite leaders - Glaivester] leaders are also claiming the U.S. is holding them back from fighting the sort of war necessary to defeat savage terrorists, according to a Sunday Washington Post story. This echoes the only complaint I heard from Marines and soldiers when I was in Iraq, that we were trying to win with a "kindler, gentler military."

Reading the story he links to, one gets the sinking feeling that what the Shiite leaders really want is a chance to significantly reduce the Sunni Arab population , to put it mildly.

Earlier this month, I commented on Michael Schwartz's article about U.S. strategy in 2006, where he quotes Seymour Hersh:

An American Army officer who took part in the assault on Tal Afar, in the north of Iraq, earlier this fall, said that an American infantry brigade was placed in the position of providing a cordon of security around the besieged city for Iraqi forces, most of them Shiites, who were "rounding up any Sunnis on the basis of whatever a Shiite said to them." The officer went on, "They [the U.S. troops] were killing Sunnis on behalf of the Shiites,"

Given this, I am afraid of what not "holding [the Shiites and Kurds] back from fighting the sort of war necessary to defeat savage terrorists" might entail. Either Mr. Fumento does not believe that the Shiites will or are doing stuff like this, or else he doesn't care.

On the other hand, he doesn't like Cindy Sheehan, and while I don't doubt her sincerity, I have to agree with him that she is a crackpot.

More on this later.

That is all.