Too Bad Rummy Won't Go. He Has Been A Perfect Disaster.

[kpete]

The news that Rumsfeld denied rumors on Thursday, that he was planning to step down tipped my memory to having heard him on the radio last week. (Too bad he won't go. He has been a perfect disaster.)

Rumsfeld complained at SAIS a week ago that there are 14,500 murders a year in the United States and 42,000 driving fatalities, and the US press isn't covering that, whereas, he implies, 43 people getting blown up on a bus in Baghdad is front page news.

Rumsfeld is committing a logical fallacy here. He is comparing apples and oranges. Does Rumsfeld think that there is not also a murder rate in Iraq beyond the guerrilla violence? The likelihood from the information that has leaked out from the Baghdad morgue is that Iraq is among the more murderous societies in the world at the moment. (As you would expect, since where there is no law and order, criminal elements act with impunity. Worse, there are regular political assassinations by religiious militias.) These Iraq murders are not usually reported in the press, any more than the murders in the US are. Likewise, one can only imagine the traffic death rate in Iraq. The country has imported more than 100,000 used cars since the fall of the old regime, and there aren't exactly a lot of vigilant traffic police.

So the fact is, Mr. Rumsfeld, that the per capita rates for murder and traffic deaths in Iraq may well be similar to those in the United States. The deaths in the guerrilla war are extra.
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