Jeff Jarvis attempts to compare Saddam Hussein to the tsunami disaster. In a post titled Catastrophic equivalencies, he says:
By the latest count, 160,000 people have died in this tsunami.
A month ago, Tony Blair said that 400,000 victims of Saddam Hussein’s tyranny and murder have been found in mass graves in Iraq.
Both are humanitarian tragedies, humanitarian issues, humanitarian needs.
In Jeff’s rush to come up with a number documenting what he thinks he already knows, he grabs, off the US Aid website, a quote by Tony Blair that Blair himself admitted was false long ago.
Downing Street has admitted to The Observer that repeated claims by Tony Blair that ‘400,000 bodies had been found in Iraqi mass graves’ is untrue, and only about 5,000 corpses have so far been uncovered.
The claims by Blair in November and December of last year, were given widespread credence, quoted by MPs and widely published, including in the introduction to a US government pamphlet on Iraq’s mass graves.
In that publication – Iraq’s Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves produced by USAID, the US government aid distribution agency, Blair is quoted from 20 November last year: ‘We’ve already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves.’
On 14 December Blair repeated the claim in a statement issued by Downing Street in response to the arrest of Saddam Hussein and posted on the Labour party website that: ‘The remains of 400,000 human beings [have] already [been] found in mass graves.’
The admission that the figure has been hugely inflated follows a week in which Blair accepted responsibility for charges in the Butler report over the way in which Downing Street pushed intelligence reports ‘to the outer limits’ in the case for the threat posed by Iraq.
I find it rather repulsive that Jarvis, who vocally supported the Iraq invasion on his widely-read blog, is using the tsunami disaster to opportunistically ride his pro-war hobby horse, but to repeat such a widely discredited factoid as Blair’s mass-grave numbers is simply irresponsible. Not only did he fail to research the discredited quote but he attributed it to Blair in the wrong year.