LIBERAL CRITICS WITHOUT CREDIBILITY
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NY Post Editorial
December 13, 2003 -- The activist group Human Rights Watch has claimed
that "hundreds of civilian deaths" in the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq
"could have been prevented" if only America hadn't used cluster
munitions or tried to "decapitate" the Iraqi leadership using
intercepts of satellite phone calls. This could be true. After all,
war is an inherently messy thing - a kingdom of difficult, often
deadly choices.
But keep these facts in mind: Overall civilian casualties during the
war were amazingly low. (Even Kenneth Roth, director of Human Rights
Watch concedes - grudgingly - that "Coalition forces generally tried
to avoid killing Iraqis who weren't taking part in combat.") Physical
destruction in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities was extremely limited.
So fair-minded folk should assess this claim skeptically.
Especially given the group's obvious - and sometimes grotesque -
anti-American bias in the context of Iraq.
After all, before the war HRW predicted a massive "humanitarian
disaster" if America tried to topple Saddam Hussein, though it claimed
to take no position on the imminent invasion.
And during the war it could barely rouse itself to condemn the Iraqi
forces' practice of wearing civilian clothes - an open-and-shut,
abundantly documented, large-scale violation of one of the core laws
of war that put civilians at grave risk.
Instead, HRW issued press release after press release condemning or
carping at Coalition forces - often based on nothing more than
supposition.
For instance, in an April 16 press release HRW Director Roth wrote of
the U.S. Army "indiscriminately batter[ing] civilian neighborhoods
with cluster munitions," even though he had no evidence whatsoever of
any kind of "indiscriminate" behavior (his only evidence was a
newspaper photograph of a single bomblet in a Baghdad building).
Indeed, HRW's researchers didn't even arrive in Iraq until April 29.
Nor does it encourage faith in Human Rights Watch's supposed
objectivity that one of its key sources for an October report on
post-war civilian deaths in Baghdad caused by U.S. forces was Nermin
al Mufti, a longtime Ba'athist activist and propagandist for the
Saddam regime.
Human Rights Watch (or at least its predecessor organizations like
Helsinki Watch and Africa Watch) was once a responsible group that
tried to be objective despite the left-wing views of its staff and did
some good work in dark places that knew little liberty.
Now its claims simply can't be trusted.
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