Story here:

“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.

“Downing Street’s admission comes amid growing questions over precisely how many perished under Saddam’s three decades of terror, and the location of the bodies of the dead.”

5,000 dead is pretty awful too, but the gross exaggeration is relevant in a different way. We now hear from various chicken hawks and right-wing pundits (I realize the categories may be redundant) that, whatever the casualties of the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq, as many would have died anyway if Saddam remained in power. Put aside the ghoulish nature of these post-hoc rationalizations, it turns out there there is no reason to think anything like this is remotely true. Tens of thousands have been killed since the invasion in March of 2003, and tens of thousands have been maimed and injured, their lives shattered, in many cases, beyond repair. There is no evidence that anyone has produced that Saddam was killing and maiming people at anything close to this rate. His worst killing sprees appear to have coincided with when he enjoyed staunch U.S. and British support–for example, when he used poison gas on the Kurds in the late 1980s. Where is the evidence that if Saddam had been in power from March 2003 to the present, forty or fifty (or is it sixty or seventy? the Pentagon, as we know, doesn’t count Iraqis) thousand people would have been killed and maimed? There is none. Chicken hawks ought at least to hold their blood-drenched hands up to the light of day.

UPDATE: Benjamin Hellie (Philosophy, Cornell) calls my attention to the fact that there is debate about whether Saddam is actually responsible for using poison gas on the Kurds: details here.