Daily Mail’s anti-war campaign

I was very sorry to see Johann Hari, who once supported the invasion of Iraq, now repeating some of the most awful and untrue anti-war propaganda in an unconvincing article about Tony Blair, BP, Libya and oil in yesterday’s Independent. In it he says:

Many people were perplexed by Tony Blair’s decision to back George W Bush’s invasion, which has led to the deaths of 1.2 million people.

There is no credible basis for this figure, which overstates the level of violent deaths in Iraq since the invasion by a factor of about 10. The methodology of the once widely-cited figure of half that number, 600,000, published in The Lancet, has been exposed as unreliable. As I have said many times, the death toll in Iraq is terrible enough for it not to require wild exaggeration by those who disagreed, or who now disagree, with the invasion.

The quality of Johann’s article can be  gauged accurately by its reproduction entire in today’s Daily Mail.

Update: I know that Johann would not have had a say in the syndication of his article, but Fraser Nelson draws attention to an irony in this article, “Why the Daily Mail is a poison“, by Johann in 2003.

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