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I normally don't bother answering stuff like this. There's so much ignorance and anger in the world, and especially coming from the United States, that it would be an endless task trying to correct it all. But important facts in this case should be set right.

Dr. Goebbels - for so it seems appropriate to nickname this angry, unthinking propagandist - claims the reference to 100,000 innocents killed is thoroughly discredited. Well, just because one writer at George Mason says so, does not make it so. The number is the result of a statistical study, and it was published in Lancet, one of the world's most important (peer-reviewed) medical journals.

But even if you choose not to accept the words of experts in a scientific journal (and of course Dr. Goebbels lives in a land where biology increasingly is set by the Book of Deuteronomy), there's the separate effort of actually counting corpses, conscientiously led by an American woman, which came up with about 25,000 killed. This study was unquestionably an undercount because of the sheer problem of getting around Iraq to talk to doctors and officials and because of language and cultural difficulties in communicating. I suppose Dr. Goebbels views 25,000 innocents killed not worth mentioning. We also have the recent statements of important British military men concerning American tactics, tactics almost guaranteed to inflict heavy civilian damage. Several important British commanders have been surprisingly blunt in this.

The ugly, repressive laws to which I refer are of course - as any thinking person might immediately grasp - not American laws about civil unions for homosexuals (of which there are very few, and one can only wonder why Goebbels would come up with this hare-brained reference), but the hideous Patriot Act and related oppressive laws. These violate America's own Constitution in dozens of measures. They are disgraceful in a supposedly free society.

Goebbels' reference to Mary Joe Kopechne after asking who it was that Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell killed is straight out of the gutter. My piece doesn't mention Sen. Kennedy, nor am I am an admirer. The death of that poor woman hardly deserves to be treated like a hunk of raw meat tossed to hungry animals. Robertson and Falwell are slimy manipulators living off people's loneliness, and they have made countless dumb public statements, but no one is yet aware of their homicidal tendencies.

Dr. Goebbels goes on: "But I guess the red flag would be OK." Red flag? Who mentioned a red flag except Goebbels?

'But "Allah akhbar", meaning "God is great" is OK of course.' Again, who said this but Goebbels? He is arguing with his own disturbed dreams. It certainly sounds like the raving of a lunatic, but then hate and anger do make people act unbalanced.

"Illegally under what law? Are heaps of U.N. resolutions that Saddam refused to comply with and big majority votes in the U.S. Congress not enough?" The UN was, in fact, deliberately ignored by Bush when he couldn't secure Security Council authority.

UN arms inspectors were frantically at work then to find whether Hussein had violated resolutions. They found absolutely nothing, confirming what previous UN arms inspectors had told us. US forces, after the illegal invasion, tried for months to come up with proof and failed completely. About the time of Bush's second election, the Secretary-General of the UN made the un equivocal statement that the invasion was illegal. The British government, as has since been revealed, was advised by its own experts in secret that the invasion would be illegal. Expert after expert in international law has agreed.

But you don't need experts to understand the technical legal points. How does a majority of the US Congress make it okay to bomb and invade a foreign country? If all countries behaved that way, the world would be reduced to complete anarchy. Besides, the Congress cowardly never declared war, it just passed resolutions which mean nothing to anyone else in the world. But if you are fired up with the spirit of Dr. Goebbels, none of the facts matter.

"How nasty of them to kill terrorists while the terrorists are trying to kill them!" This is Dr. Goebbels' response to my mentioning Marines, after a bowing of the head, going out to kill more Iraqis in their own homes. Before the invasion, there were no terrorists in Hussein's Iraq, anymore than there were in the old Soviet Union. It was in fact one of the last places on earth they'd even think of going. Brutal secret police do have a way of assuring such things.

Yet Bush always dishonestly or stupidly said there were, and Dr. Goebbels clearly believes, years later, the word of the most misinformed and dishonest president in American history.

Of course, Bush also insists on calling the people now fighting a guerilla war against US forces terrorists. This usage is just plain dumb. When you fight invaders, you are not a terrorist, you are a patriot or resister by most people's reckoning.

But today we do know something new, and we owe the knowledge to people like Bush and Dr. Goebbels. The Iraqi resistance has become the world's great training ground for young Arab men angry with American injustice. Bush has stirred a hornets' nest that will plague the world for decades. People who understood this before the invasion tried to tell Bush, but, out of sheer stupidity, he wouldn't listen. Just like Dr. Goebbels answering words he either hasn't read or doesn't understand.

" [Chuckman] Being a Canadian Leftist." Sorry, Dr. Goebbels, but in this as in virtually everything else you simply don't know what you talking about. I am a classically trained economist, and a strong believer in markets. I just tend to strongly dislike mass murder in the name of freedom. But then people like Goebbels never are much concerned about identifying truth.