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450 being the figure that Cheney has admitted to, 4,000 being the independent estimate.
Whose independent estimate is this? I've never heard of any evidence of a figure anywhere near as high as 4000.
Fox-
From memory it was an estimate by a charity based on the number of Iraqi soldiers deployed to the Sadam line who didn't return to their families. They contested that the ~450 figure was based on a count of visible body parts sticking out of the sand. A full excavation was never conducted, let alone by the USA to come to the ~450 figure.
I'm sure it's a bullshit high estimate but the point is that the ~459 figure is clearly an underestimate.
In the same way that the US official death toll for the Highway of Death is lower than even the photos that western journalists took of corpses in the vehicles because the US publically stated that they were sure that everybody ran away when the attack started. The US claim 200 deaths, independent assessors claim closer to 1,000.
The whole thing stinks. I didn't even realise until yesterday that the US have recently admitted to exposing their own troops to Sarin and VX, telling them at the time that their chemical sensors were faulty and false alarms. War Crimes against the Iraqis, war Crimes against their own men.
Stonehedge
Absolutely, I just feet frustrated that it's been made ALL about him by some people. To the point that the fact that the reasons for the intelligences failures have been sidelined, even to the point of some people glossing over the colossal shithousery by Saddam Hussein and Iran and the fact that we thought we knew he had WMDs because we (as in the allies) fucking sold them to him.
Another issue that bothers me is that nobody really seems to give a shit about the war Crimes committed by the Allies in Iraq in 1991 such as the burying alive of between 450 and 4,000 Iraqi soldiers using bulldozers. 450 being the figure that Cheney has admitted to, 4,000 being the independent estimate.
Edit: sorry, just feeling really fucking angry about western middle East policy overall and am easily triggered by the Blair thing. He was bad but not the worst and some of the worst people involved haven't taken one ounce of criticism yet by comparison.