NGOs gone wild

Human Rights Watch declares itself the ultimate arbiter of human suffering.

Human Rights Watch said Mr Bush and Mr Blair should not try to justify the war retrospectively as an effort to save human life.

“Only mass slaughter might permit the deliberate taking of life in using military force for humanitarian purposes,” it said.

“Brutal as Saddam Hussein's reign had been, the scope of the Iraq Government's killing in March 2003, was not of the exceptional and dire magnitude that would justify humanitarian intervention.

“The Bush administration cannot justify the war in Iraq as a humanitarian intervention, and neither can Tony Blair.”

So 300,000 dead do not count, because they weren't killed in a short enough period of time. So bloodshed doesn't really matter, unless the US is doing the killing—in which case there can be no justification.

Unbelievable.

UPDATE: Steven Den Beste wrote a much more detailed critique of Human Rights Watch back in December. And this evening he has a jaw-dropping example of EU anti-democratic hubris here.