Why is Jonah Goldberg so charitable to thoughtless political opportunism from the left? That's a question I can't answer. Where I can assist is to rebut a specious, manufactured scandal that's been freshly minted by the thug-loving wing of the British press, one that is now peddled by those eager to win a presidential election — even it means technically taking the word of Saddam Hussein over an American president, a British prime minister and the general worldwide consensus.

Leftist British paper Observer has charged Tony Blair with making a false claim: Blair is quoted in the November 20, 2003 USAID publication entitled Iraq's Legacy of Terror: Mass Graves that "[the Allies have] already discovered, just so far, the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves." The quote was apparently repeated by Blair on December 14, 2003. And that, from the looks of it, is the substance of the charge, from which some are drawing absurd conclusions by conflating those statements with all public testimony on the subject and from there, toying with the idea of Saddam Hussein's twenty-four-year massacre as just another fabrication by George W. Bush and Tony Blair.

I find two immediately apparent flaws with this accusation. First, the USAID pamphlet continues beyond Blair's quotation:

United Nations, the U.S. State Department, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch (HRW) all estimate that Saddam Hussein's regime murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

Wait — what is that word? It's "estimate." Quite unlike "discovered." By November, 2003, nearly 270 mass graves were estimated; less than one-sixth had been confirmed. Several thousand bodies had been discovered. Four entities offered guesses, not physical accountings, on how many murdered Iraqis might lay underground if their broken bodies had been dispensed with in an orderly manner and not, say, run through a plastic shredder to preclude the need for a grave. The numbers ran between 250,000 and 300,000.

Right from the start, Blair's statement was incorrect, an erroneous number of bodies that hadn't even been exhumed. How it found its way into the USAID pamphlet or the prime minister's list of talking points, we can't say for certain. He was mistaken. But his error did nothing to undermine the estimates of bodies in mass graves. John Kerry called United Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi "Brandini" not once but twice. Should we have expected Lakhdar to change his name? Was Kerry lying? No, it was a misstatement that demonstrated Senator Kerry's unfamiliarity with a man's name; again, we can join in speculation on what it meant for Tony Blair to be so confused about Saddam Hussein's victims in the first weeks after the reports were released. But that doesn't turn the Baghdad dictator's crime into a White House-Downing Street swindle.

There's more. Twelve days before the USAID pamplet was released, on November 8, 2003, the Associated Press published this story:

As many as 300,000 Iraqis killed during Saddam Hussein's 23-year dictatorship are believed to be buried in more than 250 mass graves found so far around the country, the top human rights official in the U.S.-led civilian administration said Saturday. Sandy Hodgkinson spoke at workshop to train dozens of Iraqis to find and protect mass grave sites that many fear could be destroyed by desperate relatives trying to dig for evidence of their missing loved ones.

Mass graves have been found throughout the country since the U.S.-led coalition deposed the dictator in April. Mass graves "tell the story of missing loved ones such as where, when and how they were killed," Hodgkinson said. "Truth and proper burial is the first step toward reconciliation."

The process of recovering and identifying the bodies, however, could take years.

So we can say with certainty that Blair's statement was incidental, and not causal, to reports on mass graves. And it's with the excerpt's last sentence that we find the Observer accusation's second flaw. It was well understood that the estimates of bodies were far from physical confirmation. There was no official confusion, other than that of the prime minister, on what had been yet discovered. [And as the latest report on reclamation states, excavation is a long and arduous process, irrespective of Iraq's unique challenges.]

This "story" is nothing more than an attempt to use Tony Blair's twice-mistaken statement as a wrecking ball on the prime minister, even the Ba'athists' murder of hundreds of thousands, bizarre libel that is not likely to settle well with Iraqis; Shiites and Kurds especially. The Observer claims that 55 mass graves have been "examined." No, that's "confirmed." Again, an enormous difference in meaning that is either negligible or inconvenient to the left. As USAID administrator Andrew Natsios said this March:

I'd also like to discuss some of the progress Iraqis are making on their own and with U.S. assistance. Across Iraq, more than 270 mass graves have been reported. About 50 of them have been confirmed as they begin to yield their tragic secrets -- the bones tell us a story of horror and shame; arms of people were bound together; skulls pierced from behind; hundreds of bodies have been discovered in long trenches.

Leaders of the new Iraq and the international community have now joined together to begin the long and painful process of accounting for the dead. In order for all Iraqis to move into their new democratic future, there must be an accurate accounting of these past atrocities. How many died in these mass murders? Some say 300,000, some say 400,000. There are estimates of upwards of a million. We are helping the Iraqis as they begin the terrible task of counting.

The many Disappeared are the most tragic victims of tyranny. Where are they all? We'll never know. We're best to believe the Survivors, and we do know what happens to those who go far to disprove what is better left to common sense. Shame on Kevin Drum for trying to wield this nonsense as a political weapon; shame on Jonah Goldberg for taking him seriously.