The Indian Tata group has unveiled the Nano, an aptly-named new car that will sell for just R17 500 (Rp100 000, or $2 550), not counting taxes and import duties. MyBroadband carries the AFP story — presumably because the Indian Tata conglomerate is heavily invested in South Africa, including in its telecoms sector — and has a picture, reproduced alongside.

Horrid, innit? But hey, it’s transport. And cheap transport at that. For the price, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a ten-year-old wreck in South Africa.

One would think that such a bold competitive move, bringing prices down and promising to improve the quality of life, employment opportunities and business prospects of millions of people who previously couldn’t afford the luxury of a motor vehicle, would be hailed as tremendous news. You’d think it would be held up as a symbol that free enterprise can yield success not only in the rich west, but also in the emerging markets of the south and east.

No. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, which jointly won last year’s Nobel Peace Prize, is “having nightmares” about the prospect of a low-cost car for the masses. Despite the fact that the car has a tiny engine, meets emissions standards, has a claimed fuel efficiency number well ahead of even the smug hybrids of the rich, he is among the critics who reckon it can only contribute to noise and air pollution, and therefore it’s a bad thing. Better to keep cars expensive, so only the rich get to pollute the planet.

There, with one simple phrase, Pachauri betrays the nightmarish aim of the environmentalists. The sanctimonious elite seek to bar progress, and their anti-prosperity goals are aimed not only at the extravagant rich, but also at the ambitious poor, who are still climbing the ladder of rising prosperity and quality of life purchased by rising production and economic development. Can’t have the natives driving cars, now can we?

What people like Pachauri fail to realise is that prosperous people have the means and motive to do something about pollution and environmental quality. By keeping the poor pinned underfoot, all the self-proclaimed “socially conscious” set do is ensure that the poor will have higher priorities than being nice to the planet for the sake of the rich. All they will do is make sure the poor won’t have the means to protect themselves against the natural changes and disasters that are an inevitable part of living on this active planet of ours.

If the madder branches of the Cult of Gaia resemble suicide sects, the remainder appears to be into human sacrifice.

An infamous report was issued in October 2006, just before the US mid-term election that returned Congress to Democratic control. Though the election had been the Republicans’ to lose, by virtue of their disregard for Gingrich Revolution-era promises of small government and spending restraint, the Iraq war played a not inconsiderable part in the electorate’s dissatisfaction with their government.

The Lancet, a hitherto respected British scientific journal, published an estimate by Johns Hopkins researchers (PDF) by means of a cross-sectional cluster sample survey, that between the invasion in March 2003 and July 2006, “there have been 654 965 (392 979–942 636) excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war, which corresponds to 2.5% of the population in the study area.”

That is carnage. It exploded arguments that modern wars, though always awful, have become progressively less awful because of better targeting, more accurate munitions, and greater care among Western soldiers to avoid “collateral damage” — the unfairly maligned hold-all phrase used to describe death and injury to civilians and damage to non-military buildings and infrastructure. They understand that collateral damage wastes effort, munitions and lives on inconsequential targets. They understand that collateral damage isn’t exactly the best way to win hearts and minds. They understand that collateral damage makes for bad PR back home, which undermines political support for their efforts. They understand that collateral damage serves nobody and harms everybody, and they have the means to avoid it.

Or so we thought. Until we discovered that around 650 000 people died unnecessarily. This was a much higher death toll than even the most vocal opponents of the war had yet claimed. It was at least 13 times more than the worst estimates of the US military, the Iraqi health ministry, or the independent Iraq Body Count organisation. Not to say that their estimates of 50 000 deaths was good news, but given that some combatants deliberately targeted civilians, it was better than half a million or more. In fact, it wouldn’t compare unfavourably with the death toll during the five years of South Africa’s “peaceful” transition to democracy. In short, tragic though it remains, 50 000 or 100 000 deaths are expected, but 650 000 are not.

The study was met with skepticism in some quarters, and the error margin of 550 000, or over 40% either way, doesn’t inspire confidence. President Bush dismissed the credibility of the report, and his political opponents in turn dismissed his credibility.

Meanwhile, the result was trumpeted across newspapers the world over. The National Journal, which stuck to an arcane debate clouded too often by splits along political lines, rather than substantive arguments about research accuracy and statistical methodology, noted:

CBS News called the report a “new and stunning measure of the havoc the American invasion unleashed in Iraq.” CNN began its report this way: “War has wiped out about 655,000 Iraqis, or more than 500 people a day, since the U.S.-led invasion, a new study reports.” Within a week, the study had been featured in 25 news shows and 188 articles in U.S. newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.

Turns out Bush was right, though. Earlier this month, the National Journal published a comprehensive set of conclusions in an article entitled Data Bomb, in which it interrogates every aspect of the study.

Days later, the New Scientists publishes an article entitled “Iraqi war death toll slashed by three quarters”, in which it reports that according to Iraqi health officials, the death toll for March 2003 to June 2006 was in fact between one sixth and one third of those published in The Lancet.

As the American Digest observes, if 600 000 Iraqis had really died, where are all the funerals? Were they held in secret? Were reporters just not interested in the heartfelt drama of corpses swaddled in white, borne by crying men and women?

The Iraq issue may turn out to be the most curious aspect of the 2008 presidential election campaign. Though dramatic mistakes were made, at political level, at intelligence level, and in strategic and tactical decisions on the ground, one gets the impression that most voters now recognise one might expect such missteps in a difficult war. Too many prophecies were made before the fact, rather than after the fact, the way Churchill preferred them, and a political price was paid. It is time, to turn an Angry Left slogan against it, to move on.

The carnage and failures and pessimism appears to have been exaggerated for too long. General David Petraeus is overseeing a strategy that is demonstrably working. Would it surprise anyone to learn that MoveOn.org, the pressure group that slandered him as “General Betray Us” in the New York Times, is funded by the same George Soros who partly funded the Lancet study?

The danger of exaggeration is that people stop believing you. That they recognise you’ll have difficulty making a case on the facts of the matter. The result, in the case of the Iraq-war-as-willful-carnage myth, is that few of the current presidential candidates even mention the war, beyond promising its responsible conduct to a hopeful conclusion. Even some of the Democratic candidates are, implicitly, endorsing the Bush Doctrine now. They know that they can’t objectively call Iraq a disaster, and that it’s no longer politically advisable either. Now, it seems voters, who opposed the war when it was (or sometimes merely appeared to be) going badly, have resolved that competently bringing it to a satisfactory conclusion is a more reasonable political desire than high-tailing it and leaving carnage behind. How far we’ve come, in just one short year.