The left's vice has always been self-righteousness, just as the right's is smugness. But when you add the sense of entitlement that is characteristic… - David Aaronovitch

But, [John] Pilger objected, "Amnesty produced a catalogue of Saddam's killings that amounted mostly to hundreds every year, not millions. It is an appaling record that does not require the exaggeration of state-inspired propaganda".
In fact Pilger's own source said (unquoted by him) that, in addition to the number of known executions Amnesty had also collected information on around 17,000 cases of disappearances, over the last 20 years, and "the real figure may be much higher".

The grand-paternal Aaronovitches came to England as Jewish refugees — "aliens" as the 1906 anti-immigration legislation called them — fleeing the murderous Russian pogroms. They scraped in just before the door closed on their kind. Aaronovitch's paternal grandfather drifted into the east London rag trade. Buttonholes were the illiterate old needleman's speciality. David's paternal grandmother spoke Yiddish all her life. The book's central focus is on David's parents. They are not, for him, mum and dad. He uses their first names — Lavender and Sam — throughout. It is as if he is holding them up with forceps.

During the Anfal anti-Kurdish campaign in 1987 as many as 180,000 Kurds disappeared. At Halabja, in one incident alone, more people were killed than in the whole of this latest Gulf war. The most conservative death toll attached to the repression of the Shia uprising in 1991 was 30,000. One million died in the Iran-Iraq war started by Saddam.
And this is reduced by Pilger to "hundreds every year".