When I read his Washington Post op-ed arguing that containment, via sanctions, was harder on the Iraqis than a war would be, I had two questions: 1) Given all the bogus figures that have been thrown around as estimates of the human toll of sanctions, should I trust Mead’s numbers? 2) What would Matt Welch, who wrote a careful article about those estimates last year, think about Mead’s piece? A lot of (my fellow) hawks have sung Mead’s praises since the op-ed appeared. Now Welch has responded to him. The answers to my questions turn out to be 1) no, and 2) not much.