definition of red herring fallacy merriam webster

I told them to read the 661 Sanctions Committee reports, which provided documentation that items such as refrigeration equipment to store medicine, needed medical textbooks, ambulances, and even requests for pencils were being withheld from Iraqi civilians by the Sanctions Committee under the control of U.S. bombs having destroyed Iraq's civilian infrastructure during the first Persian Gulf War (which is a war crime, by the way), and that, according to even independent Western doctors and scientists, the lack of this infrastructure was (and is) the primary cause of all these deaths, 'realists' called me a blame-America-first kinda guy. Several years ago, when I first wrote about U.S. But as we've come to find out, Iraq didn't possess what America's U.N.-haters swore Saddam had, which makes the toll of human suffering created by the sanctions all the more scandalous.) Security Council would not lift the sanctions until Iraq was declared WMD-free. What withered international support for the sanctions was the human toll they were taking. The Clinton administration continued this policy of 'containment.' They had the backing of the international community. The sanctions were first established when the first President Bush was in office.

In terms of moral and legal malfeasance, ask yourself: What's more scandalous - skimming money from a U.N.-controlled fund or upholding the most severe sanctions against a country in the history of the world, as was the case in Iraq, in which more than 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of 5 died of diseases directly attributable to the sanctions?

Definition of red herring fallacy merriam webster