New report -- 655,000 Iraqis dead since invasion
(promoted by paradox - too important not to)
Bush discounts new study that reports 655,000 Iraqi civilians have died since 2000 invasion.
As the Bush administration sticks to its estimate of 30,000 civilians killed, a new study released today estimates about 655,000 Iraqis have been killed since the 2003 U.S. led invasion of Iraq. Naturally, in a news conference today, Bush says he doesn't believe the figures are accurate though he realizes, "a lot of innocent people have been killed."
Excerpt from the news story follows:
Researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad derived that estimate from a door-to-door survey, conducted by doctors, of 1,849 households in Iraq. Taking the number of deaths reported by household residents, they extrapolated to a nationwide figure.
The researchers, reflecting the inherent uncertainties in such extrapolations, said they were 95 percent certain that the real number lay somewhere between 392,979 and 942,636 deaths.
And the pitiful truth is that in the 3-year period before the invasion, not even 1/3 of this number had died in Iraq due to violence. How thankful the Iraqis must feel that we saved them!
Realized it's ok though, because
we can all go vote in our favorite polls and decide which reality suits us best. It's all subjective, man.
Dead people? Oh that's just your opinion. (from the SFGate.com)
So many dead
even more wounded, even more lives shattered, so many more lives disrupted -- for no reason. Bush did this just because he could. He is a monster.
But remember, m. That's just your opinion!
Some of us are a lot more shiny and happy than you are sir - please don't weigh our cloud down anymore with your "negative" points of view. What makes you hate America so much anyway?
[sorry, I can't help myself sometimes. It's just too easy to know what some people's reaction will be - and it really pisses me off...]
Great commentary by billmon on the subject.
Excellent counterpoint to right wingnuts
Leaders who start them [wars] have to take responsibility for the consequences -- good, bad or indifferent. --Billmon
Like Glenn Beck (CNN) the other night who said that most of the deaths were caused by insurgents or other Iraqis, not US-led coalition forces. As though that is some kind of justification!
As I said previously, the invasion has sparked this violence -- BushCo and the warmongers and the BushCo supporters HAVE TO ACCEPT the responsibility for the deaths. I don't care whether you are conservative or liberal, no one can say that there was this type of daily violence in Iraq prior to the US-led invasion.
Billmon finishes with a great point too:
The moral of the story, I guess, is that you don't need to be an inhuman monster to cause an inhuman amount of death, destruction and suffering. You don't even need evil -- ignorance and arrogance and incompetence can manage the job quite nicely.
Ignorance and arrogance and incompetence -- Oh My!
It's Vietnam all over again
During the Vietnam war (abt. 1963-73), the General in charge, William Westmoreland, discounted estimates of civilian casualties the same way the General in charge of the Iraq offensive, Gen. George W. Casey does.
Gen. Westmoreland even low-balled American casualty numbers and it wasn't until well after the Vietnam war ended in 1973 that the 58,000 American casualty number was revealed.
Gen. Westmoreland also blamed the withdrawal, not on a military failure, but on civilians who were unwilling to see the war through. Ultimately, it was the unpatriotic civilians who would not stay the course.
The other shameful similarity between Vietnam and Iraq is the unknown number of civilian deaths. To this day, there is no reliable estimate of how many Vietnamese/Cambodia/Laos civilians were killed, though it is often put between 1 to 3 million. Americans have little tolerance for American deaths abroad, but foreigners deaths, well that's another matter. It seems as though we can tolerate quite a great number of those.
Flying by the seat of my rants...
But, but, but
Westmoreland did grossly highball the number of enemy killed. Doesn't that even it all out?
Just to reiterate that
all hope is indeed lost in some parts of the world - I saw a bumper sticker this morning that said, "Peace through superior firepower".
I kid not.
Rarely have I wanted to guide my Ford Taurus into some else's car so badly. :)
Numbers, Numbers
Hopkins has been known to make less than perfect Public Health estimates and proclamations before. The Lancet exists to provide a forum for methods, ideas and research pieces that need to be published, but are not always of the highest quality.
We all live in a world of countered statistics. This latest declaration of 650K civilain deaths is in contrast to the 30K claimed by the Bush administration. Somewhere we all have to come up with numbers that seem reasonable to us. Too many people don't even question the numbers that are generated by "their" side.
The disparity, roughly 22x, is not all that great when you look at some of the numbers that have been swallowed whole over the past 25 years. My personal favorite was the 1980's claims of 50K murdered children in the US per year. That number was accepted for years by supposed authorities despite that fewer than 40K total number murdered, and "only" about 500 children per year. That was a 100x disparity between report and truth. And that wasn't even between contending factions. Neither the Bush Administration, nor Hopkins is off by anywhere near that kind of an error factor.
655,000 Iraqi's Dead
The numbers don't surprise.. I saw this coming from the beginning.. sad thing is, it's most likely the tip of the iceberg if we take the forthcoming sectarian violence into account.
Iraq body count
Civilians reported killed by military intervention in Iraq
Min- 43937 Max- 48783
"We don’t do body counts"- General Tommy Franks, US Central Command
More on civilian deaths
As I have often posted here, numbering systems are mutable. The numbers used in politics don't bear much relationship to the numbers that most people use in every day life. If I buy something for $74.99 with a $100 bill, I get $25.01 in change.
But the numbering systems used to determine such concepts as civilian deaths caused by war are all based on assumptions of what a civilian death is, and how it is to be counted. This sounds stupid, but even in the US, death certificate information is not as pristine as assumed.
For example, there are many authorities in the US who are able to issue death certificates. Sometimes more than one authority will issue a death certificate. But in a war zone, there are an incredible number of error generators.
Even counting soldiers killed is difficult. Forty plus years after the Korean war, the US revised the number of soldiers who died in that conflict downward by some 40% because of errors that were discovered at that time.
What is important, is that George W Bush lied our nation into an illegal war of aggression. George W Bush has committed crimes against the peace, crimes against humanity, and crimes against a people. G
Dead people have names
Following the 9/11 attacks, the official number of dead was put at 2,888 (or thereabouts). Why? Because, dead people can be counted -- they have names, they have families, and they represent a finite number.
Of course during a fluid situation like war, there will be initial confusion and chaos after military or insurgent attacks. BUT, at some point, the dead people's family/friends/co-workers/neighbors will be able to definitively state that they are indeed dead. Iraqis, whether civilians, terrorists, police or whatever have names and they have families. Why can this not be counted?
I can think of only one reason -- and that is the horror of the actual number of deaths caused in Iraq among the civilian population would outrage most "civilized" people. So the administration needs to lowball the number to keep the illusion alive.
According to the State Dept., before the invasion, there were approximately 200-300 people killed in Iraq per year due to sectarian violence. Every day, I hear 30 found dead, 26 found dead, 55 found dead -- that's every day when you listen to the news. Maybe someone should have been keeping a running tally of that number. Without question it will add up in a few days to the total number killed in an entire year from sectarian violence before the invasion.
Dead people have names and can be counted -- but the politicos don't want that, and the masses need to keep their illusions. Any number between 30,000 and 655,000 of innocent civilians killed should shock the socks off everyone. It certainly would if it was happening here!
Flying by the seat of my rants...
Beware: Graphic Image
This dead Iraqi child has a name and apparently a family. His or her name should appear on some "death list" somewhere.
Excuse me for being so graphic -- but it is hard for me to reconcile this image with everyday scenes of American life. Like all they talked about at work today was who won Project Runway, or who got eliminated on Dancing with the Stars, or the Mets vs Cards, or are we going to Ruby Tuesdays or TGI Friday's for lunch.
So we close our eyes to Iraq because BushCo has convinced us that the devastation happening there would be happening here if we left. How arrogant we must sound to Iraqis. What if Blair decided he wanted to make Manhattan the central front in their war against the radical Irish Republican Army (IRA). Sounds silly, huh? Well, that's exactly the logic BushCo uses to justify his continued occupation of Iraq. He'll cause deaths and destruction in Iraq so we can keep watching TV and the World Series and enjoying lunch without being interrupted by those pesky terrorists.
My disgust could fill a stadium.
Counting
In the initial confusion?
For more than forty years the US claimed some 50K US soldiers dead as the result of the Korean war. We knew who went in, we knew who came out, and what condition they were in. Recently (within the past ten years) that number has been revised downward to about 35K. This blunder was not the result of political machinations, but rather a failure to count what was in fact enumerable.
I spent my career in Public Health often working with death certificate data. Here in the US, in one of the more progressive states, that data was often terrible and riddled with mistakes. It often took several years for the data to be collated, for duplicates to be removed, and the data "reasonably" cleansed. The situation in Iraq is a data collectors nightmare, and the deaths may not be enumerable ever. At this time they certainly aren't. In the middle of their civil war there is no way to confirm the data.
People, both producers of information and consumers of information, almost always believe their data is better than they think it is. Some interesting metastudies have been done recently, which indicate that more than half of all medical studies are wrong. The Hopkins study is a population based retrospective study under incredibly difficult circumstances -- it already has three strikes against it for accuracy. That does not mean it does not have value, it does. But that numeric value is not of the type in counting the dollars in my checking account. It has a different meaning.
One way to describe how different mathematics can be when used for varying purposes is to consider the statement that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. For Euclidean geometry that is an axiom. But there are a variety of other geometries. One which you are familiar with in fact, though probably not by name, is Taxicab geometry. It takes into account certain rules, like one way streets, in which the shortest distance between two points may be a zigzag.
Other abuses of numbers exist as well. These are pet peeves of mine. I have written a number of rants about that here. Meaningless numbers get thrown around and eventually become engraved in the public consciousness as if they were TRUTH. When in fact the limits of meaning of those numbers are ignored. Other numbers just get made up on the spot because they sound good.
It is not that I disagree with your final premise. I will even go quite a bit further. There is no justification for any mortality in Iraq. The death of any one single Iraqi, civilian or military, as the result of the criminal actions of BushCo should shock the socks off everyone. We are killing on the basis of an illegal war. We are war criminals. And this is just one of the horrors that BushCo has perpetrated upon our nation.
No argument there
As the well-worn expressions go: at the end of the day, in the final analysis, the bottom line is: We ARE engaging in an illegal war and whether the death toll is 1, 30,000 or 1/2 million, the blood is on BushCo, and by proxy Americans', hands.
Flying by the seat of my rants...
Unbelievable.
Don't know of any other way to describe it.
Holocaust. Maybe that's another way to describe it. I won't wonder 'how the Germans who live through WWII felt' anymore. I have some idea now what it's like watching a madman murder, and murder, and murder, and then feel no remorse whatsoever...while the populace shrugs along.
Awesome.