Iraq Deaths =72 times 9/11 Deaths

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  • Thread starter Dayle Record
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In summary: The study found that mortality in the two months after the invasion was 400% higher than in the two months before the invasion.The study found "that mortality in the two months after the invasion was 400% higher than in the two months before the invasion."
  • #1
Dayle Record
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http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996596

This article in New Scientist today, describes a study of Iraqi deaths in this preemptive war. 100,000 deaths are of women and children, 100,000 are men. With a little simple math it comes to about 72 times the number of dead, in Iraq, vs the number of dead on 9/11; an unrelated event linked by political rationalization. That is a lot of dead people. It is only about 1/3 of what we are calling Saddams genocide. Maybe I have been generous calling his kill number to be 600,000. There had been some numbers stated before the war, regarding one half million children dead from the cost of sanctions. Now, we blame Saddam for those deaths because he diverted the "oil for food" money, to arms buildup.

Anyway, this represents a huge wound to the nation of Iraq, and this wound has clearly been inflicted by the will of this Administration. This kind of horrific loss will never quiet, an entire generation will be psychically branded from this, and regardless of any good intention, that intention will never be remembered by the living victims of these losses.

Death and destruction, is never the author of gratitude or good. Is this an example of compassionate conservatism?
The Karma from this has been placed on the American People. I am reminded of the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." So if people do unto us, in retribution for these kind of horrific losses, will we lose our freedom, as we militarize to combat threats we made to our own security, by our actions?
 
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  • #2
Is it possible to be any more biased? I find this sort of "analysis" entirely worthless; absolutely anything can be made to appear terrible if you pick only the aspects that can be phrased to sound bad.
 
  • #3
Hurkyl said:
Is it possible to be any more biased? I find this sort of "analysis" entirely worthless; absolutely anything can be made to appear terrible if you pick only the aspects that can be phrased to sound bad.
Yeah, it's the way he phrased the deaths of 100,000 women and children that made it seem bad.

To make it seem happier, he should have pointed out that since we invaded Iraq, there are tens of millions of people who haven't yet died. So far, we're doing a GREAT job of NOT killing millions of people.
 
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  • #4
The New Scientist article was biased?

I have been wondering throughout the duration of this war, just how many of the Iraqi people have died as a result. Until today, I have heard no discussion of this, with the exception of Iraqi forces killed in action as a ratio to US forces killed in action.

You are missing the point. These figures are brutal, absolutely brutal. 100,000 women and children have died in Iraq as a result of this war.

We went to this war because of a fallacious link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaida. The big sell for this war was the death of 2,800 people in the World Trade Towers.
2,800/200,000 that is a telling ratio. My math may be bad, this is physics and math help, what is the ratio of dead on 9/11 to dead Iraqi citizens? That ratio is really just about 1/72.

I owe a great debt of gratitude to the Americans in harms way, to the people that answered this governments call to arms. They have put everything on the line. This is where the rIdiculousness of war comes to the fore.

Draw a line on the ground, on one side is American and Iraqi Combat deaths, is that number 2000? On the other side of that line 200,000 other deaths. Add it up. There was no 9/11 link, No Al Qaida link, no Weapons Of Mass destruction. 202,000 dead/0.

Let us say that the big number shocked me today, here is your shock and awe.

I am always amazed at the furor some of my comments raises. That is a BIG NUMBER, GET IT, A BIG NUMBER.
 
  • #5
On a side note, the bumper sticker of the week in my world, was

WE ARE MAKING ENEMIES
FASTER THAN WE CAN KILL THEM.
 
  • #7
A few points:
  • This is a scientific study published in The Lancet, Britain's leading medical journal. (The paper is available free, but you have to register at The Lancet's site.)
  • The authors of the paper are from Johns Hopkins, Al-Mustansiriya University (in Baghdad), and Columbia.
  • The method of the study is a "cluster sample survey", which, from the bits of the paper I've read so far sounds like the standard method used for many public health surveys. I don't know if there are methodological drawbacks to applying this method to zones of violent conflict.
  • The paper mentions the Iraq Body Count site that Gokul pointed out and a BBC report as sources for casualty estimates arrived at by different means (e.g. Iraq Body Count is based entirely on press reports, which, as the paper notes, are unlikely to be complete).
  • The breakdown that Dayle gives in the original post does not really accord with the numbers in the linked New Scientist article. The description there states that the estimate comes out to about 100,000 civilian casualties for Iraq excluding Fallujah with another 100,000 possible civilian casualties in and around Fallujah, and while the description indicates that the majority of victims are women and children, no numerical breakdown is given. I haven't looked at the original paper closely enough though to know if Dayle's numbers come from that context.

The overall conclusion of the paper is that the current leading cause of death among Iraqi civilians is aerial bombardment by coalition forces, and that evidence is strong that the number of civilian casualties is much higher than previously thought.
 
  • #8
I read it twice, at first I thought there were only 100,000. But the second read revealed that 100,000 are women and children, and 100,000 are adult males. That makes 200,000 and they felt this was a low estimate. So if you add the 1,100 American dead, and the now increasing number of coalition soldiers then this is a really big, stark number. If 10 people are personally aggrieved by the loss of each person, than those intensely personally affected number 2,002,000 or so. It is a big wound, all around.
 
  • #9
wasteofo2 said:
Yeah, it's the way he phrased the deaths of 100,000 women and children that made it seem bad.
The worst estimates from the worst anti-America propaganda sites were on the order of 12-16,000 civilian deaths (thanks Gokul).

The fine print at the end of th article:
Horton acknowledges the potential for recall bias among those interviewed and also the relatively small sample size. “The research was completed under the most testing of circumstances - an ongoing war. And therefore certain limitations were inevitable and need to be acknowledged right away,” he says.
...and the bias for all to see:
But he also calls for an “urgent political and military response”.
I'm not inclined to trust this report.
Dayle Record said:
The New Scientist article was biased?
No, the study was biased - the report is just regurgitating what the study says.

Edit: correction, the "Lancet"'s editor provides a political commenatary on the study. The "Lancet" is also biased.
I am always amazed at the furor some of my comments raises. That is a BIG NUMBER, GET IT, A BIG NUMBER.
No furor, just incredulity. That BIG NUMBER, just doesn't add up. GET IT?
 
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  • #10
200,000 - 500,000 are in line with comments made at the daily Pentagon briefings during the war; which I watched every day at 4:00 AM. Of course, most of those killed were first victims of Saddam, and then victims of George Bush. Bush's idea of freeing people is to, first, kill a few hundred thousand of them. The bunker busters buried the bodies very nicely.

According to the Pentagon at the war's end, 6 divisions of 60,000 - 80,000 troops were unaccounted for. When this was announced, the entire press room fell silent.
 
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  • #12
In short:

"This war of yours costs billions," Ahmed said. "Are we not worth more than a few thousand?" Just as troubling is that the US military has rejected 5,700 of the 11,300 claims processed. Of the 5,600 cases where claims have been paid, the total payout has been $2.2 million. That is an average of $393 per Iraqi victim.

The families of American victims of 9/11 are receiving an average of $1.8 million per victim.

Military officers in Iraq admit that the payouts can seem random, without reason. A Newsday piece featured Wafa Abdul Latif, the mother of a 12-year-old boy who was shot by US soldiers. Because of a curfew, US troops blocked an attempt by neighbors to rush the boy to the hospital.

The boy died in the car. A US military official apologized for the shooting. The family was denied compensation.

"When the Americans first came, Mohammad and my other children watched them with joy in their eyes," Latif said. "Now we hate them."

Newsday and the Los Angeles Times reported on bizarre cases where people received more cash for damaged automobiles than for dead relatives. The family of Husham Sami was denied compensation despite the fact that the unarmed Sami was killed point-blank at his house by US soldiers who did not understand he was trying to desert Saddam's army. Sami's brother Kamel received $2,500 for his US-wrecked, 15-year-old car.

"It is a strange form of justice," Kamel Sami said.

Strange justice is a natural result of a strange and unjust war. At Fort Campbell, Bush said Iraqi civilians are seeing "the good heart of America." In the comfort of soldiers, he felt it was fine to inject some levity into his speech. He quoted a US female soldier who said she is one of the best shots in her battalion: "But hey, I'm a redneck, what do you expect?"

There was laughter and applause. In Iraq, there is no yahoo laughter or applause in homes reddened by the blood of civilian victims of the invasion. In those homes, there are the perturbations of hate.

Bush never fails to remind the rest of the world that 3,000 innocent Americans were killed on 9/11. Yet America refuses to count civilian casualties in Iraq. Bush still rails about a Saddam Hussein who "tortured children in front of their parents." Yet America stiffed thousands of Iraqis who watched family members burn and bleed to death because of our invasion.

Bush says that unlike the terrorists, "We believe in the values that uphold the dignity of life." Yet the value America places on American victims of foreign terrorism is 4,580 times more than the average compensation for Iraqi victims of premeditated American violence. That gap and the ease with which Bush made redneck jokes with his soldiers is a stunning clue why he found it so easy to invade Iraq.

Bush never put a human face on Iraqi civilians. That makes the invasion and occupation a failure, on face value.
 
  • #14
Its an election trick defeated by the truth.
 
  • #15
studentx said:
Its an election trick defeated by the truth.

And I suppose you have proof of this truth, which you are withholding merely for your entertainment ?
 
  • #16
One Scientist stated his aim is strictly a public health issue, and the protection of civilians in wartime, advanced as a public health strategy.

One Scientist said that his aim, releasing this before the election, was so that BOTH CANDIDATES would see the numbers, and have a chance to openly pledge to protect civilian lives, as this conflict progresses, or resolves or whatever it does.

Where is the political trick in recognizing the extremely high death toll, in this conflict?

We are engaged in payback for 9/11, the death toll 2800 or so. This number will help everyone understand, the war we face there. I have been lulled into thinking that the combatants we face are just suicidal religious fanatic mujahadeen, but the fact is the number of normal citizens taking up arms is bound to increase, when the civilian death toll is so high.

This is a no brainer, and we have been lulled into thinking that this was somehow an antiseptic situation with our smart weaponry, and the news and spew simply implies that this is a religious war we are fighting to free the middle eastern region from "THE FUNDAMENTAL NATION OF ISLAM". I have heard perfectly rational, sophisticated Americans espouse this doctrine. But, our actions have had grievous consequences for innocent populations, so grievous, that the war we now face is for the right to live, and for revenge for their losses. This is bad for our armies there, since they were sent for untrue reasons, and kept there with shellac and push pins, and prayers.

This isn't bleeding heart me, this is me saying that the news emphasizes a couple of Class A Terrorists, and asks us to focus on the war on terrorism. The fact is that we have killed so many Iraqi innocents, that we are no longer innocent. I hate sending anyone into that, and it will be very difficult to mend the situation.

Think about Columbine High School, or the shootings at Kent State, or the victims of 9/11 now multiply those events by their relative ratios, and you will see the human expense of this war. Three years have passed since 9/11 did everyone get all better yet? The whole middle east is going to share their pain, Muslims do tend to stand together once they are finished tearing each other apart.

I remember some famous quote, "We have only begun to fight". I maintain that we have only begun to die. This will be a direct consequence of failure to understand the message in these numbers. Failure to factor in the negative social energy potential, glossing this over, ignoring this in public policy statements, will not keep us in good stead with the world.

Some sort of Ostrich movement won't serve the ground troops, won't serve any peace process, won't serve to heal the wounds we have inflicted on top of grievous wounds already present. This isn't any annoying fact, a cloying fact, a little bo peep, bleeding heart anthem, it is liken unto a huge cache of explosives that we overlooked in defensive strategy sessions.
 
  • #17
Hurkyl said:
Is it possible to be any more biased? I find this sort of "analysis" entirely worthless; absolutely anything can be made to appear terrible if you pick only the aspects that can be phrased to sound bad.

I'm trying to see exctly ewhat your problem was, the research was carried out by one of the world's premier research organistaions and it was published in one of the world's premier peer-revied jornual - the Lancet.

The point is that the US led invasion has probbly led to the death of over 100,000 Iraqi civilains both directly and indirectly, make of it what you will. In fact this should not be a great surprise as this was around the level that was forcast by humanitarian organisations before the war.
 
  • #18
plover said:
Juan Cole, of course, has a good take on the Lancet paper.
Plover, that link makes it fairly clear: the numbers are backwards:
The Lancet, a respected British medical journal, reports that the US and coalition forces (but mainly the US Air Force) has killed 100,000 Iraqi civilians since the fall of Saddam on April 9, 2003. Previous estimates for civilian deaths since the beginning of the war ranged up to 16,000, with the number of Iraqi troops killed during the war itself put at about 6,000.
No report I've ever seen has put the number of Iraqi military deaths at 6,000. As Ivan said, the US military has been quite open about the likelyhood that we killed several hundred thousand Iraqi military personnel. It is obvious to me that the study is counting military deaths as civilian deaths (intentionally or not).

Incidentally, Ivan, I think you missed the point: no one is arguing that we didn't kill several hundred thousand Iraqi military personnel (well, except for that absurd 6,000 number someone pulled out of the air). The study alleges 100,000 civilian deaths.

The study mentions the possibility of a "memory bias" but dismisses it. I think they are wrong to do so: since the vast majority of Iraqi military personnel were conscripts, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect their families to report them as having been civilians.

Several other things about the report don't jive: the report says that most of the deaths were from aerial bombardment - but we didn't do any aerial bombardment that could have caused 100,000 civilian deaths - especially not in different, widely separated cities. Are we to believe that all these people traveled to the small handful of cities where aerial bombing took place and then left no physical evidence of their deaths? Its absurd. We didn't bomb all that many cities and we didn't cause that many civilian casualties in the ones we did bomb. 100,000 people is a lot of people to not have any physical evidence of their deaths. It was all over the news when we killed half a dozen or more even in large cities (where the largest attacks were). Where were these other people?

klusener, I happen to disagree with the opinion presented in that Op-ed, but the facts are the facts that are accepted by reputable sources: ~10,000 civilian deaths. And the fact that we are paying reparations (I didn't know we were) is unbelievable. No one ever does that. But hey, I guess that's the type of people we are.
Dayle Record said:
Where is the political trick in recognizing the extremely high death toll, in this conflict?
Dayle, you said it in your previous sentence and the commentary that followed the report says it in the title: the report, the study itself, and their timing are politically motivated.
JSCD said:
I'm trying to see exctly what your problem was...
The basic problem is that the study relies on witnesses - the most unreliable of all forms of evidence. The previously accepted numbers that we have are based on physical evidence, ie. actual dead bodies. I'm much more inclined to believe reports based on actual physical evidence and I think the bias openly admitted in the report and the study makes it clear that the study found what it was looking for and made no effort to reconcile that with conflicting evidence.

edit: Another flaw I just thought of. Since most of the places we bombed were cities, most of the civilian deaths were in cities. As a result, the study is biased toward a higher number of civilian deaths than is representative.

edit: More flaws (I'm reading the study now). The study includes 11 cities. Of them, Anbar shows a "crude mortality rate" of near zero before the war and about 200 since. The other 10 show rates from 5-15 for both before and since the war. Anbar is clearly an aberration and its rate is sufficiently high to vastly affect the national rate. With it included, the average is around 30, without it, the average is around 10 (which, if I understand the concept, is about value you should expect). It should also have been discarded from the study(or been treated separately). Also, the wide range of mortality rates even in the other cities, some rates unreasonably low (as few as 1 or 2 per 1,000), indicates a severe sampling error in the study.

Also, looking at the data, the number of women killed and the number of children killed doesn't correlate, as you would expect it to if they died violently, together.
 
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  • #19
Russ we a re talking about a scientifc study here conducted by experts not a bucnh of yahoos who just decided it would be a lark to interview people in Iraq, these things are taken into account.

I'll also point out that the number 16,000 deaths is only based on deaths as a direct result of violence that have been reported by the press. We should expect the number to be much higher than that.
 
  • #20
jcsd said:
Russ we a re talking about a scientifc study here conducted by experts not a bucnh of yahoos who just decided it would be a lark to interview people in Iraq, these things are taken into account.
If you'd like to discuss the flaws in the report, please do...
I'll also point out that the number 16,000 deaths is only based on deaths as a direct result of violence that have been reported by the press. We should expect the number to be much higher than that.
Why?
 
  • #21
I'll also point out that the number 16,000 deaths is only based on deaths as a direct result of violence that have been reported by the press. We should expect the number to be much higher than that.

It should be fairly obvious that every act of violence is not reported as frontpage news, I'm not even sure you can talk about the existence of news and any other reliable source of information out there. Asking "why" seems quite naive here.
 
  • #22
PerennialII said:
It should be fairly obvious that every act of violence is not reported as frontpage news, I'm not even sure you can talk about the existence of news and any other reliable source of information out there. Asking "why" seems quite naive here.
Yes, its true that not every act of violence is reported - but we're being asked to believe that only 15% were reported! A discrepancy of 90,000 deaths in 1.5 years is an average of 164 unreported deaths per day. That's a lot of deaths for no one to notice or report on. I'm not inclined to accept that that is possible.

At the same time, some deaths are reported multiple times or military deaths are reported as civilian deaths. I'm not saying the 16,000 number is perfectly accurate - indeed, I'd expect it is a little high. But it is based on real bodies.
 
  • #23
russ_watters said:
As Ivan said, the US military has been quite open about the likelyhood that we killed several hundred thousand Iraqi military personnel. It is obvious to me that the study is counting military deaths as civilian deaths (intentionally or not).

I find this odd. I thought Iraq had only about 3 or 4 hundred thousand troops in the first place. And I thought a large chunk of this force simply surrendered. How can there have been "several hundred thousand" military personnel killed ? I guess this includes irregular forces that now make up the insurgency.
 
  • #24
The basic problem is that the study relies on witnesses - the most unreliable of all forms of evidence. The previously accepted numbers that we have are based on physical evidence, ie. actual dead bodies. I'm much more inclined to believe reports based on actual physical evidence and I think the bias openly admitted in the report and the study makes it clear that the study found what it was looking for and made no effort to reconcile that with conflicting evidence.

This quote, I am not sure if it is pure Brave New World, or more Monty Python Puts On The Third Reich. We fought this war in the beginning with smart weaponry that kept our personnel out of harms way. We certainly aren't going to go in there and knock on every door and say,"Bring out your dead, we want a head count". I consider the scientists that used standard methods to achieve their figures, were heroic, in that they did a lot of that. Polling very aggrieved and likely hostile individuals, regarding terribly bitter matters, at considerable risk.

This notion that you can't trust witnesses, is certainly a strange one. You will trust the witness that counts the bodies, but not the witness that personally counts the loss.
This kind of thinking, leads no no accountability. If this is the paradigm, then the road is wide open for us to become monsters, good thing it is Halloween.

Do scientists discount all studies of populations, all pubic health information, all statistical evidence? If this is how it works, then everything can go into the black, no one is credible, unless they are telling corporations how to make more money.
 
  • #25
Dayle Record said:
I consider the scientists that used standard methods to achieve their figures, were heroic, in that they did a lot of that. Polling very aggrieved and likely hostile individuals, regarding terribly bitter matters, at considerable risk.

And you don't think bitter hostiles will exagerate the numbers? Poll a thousand bitter households and you get the real number of deaths...
 
  • #26
I'm trying to see exctly ewhat your problem was

I never read the article; my comment was entirely on Dayle Record's post. My primary problem was summarized quite nicely by Dayle himself:

Let us say that the big number shocked me today

This phenomenon bothers me to no end. Once a person gets it in their head that a number is large, they seem to lose the capability for any critical thought.

Most specifically, they seem to forget that they have absolutely no context in which they can place the number.

This last point is what has bothered me the most about all this post-war discussion. We hear all these numbers we're supposed to think are horrible because they're soooo big, and they say so!

But you know what? Until I have some idea what an appropriate death toll is for this sort of conflict, I have no idea if these numbers are outrageously bad, or even surprisingly good! And neither do these people who get shocked by large numbers, and it irritates me to no end that they just can't see that.
 
  • #27
100000 deaths?? well no wonder people in the Middle East hate the USA! :rofl: (I always thought the Lancet was one of the most prestigious medical journals, on par with the New England Journal of Medicine)


Actually, 100000 is pretty low compared with other invasions/occupations in the last 50 years. Just ask a Cambodian, Vietnamese, Guatemalan, Nicaraguan, Dominican, Lao, Japanese, Chilean, Korean, Indonesian, etc. & I haven't even heard much about Iraqis getting any depleted uranium lodged in their lungs to radiate for the rest of their lives this time around, or birth defects caused by Agent Orange, or more DU, etc etc. Nor even unexploded-cluster-bombs-turned-landmines causing children to lose limbs all over the place. All in all, this Iraq invasion went over very well, compared with the rest of the stuff the US has been involved in since WWII.

"The West has never been allowed to forget the Nazi holocaust. For 40 years there has been a continuous outpouring of histories, memoirs, novels, feature films, documentaries, television series... played and replayed, in every Western language; museums, memorials, remembrances, ceremonies...Never again! But who hears the voice of the vietnamese peasant? Who can read the language of the vietnamese intellectual? What was the fate of the vietnamese Anne Frank? Where, asks the young American, is Vietnam?" - William Blum, www.killinghope.org
 
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  • #28
russ_watters said:
Why?

For the simple fact that not all detahs are reported in the press, infact 30,000 deaths I believe was one offical estimate knocking around.
 
  • #29
Hurkyl said:
But you know what? Until I have some idea what an appropriate death toll is for this sort of conflict, I have no idea if these numbers are outrageously bad, or even surprisingly good! And neither do these people who get shocked by large numbers, and it irritates me to no end that they just can't see that.
While I wouldn't disagree with your overall point, my guess from what people have said is that the surprise comes from people being aware of the death counts in the neighborhood of 15,000 and being unaware that there were reasons to believe that figure low. The desire to believe that this data was being accounted accurately is certainly understandable. The context is thus the statements made by the government and press concerning the consequences of hostilities. (There is also the separate complaint, made by human rights groups for some time now, that overall the US has been negligent in keeping track of civilian deaths.)

I expect it is difficult for anyone to know whether, given the weapons and tactics used, these numbers are high or low. My understanding is that a number of the weapons used, especially those considered to be "smart" munitions, have never been used in a conflict of this scale. So expections for collateral damage may not be well quantified.

The soldiers on the ground are obviously individuals, and will act according to their character—some will be cavalier, others scrupulous—but the aggregate effect of their actions will be a result of the training they are given and the rules of engagement that are in effect. The question, given that we are dealing with human lives, is not whether the number is high or low, but whether tactics are being assessed and adjusted to minimize the number of deaths. I have never heard this point addressed. The higher the number of civilian casualties and the more of these casualties that are caused by means that were considered to be affecting only hostiles, the less likely it seems that the military command structure takes the concept of adapting their tactics to minimize civilian deaths seriously.
 
  • #30
Appropriate death toll? Is that like appropriate attire? Let me tell you a couple of things, one, it is a big number of women and children to die at our hands. Yes it is. You would think that we would have taken the lessons Vietnam offered, and bettered ourselves, but we didn't. We allowed this. We allowed the same monsters to rule us, as ruled the day when Viet Nam happened. Just because some atrocity happened doesn't set viable precedent. I hope they aren't still teaching this crap in War College.

Here, I frequently hear that it isn't apropo to have an emotional response to atrocity, or to anything. Rationality goes at the sound of a big number, etc. That is ridiculous to pat ones self on the back, over the fact that one is callous, it is irrational to ignore the function of an entire organ system. If we don't poll our emotions at least give a listen, then we become ethical amputees, plus; emotion is a message from the subliminal saying there is more information available, possibly dangerous, possibly a way out. I am a woman, not a man. I am as cold and results oriented as people get. It is a bad move to suppress this information, and once it comes to light, to disavow it, and and ignore it in the press, and on the campaign trail. Appropriate death toll. That is oxymoronic to the extreme.

In a "good flu year" the typical death toll is 30,000 people.
In a "bad flu year" the typical death toll is 70,000.
So why did we get our panties in such a knot over 9/11, if our bully boy government is first of all, rational?
Keep in mind we went to war because 2800 people died, in a sloppy plan, that we could have thwarted if so many people weren't going to get rich on the war glut.


In the year of little flu vaccine, The Spanish Flu, is deliberately resurrected. We are stupid to allow it, we were stupid to be led into a baseless war. But see, these emotions were forwarded by the plans already in place before 9/11. We are stupid to ignore the harm we have done. Why? Because it puts our entire nation in harms way, starting first with the troops on the ground, in Iraq.

I would much rather that we were the most compassionate nation, the most generous nation, the best friend Earth ever had, instead of letting the Bully Boys take the day. It is stupid for the US to disavow these numbers, because the Muslim world won't.
 
  • #31
Yes, its true that not every act of violence is reported - but we're being asked to believe that only 15% were reported! A discrepancy of 90,000 deaths in 1.5 years is an average of 164 unreported deaths per day. That's a lot of deaths for no one to notice or report on. I'm not inclined to accept that that is possible.

Its likely the truth is somewhere in between as usual, but believing the lowest number has usually been overly conservative. Typically in conflicts the after-the-fact casualty counts have always been higher than estimates made during.
 
  • #32
Appropriate death toll? Is that like appropriate attire? Let me tell you a couple of things, one, it is a big number of women and children to die at our hands. Yes it is. You would think that we would have taken the lessons Vietnam offered, and bettered ourselves, but we didn't. We allowed this. We allowed the same monsters to rule us, as ruled the day when Viet Nam happened. Just because some atrocity happened doesn't set viable precedent. I hope they aren't still teaching this crap in War College.

Had to go this far to find some sense ... appropriate death toll ... why isn't there a puke smiley in the collection... the issue whether there are 10k or 100k civilian deaths is starting to sound pretty trivial.
 
  • #33
Dayle, you are shocked by numbers that might not even be true and you don't know what these numbers represent. I think that sums up the problem.
 
  • #34
i have been meaning to ask you this studentx, but is the x in your username from malcolm x...
 
  • #35
Sums up what problem?
 
<h2>What is the significance of comparing Iraq deaths to 9/11 deaths?</h2><p>The comparison between Iraq deaths and 9/11 deaths is often used to highlight the scale and impact of the war in Iraq. It is meant to draw attention to the fact that the number of deaths in Iraq is significantly higher than the number of deaths in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.</p><h2>How was the number of Iraq deaths calculated?</h2><p>The number of Iraq deaths is based on estimates and is not an exact figure. It is calculated by various organizations and agencies, such as the Iraq Body Count project, which tracks and documents civilian deaths in Iraq. The number also includes deaths of US and coalition military personnel.</p><h2>Is it accurate to compare Iraq deaths to 9/11 deaths?</h2><p>The comparison between Iraq deaths and 9/11 deaths is often criticized as being inaccurate and misleading. While both events involve loss of life, they are vastly different in terms of circumstances and context. The 9/11 attacks were a deliberate act of terrorism, while the war in Iraq was a complex and ongoing conflict.</p><h2>What are the limitations of using this comparison?</h2><p>Using the comparison between Iraq deaths and 9/11 deaths can oversimplify and minimize the complexities and consequences of the war in Iraq. It can also be seen as disrespectful to the victims of both events, as it reduces them to a mere statistic in a political argument.</p><h2>Are there any alternative ways to understand the impact of the war in Iraq?</h2><p>There are many other ways to understand the impact of the war in Iraq, such as examining the economic, social, and political consequences, as well as the human toll on the people of Iraq. It is important to consider multiple perspectives and sources of information when trying to understand complex events like war.</p>

What is the significance of comparing Iraq deaths to 9/11 deaths?

The comparison between Iraq deaths and 9/11 deaths is often used to highlight the scale and impact of the war in Iraq. It is meant to draw attention to the fact that the number of deaths in Iraq is significantly higher than the number of deaths in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

How was the number of Iraq deaths calculated?

The number of Iraq deaths is based on estimates and is not an exact figure. It is calculated by various organizations and agencies, such as the Iraq Body Count project, which tracks and documents civilian deaths in Iraq. The number also includes deaths of US and coalition military personnel.

Is it accurate to compare Iraq deaths to 9/11 deaths?

The comparison between Iraq deaths and 9/11 deaths is often criticized as being inaccurate and misleading. While both events involve loss of life, they are vastly different in terms of circumstances and context. The 9/11 attacks were a deliberate act of terrorism, while the war in Iraq was a complex and ongoing conflict.

What are the limitations of using this comparison?

Using the comparison between Iraq deaths and 9/11 deaths can oversimplify and minimize the complexities and consequences of the war in Iraq. It can also be seen as disrespectful to the victims of both events, as it reduces them to a mere statistic in a political argument.

Are there any alternative ways to understand the impact of the war in Iraq?

There are many other ways to understand the impact of the war in Iraq, such as examining the economic, social, and political consequences, as well as the human toll on the people of Iraq. It is important to consider multiple perspectives and sources of information when trying to understand complex events like war.

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