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It's a good thing we invaded Iraq; look at how oppressed and unhappy the Iraqis used to be:
Many of those Iraqi's are probaly dead now since this invasion began as it has resulted in the deaths of up to 950,000 of them. They were either killed by misguided cluster bombs, illegal white phosphorus weapons, insurgent terrorist attacks that started in the country after the invasion began, or sectarian violence which started after the war began.
Iraq which used to be one of the more secular Muslim society is now a hot bed for fundamentalism. Al Qaeda which had no links with Iraq at all is now present in Iraq . The war has not only killed hundreds of thousands innocent civilians who had quite frankly had enough of a hard life under Saddam, it has ravaged their land and infrastructure and it now a nation is now far more radicalised than it ever was.
Instead of stabilizing this part of the middle east the invasion has done the opposite causing more misery to millions of people. Women for example are now far more likely to be raped and under a lot more risk from fundamentalists.
How anyone in their right mind could possible think this has been anything but a crime against humanity is beyond me.
I went to Iraq years ago and the Iraqis are a lovely kind , hospitable and generous people. They did not deserve this. And all for oil. Wow a real strike for democracy. They must be so grateful for all those American and European contracts which will make them.... wait a minute ZILCH.
On top of this priceless archeaological sites have been destroyed .
And let's not forget all the deaths from American soldiers and allies.
All that when it was known all along ( by anybody with any brain cells and an understanding of the middle east) that there never was any threat from Saddam apart to his own people.
What a glorious undertaking to be proud of. If it is Democracy we have brought to them then maybe Democracy is not worth having.
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68,330 posts, read 54,419,437 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by AA1975
Many of those Iraqi's are probaly dead now since this invasion began as it has resulted in the deaths of up to 950,000 of them. They were either killed by misguided cluster bombs, illegal white phosphorus weapons, insurgent terrorist attacks that started in the country after the invasion began, or sectarian violence which started after the war began.
Amnesty International estimates between 500 000. and 800 000.
This below is from the Council on Foreign Relations ( a non partisan organisation) :
The Difficulties of Counting Iraq’s War Dead
Author:
Lionel Beehner, Staff Writer
Updated: March 13, 2007
* Introduction
* Methodologies Used to Count Casualties
* How Cluster Sampling Works
* Criticisms of This Approach
* The Politics of Body Counts
Introduction
Counting casualties during wartime is a murky and inexact science. In Iraq, in particular, it is made more cumbersome by inadequate census data, poor security, and the lack of an official civilian body count by the U.S. government. A range of epidemiology surveys employing various methodologies have produced staggeringly varied results, the most controversial being one conducted by Johns Hopkins University last fall that found more than 600,000 Iraqis had been killed as a result of violence since the overthrow of Saddam in March 2003. Official estimates by the Iraqi government are closer to the 40,000-50,000 range. The discrepancy in numbers reveals the difficulties of counting casualties during wartime, particularly where civilian centers are the primary arena for battle. Also, given the politically charged atmosphere surrounding the Iraq war in the United States, this opens up any surveys to scrutiny and charges of hidden political biases.
Methodologies Used to Count Casualties
There are three estimates generally used to calculate the number of Iraqi civilians killed by post-war violence:
* The Iraqi government. It relies on data from the Ministry of Health, hospitals, and the Baghdad morgue. The government's casualty count of violent deaths since April 2003 was roughly fifty thousand as of last June, but the Iraqi health minister estimated last November the total number of civilians dead was somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000. Experts say that number is probably an underestimate because many Muslims in Iraq bury their dead without going through an undertaker or hospital.
* The United Nations. The UN's figure for the civilian body count, much like the Iraqi government's, relies on information from hospitals, morgues, and municipalities in Iraq but also takes into account casualty reports from Iraq's Ministry of Interior; it found that 34,452 Iraqi civilians had died because of violence in 2006.
* IraqBodyCount. This independent organization catalogues its casualties by looking at the number reported killed by confirmed news reports. The group calculates about 62,000 civilians have died from violence in Iraq since April 2003, with the caveat that its findings are low-ball estimates because not all deaths are obviously reported. Some epidemiologists say only around 10 percent of the deaths in Iraq are described in newspapers.
How Cluster Sampling Works
Another methodology is random—or cluster—sampling, whereby people are surveyed in select neighborhoods to determine larger patterns of the whole population. That was the method chosen by a team of researchers at the Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health (The United Nations uses a similar method to calculate mortality rates).
The leading cause of death, they find, is gunfire, though casualties from car bombs had also increased.
Their October 2006 study, published in the UK-based journal Lancet, found that a further 2.5 percent—or more than six hundred thousand—of Iraqis had been killed because of post-war violence. The leading cause of death, they find, is gunfire, though casualties from car bombs had also increased. The findings created a storm of controversy because the numbers were astronomically higher than previous casualty estimates. The same group found in October 2004 that Iraq's death toll had reached one hundred thousand (this survey relied on death figures in a fourteen-month period prior to the March 2003 invasion by way of comparing the data to a similar period after the invasion).
Many statisticians and political scientists defended the Johns Hopkins group's methodology. The results were peer reviewed and relied not only on random sampling but also death certificates (92 percent of the deaths were certified). Because no reliable data on the number of Iraqis or accurate breakdown of its various ethno-religious groups exists, “unless you do something like an old-time Jerusalem-style census where everybody lines up, you're not going to get much else,” says Sharyn O'Halloran, a statistician and political science professor at Columbia University.
Criticisms of This Approach
Still, the Lancet study has come under heavy fire from a number of fronts. President Bush told reporters October 11, “I don't consider it a credible report,” offering up thirty thousand Iraqi deaths as a more accurate estimate. Many critics pan the report's vagueness. The Lancet figure, Vanity Fair columnist Christopher Hitchens notes in Slate, “does not clearly state, for example, that all these people have actually been killed,” alluding to the “subjective definition of cause of death.” Others criticize the report's sample size. The researchers randomly chose fifty clusters from sixteen provinces, with each cluster consisting of forty households. The trouble with this methodology, Michael Spagat, a conflict studies expert at the University of London, tells Nature (subscription required) is what he calls “main-street bias”: researchers randomly selected residential streets that crisscross busy thoroughfares in each survey area, which are more prone to car bombs and heavy violence, but left out safer streets off the beaten path.
Also problematic with the survey is determining civilians from combatants. Les Roberts, one of the report's coauthors, admits “it is probable that many of the household deaths [reported in their study] were indeed combatants.” Another problem is Iraq's constantly changing demographics, as millions of mostly middle class Iraqis flee for safety in Jordan and Syria. That not only affects the survey's sample size, says O'Halloran, but also the probability of a civilian getting hit by crossfire, a car bomb, or an aerial assault because there is less density. Respondents also are inherently biased. “There is a tendency to over-inflate the [household casualty] estimate on the part of the respondent because from your position, you want to convey it's been horrible here,” says O'Halloran. Also, there is the question: What if an entire house was shelled and the whole family perished, as was often the case in insurgency strongholds like Fallujah? These deaths would not be recorded by the Johns Hopkins report unless the survey took into account neighbors or friends of family, which raises the risk of double-counting. Roberts admits their study “is not ideal, but under these settings, it's the best you can do,” adding that “surveillance is never complete.”
The Politics of Body Counts
Some critics say the Lancet survey's results were inflated for political reasons, particularly given its publication directly before the November midterm elections. Hitchens accuses Dr. Richard Horton, the journal's editor, of being a “full-throated speaker at rallies of the Islamist-Leftist alliance that makes up the British Stop the War Coalition.” Roberts dismisses these criticisms.
Part of the problem is that no reliable U.S. government data on Iraqi casualties exists to cross-check against the Lancet study’s findings.
“No one in public health who studies what causes death is in favor of that thing,” he says. "There's never been a more controversial study more easy to verify or refute.” That is to say, his researchers found that, on average, one in seven Iraqi households had lost a loved one; the Iraqi government estimates one in eighty have. “You wouldn't have to call up very many Iraqis to confirm the truth,” says Roberts. Moreover, he argues, if the government's body counts are true, then South Africa, Colombia, Estonia and a host of other countries would have higher violent death rates than Iraq and American cities like New Orleans or Baltimore would have a higher murder rate than Baghdad.
Part of the problem is that no reliable U.S. government data on Iraqi casualties exists to cross-check against the Lancet study's findings. The U.S. military, argues Samuel Gardiner, a retired Air Force colonel who has taught at the Naval Defense University, “is in a better position than anyone else [to count casualties] because they have the presence and resources.” But for public relations reasons, he says, they do not collect these statistics. “Their motivation is not to have a body count number out there,” he says. “If there's a number that appeared on TV every night, it would be that much more difficult to conduct this war. Think of pictures of Iraqis digging mass graves.” The Defense Department does catalogue some instances of collateral damage—for instance, when Iraqis are accidentally targeted and receive claims for financial payouts. But historically, says Gardiner, during wartime the U.S. government, as with most countries, has never formally catalogued civilian casualties (though Roberts says the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, a division of the Department of Health, did conduct some body count estimates after conflicts in Somalia in 1992 and Kosovo in 1999).
How do the men responsible for this sleep at night?
We're "liberating" them...
Saddam wasn't a good guy, but he was no Kim Jong-Il. If we wanted to liberate anyone, it should have been North Korea. They have WMDs, unlike Iraq...but they don't have oil.
American propaganda is the best in the world!
When are we going to learn that a nation is only free when they fight for it, themselves? You cannot force freedom on people. You can only force oppression.
Last edited by LeavingFlorida05; 05-04-2007 at 08:01 AM..
Location: By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea
68,330 posts, read 54,419,437 times
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Thanks folks for the casualty info.
One thing I've found telling about this adminstration has been even when they've disputed Iraqi casualty numbers they offer no evidence or umbers of their own. They're very good at the manipulation or data, or just ignoring it.
One thing I've found telling about this adminstration has been even when they've disputed Iraqi casualty numbers they offer no evidence or umbers of their own. They're very good at the manipulation or data, or just ignoring it.
This is how many civilians the US government claims have been killed as a result of this war. This number is sooooooo far off, it's insulting and infuriating. The ONLY people on this entire planet that come up with numbers anywhere close to this are chickenhawks and apologists.
What's unfortunate for Bush is that he lives in the age of the internet. In the past, it was easy to control the media. Not anymore.
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who would ever have ever thought it ? 
