Iraq Deaths =72 times 9/11 Deaths

[studentx]

i have been meaning to ask you this studentx, but is the x in your username from malcolm x...

Yes its the same x

Sums up what problem?

The problem you have with the number of deaths

 

[klusener]

we have a lot to talk about my friend...

why in particular did you choose his last name?

 

[plover]

No report I've ever seen has put the number of Iraqi military deaths at 6,000.

The number is apparently the lowest of various estimates. It seems to be an adjusted number derived from field reports.

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).

Read the study. Given the methodology, this assessment does not look defensible.

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.

What's your beef with this 6,000? I have no idea why Cole cited that number rather than another, but it's not because he would want to conceal the extent of the havoc caused by coalition forces. It is somewhat odd that the 200k+ estimate does not seem to be known very widely as it seems like the sort of thing anti-war folks would jump on. Perhaps it's because nothing is really known one way or the other on this count, e.g. how many of those soldiers that were unaccounted for might have deserted en masse and returned to their homes on seeing that the Ba'ath regime's number was up?

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.

Where do you get this conclusion? Why would anyone dissimulate like this? It might be more likely people would want to testify that Saddam forced them to serve in his army. In any case, I see no reason to accept your assessment (or my own, for that matter) of what Iraqis will or will not report accurately over that of the Iraqi researchers who carried out the interviews. I also see no reason to trust your assessment of what effect "recall bias" has in a study like this as you have no experience carrying them out. Your tendency to assume you can evaluate anything without reference to any expertise in the subject matter as long you've accorded the discussion a political context is really quite striking.

Methodologically, the study was designed to exclude those people active in Saddam's armed forces, and, as the authors note, except for infant mortality, "recall bias" would tend to lower the overall casualty estimates. If a soldier deserts and returns to his home as a civilian (not exceptionally unlikely for a conscript) then I don't know how that fits into your reading. The authors mention the possibility that some of those killed by coalition forces may have been engaged in action against them. Given the methodology of the study, such cases seem most likely to be individuals either peripheral to the organized insurgent militias or making isolated acts of resistance.

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.

The paper gives the percentage of violent deaths for areas excluding Fallujah to be 24% (p. 5, col. 1). So, for a 100k estimate of overall civilian deaths, the upper limit of civilian deaths from aerial bombardment is <25k. Being the leading cause of death is not the same thing as causing "most of the deaths".

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).

Without some sense of how gunships and rockets are used on a day-to-day basis, as opposed to their use in coordinated bombing campaigns, this is all pure speculation. Also, as Cole notes, many engagements never get reported in the Western press.

The figure of 100,000 dead is not an estimate of the casualty rate from coalition forces, it is an estimate of the overall number of (non-military) Iraqis who have died during the occupation over and above those who would have died if conditions before the invasion had remained in place. This includes deaths resulting indirectly from the invasion such as e.g. disruption of medical services and other infrastructure problems.

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.

And all political motivation is partisan? Here's what the more politically minded author of the study is quoted as saying by the interviewer in the link I gave above:

[Les Roberts] "I e-mailed [the study] in on September 30 under the condition that it came out before the election. My motive in doing that was not to skew the election. My motive was that if this came out during the campaign, both candidates would be forced to pledge to protect civilian lives in Iraq. I was opposed to the war and I still think that the war was a bad idea, but I think that our science has transcended our perspectives."
​

Plus, as Gilbert Burnham (the author being interviewed) notes, if the study had been released after the election, they would have gotten flak for that too.

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 just sounds ignorant as to how this kind of statistical study works. You would basically have to pull down the entire edifice of public health methodology to get this argument to fly.

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.

It is unclear what you mean by this. But it does not sound as though you are taking into account the randomization procedure used for choosing communities. Or perhaps, as implied by your next comment, you are mistaking governorates (provinces) for cities.

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.

Did it not occur to you to check whether or not Fallujah is in the Anbar governorate? (Hint: it is.) In other words, all of the text in the paper devoted to talking about the problem posed by the data from Fallujah, all of the breakdowns that show separate statistics calculated with and without the Fallujah data deal precisely with the issue of this outlying data point. The figure of 100,000 is the figure for civilian deaths not including Fallujah, as was also mentioned by the New Scientist in the article linked by Dayle and by me in my first post to this thread (#7). (Admittedly the authors could have mentioned somewhere in the paper that Fallujah is in Anbar, but it's also true that that is the most obvious conclusion to draw from comparing their discussion with the data charts.)

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.

Are you still treating violent deaths as a large majority of the total here? That would ignore the effect of infant mortality among other problems.

The study is not explicitly an attack on Bush, although many will no doubt be perceive it that way. I think Les Roberts makes it pretty clear that he cares more that some action be taken to minimize further civilian deaths in Iraq than about who does it. In the paper, the authors also make clear that they do not take this study as definitive and want it verified independently (p.7, final ¶). The reason the paper will end up being an indictment of Bush is that he'll ignore it or offer some feeble excuse to explain it away instead of using it as an opportunity to re-evaluate the strategies and tactics employed by our troops in Iraq. I would prefer to be wrong about this, but Bush's previous reactions to such things don't offer much hope.

Plus his supporters will play right into this as you have done here with an assessment that takes this sort of response by Bush for granted. Bush doesn't need you spinning for him—he's doing quite well enough on his own destroying the public discourse on scientific knowledge without people who ought to know better helping him out. You know as well as I do that empirical findings can be surprising, and I hope you're not deluded enough to think that anyone wants these results to be true.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

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.

In light of the claim that some 650,000 Iraqis are missing,
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,251-2399950,00.html
this thread came to mind.

Back then, when I first heard this at the war's end, I kept wondering how many people might have been buried by bunker busters where the bodies will never be found.

 

[russ_watters]

Well, it is unlikely that many civilians were buried by bunker-busters, but it is entirely likely that a hundred thousand or more troops were, for all intents and purposes, vaporized by those and other weapons. From the rumors I heard, the new guided cluster-bombs were particularly effective and entire divisions were simply immolated.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Given today's technology, I never understood how we could lose some 360K to 480K troops. The best explanation at time was that they simply removed their uniforms and blended in with civilians.

 

[ptabor]

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.

No, you are incorrect. We went to war because Saddam was supposedly attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

When weapons turned out to be scarce, the reasoning changed to the liberation of the iraqi people.

At no point did GW state the Iraq was responsible for 9/11. People inferred this relationship - ie the thought that Saddam was responsible for 9/11. He did state that the Saddam regime had provided support for al-qaeda, and that Saddam met with Bin Laden. While the intelligence behind this statement may be questionable, merely stating they met does not imply a connection between saddam and 9/11.

Also, granted I haven't read everyone's replies yet, but I haven't seen anyone bring up the amount of people that died at Saddam's hand. Certainly it's a travesty that people are dying as a result of our invasion, but how many of these people would have died anyway?

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Oh please, Bush [and Cheney] went out of his way to make the claim that by attacking Iraq we are fighting "the terrorists".

And first we were going after WMDs, then the terrorists, then we were "freeing the Iraqi people", and now, since 3 out of 5 Iraqi's approve of killing Americans, we are just trying to prevent our invasion from starting WWIII.

 

[ptabor]

Ivan, you are correct - Bush did use such rhetoric. This is not, however, a clear statement of a connection between Iraq and 9/11. It is ambiguous (puposely no doubt) and vague. Many people interpreted it as a connection b/t saddam and bin laden, but this is not what it actually states.

There are plenty of things to criticize Bush for, we don't need to make any up.

Trying to prevent the start of WW3? It's already begun. 9/11 set in motion a course of events that cannot be stopped. The damage has been done - no president, whether democrat or republican, is going to be able to stem the tide now.

 

[edward]

Ivan, you are correct - Bush did use such rhetoric. This is not, however, a clear statement of a connection between Iraq and 9/11. It is ambiguous (puposely no doubt) and vague. Many people interpreted it as a connection b/t saddam and bin laden, but this is not what it actually states.

Yet the connection of terrorism to Iraq was the exact result of the Administrations endlessly repeating: "terrorists are going to kill Americans"
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this was a psyops on the American people. It continues to this day.

There are plenty of things to criticize Bush for, we don't need to make any up.

Most of what was promoted by the Administration to bring about the invasion of Iraq was made up.

Trying to prevent the start of WW3? It's already begun. 9/11 set in motion a course of events that cannot be stopped. The damage has been done - no president, whether democrat or republican, is going to be able to stem the tide now.

Damage was done, but damage can be repaired. Nothing irreversable has happened. We either stem the tide now or never. It might help if Bush would quit fanning the flames by making constant statements that are keeping the American people in a state of fear.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

If we had a foreign policy and not a just "shock and awe", it would help.

Bush wanted war, so that's what we got.