I don’t get that argument about ‘fault.’ It’s simply a matter of the reporting in the English-speaking international press being the view from 40,000 feet. You can’t expect them to see more than a fraction of what’s happening on the ground.
We also don’t hear about many deaths, one by one, that happen all over Iraq. Someone gets kidnapped, the family can’t meet the ransom, and the body never turns up. Reported in the Sydney Morning Herald? Not unless they’re doing a feature on kidnappings in Iraq.
If you go somewhere you really shouldn’t be, and monkey around with things that you don’t know how they work, you’re responsible for the disasters that result, even if you had no idea of what the downstream consequences might be.
I don’t know what the real numbers in Iraq may be, but I just popped in to say that by way of comparison the US Civil War resulted in 618,000 dead, including military and civilian deaths, and in some ways the US is still healing the wounds from that conflict. Could Iraq be approaching that number?
Would you happen to know how many of those refugees the US has taken in? If you don’t I believe I can find a cite. There was a discussion on that very topic on CNN either last night or Saturday.
So are you saying that the whole country of Iraq is experiencing the same violence as Baghdad?
According to the Iraq Study Group, “Four of Iraq’s 18 provinces are highly insecure – Baghdad, Anbar, Diyala, and Salah ad Din. These provinces account for about 40 percent of Iraq’s population… The most stable parts of the country are the three provinces of the Kurdish north and parts of the Shia south.”
So, tell me how you can extrapolate the violence in Baghdad to the whole country.
If people with medical conditions that would’ve been able to seek treatment under Saddam are now dying because that treatment is no longer availble because of the violence and scarce resourses why should they be counted as causalties of war?
Based on my reading of the news over time, it certainly appears that, aside from Kurdistan, the disparity isn’t enormous - it just gets into the news more in Baghdad and Anbar, where we have the most troops.
And my observation would be that the ISG softpedalled a lot of stuff to make it palatable to Bush, even though they were unsuccessful. No parts of the country south of Kurdistan are stable, AFAICT from reading the news.
Also, I wasn’t extrapolating - I was noting the absence of a contradiction. Besides, the fact that I was talking about 600K (“I think I’ll stick with the earlier point estimate of 600K for now”) and you attributed the OP’s million to me, didn’t exactly inspire me to get into details with you.
Then you haven’t been keeping up with events there. The vast majority of the violence in Iraq is in and around Baghdad. There are vast areas of Iraq (say, the Kurdish northern areas) that don’t have much violence at all in fact. Going out on a limb here, I’d have to say that over half of all the violence in Iraq is in and around Baghdad…and I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m being very conservative (i.e. a hell of a lot more than half of the violence is happening around Baghdad). Even if we double that figure Ravenman tossed out we wouldn’t get 15k casualties a month…and I bet that doubling that figure for casualties in Baghdad would be an exaggeration anyway.
These blown out figures just keep getting more and more ridiculous. First its hundreds of thousand (the touted 300k or 600k figures)…now a million? Why not just go whole hog and state that its 10 million? Or 20? How about 28 millions (I seem to recall that was one estimate about how many Iraqi’s were actually there)? Say everyone in Iraq is dead and then…what? You win?
Why do we have to go to these ridiculous lengths? Isn’t 30k horrible enough? 50k? 80k? Isn’t 5k bad? Does the body count have to reach some number before the invasion was a bad idea…or something? If the invasion was bad or wrong, then 1 death is horrible. If the invasion was a good idea or the right thing to do then the number of casualties doesn’t matter…see WWII. The debate on whether it was a good idea or not should stand on its own…not on the numbers of people who have died. And taking everyone who died of a heart attack or theoretical pre-war death rates verse post-war are fairly meaningless IMHO. No one ever used that methodology to calculate civilian deaths in WWI, WWII, Korea or Vietnam to arrive at the generally accepted death tolls for civilians in those wars…at least not as far as I’m aware.
A million civilians died in Vietnam during the course of the war IIRC…and that was with the US literally bombing the shit out of North Vietnam CITIES and infrastructure (power plants, factories, even agricultural targets)…and you are going to try and tell me that in less than 1/4 of the time and without that kind of massive strategic bombardment that the same number of Iraqi civilians has died?? And you expect to be BELIEVED?? :dubious:
It’s not really a question of fault. You’ll hear if a bomb kills 15 people, and once in a while you hear that 30 tortured bodies were found in a ditch. I’m just saying that less high-profile killings are not as likely to be reported to us at home, and I don’t know what proportion of deaths might be occurring that way.
Last week’s issue of Newsweek has a very sad article writen by an Iraqi-American woman whose middle-class Iraqi relatives have been torn apart by the civil war in Iraq. Some have escaped to Jordan, while others are stuck in their little ethnic enclave in Baghdad, afraid to leave their homes. We have fucked up that country soooo bad.
According to the Newswek article I just mentioned, we have taken a grand total of 466 Iraqi exiles so far. No, that number is not a typo. The “good” news is that we are raising the quota to 7,000. That should fix things. :rolleyes:
I don’t know what to make of that poll, to be honest, but I think it’s very, very interesting that two polls published on the same day show almost exactly opposite viewpoints.
In any case, it’s not the number of deaths that is the point.
The point should be that it was not the Iraqi people’s choice to go to war or to destabilize their current regime. Had it been their decision one might say, “Well; it’s a terrible price, but they decided to pay it.” Sorta like the US’s War of Independence.
That Iraq War was foisted upon them by an outside agency. All war imposes unfair suffering and death upon those who might otherwise choose not to give their lives for a cause. A bare minimum of international decency requires outside nations to be absolutely certain their assistance in establishing alternate regimes is supported by the broad population of the assisted country.
That’s why it is such a farce for GWB to have changed the justification for invading Iraq from WMD to establishing a stable democracy in the Middle East.
Please excuse and ignore the rant. I realize it hijacks the thrust of the OP and is more properly discussed in other threads. Had to get it out so I could get on with my day.
Yeah, but I wasn’t addressing you directly in that post. If you must insist that all this discussion revolve around your posts, then I will point out that the 600,000 death study found that the death rate between June 2005 and June 2006 was nearly 20 deaths per 1,000 population. Cite. That’s about 35,000 deaths per month. Again comparing to the Iraqi Health Ministry’s figures, that would mean that reported deaths in Baghdad account for about 8 percent of the estimated monthly casualty total.
If anything, that only raises more questions about who is getting something really wrong here. And given your admission that roughly 5 million Kurds – heck, let’s just say 3 million Kurds – that means the discrepancy between the survey and the reported deaths are even greater.
Finally, the allegation that violence is more or less equal through most of Iraq just doesn’t seem to hold up. The number of police deaths by province is listed at theIraq Index, and it runs the gamut. Wasit Province has half a million people south of Baghdad and only 19 police casualties. Basra has 2.6 million people and 63 police killed. Baghdad, meanwhile, has 715 police officers killed. One could presume that police deaths would be fairly well tracked, and at least have some (but not perfect) correlation with the level of violence overall. By that measure, the violence just doesn’t appear to be uniform all over Iraq (excepting the north, as you have said.)
Ravenmen, the following article should put away some of your doubts, or, at the very least, place them in proper perspective. Fact is – and not what your Government or press tell you – all of Iraq, except for the already mentioned Kurd North, is a killing field. Sadly, said fact goes largely unreported for the very reasons expressed below:
Thus to say that the situation in Iraq is rather grim would be a vast understatement. A ship without a rudder running on rivers of blood is more like it.