I suggest you read Les Roberts’ response again. It doesn’t seem to have gotten through the first time.
And hell yes, you should leave ASAP. You have NO business being in the middle of a civil war that has NOTHING to do with your own nation – other than the fact that you lit the fire of course. Iraq for the Iraqis to do as they wish.
Wildfire**MM…are you contending that today was an unusually quite day then? Even if we take your figures at face value, and even if we count them all as Iraq civilians killed, I am getting a figure of somewhere between 100-200 killed based on your post. Thats a lot, no doubt. However, I don’t think people have a firm grasp on how many people a million really is.
Lets say that we take the 200 figure. Multiply that by 365 days in a year and you get…73,000 dead a year. Times 4 years…292,000 killed. Not even close to a million. To get a million we’d need something like 600+ dieing a day for 4 years. As I said in an earlier post, thats a rate of death more than the civilians in North Vietnam incurred per year…and that was with the US actively attacking their cities and factories using carpet bombing and area effect attacks!
Certainly the level of violence is rising. Certainly a lot of Iraqi civilians have died. But the generally accepted figures range from 40-50k to maybe 100k…at least that I’ve seen. Could folks like IBC be off? Certainly…I wouldn’t be surprised if they WERE off. Even they admit that. They could be off by 5%…maybe by 50%! But I’m a bit skeptical that they are off by over 1000%…over an order of magnitude off? Civilian death rates more than North Vietnam incurred even though they were being directly attacked? :dubious:
-XT
So building up an Iraqi Government and security forces to contain this ‘civil war’ which even the Iraqi public deny that is going on, isn’t the best way in which to limit the violence?
Here’s the two points of his I simply don’t understand:
If 92% of the sampled deaths have some sort of official documentation, it seems the Iraq bureaucracy is at least doing a reasonable job of doing some sort of tracking of the numbers. But then he goes on to say…
I’d be very interested to know whether in Bosnia the bureaucracy did a similar job of issuing certifications for deaths. If in Bosnia the government only recorded 30% of deaths, that seems very understandable why the surveyed numbers of deaths were so much higher than the reported number.
But my main point here is that I’m just not following how the study reporters can simultaneously say that the deaths reported in their survey were documented, but that the death rate is an order of magnitude greater than what the Iraqi bureaucracy is able to report.
Furthermore, in Bosnia, the estimated number of deaths was in the neighborhood of 100,000, about half of which were civilians. Amazingly, aerial surveillance was able to provide a lot of insights onto the extent of the violence. But if in Iraq we’re talking about four to six (or maybe even 10) times that number of killed, why does there not appear to be the same sort of corroborating evidence?
Finally, I do not know enough to challenge the methodology of the study, but even the soundest methodology does not guarantee precise results.
Disclaimer: I am not backing the OP’s vague assertion of 1,000,000 casualties, but rather disputing those that insist in trying to discredit The Lancet Report, which I believe is the most accurate (within its stated margin of difference) of all mortality records. Why? Because as quoted upthread their methodology has been tried an true on a number of prior catastrophes and even used by the very US Gov as a reputable cite. Obviously, the results are not to their liking this time around thus no wonder their are doing their best (worst) to discredit the very source they used in the past. The stench of hypocrisy permeates right through my monitor.
For xt. Perhaps you’ll find satisfactory answers to your queries here:
Lancet author answers your questions
To Ryan,
Your opinion is rather inconsequential from now on as the vast majority of your country men and women not only agree with me but have finally imposed their will on Bush’s lackey, thus your rather delusional PM, Blair The Pooch, has had no choice but to finally order a retreat from were he never should have sent your troops in the first place.
As for what happens afterwards, I am no Mrs Cleo, but as I’ve said time after time after time, it’ll be up to the Iraqis to resolve their differences. Sure, it could be bloody, but then again, it might not.
Meanwhile, I also think your continued presence there is stoking the fire, not helping to quell it. Peace, if its to come to Iraq in the near future, must be settled politically and through negotiations, And if that means partitioning the country along ethnic lines, so be it.
Point in fact, they seem to be thinking along the same lines:
Iraq ‘talking to militant groups’
So there you have it. These people are anything but dumb – so you can let go of your “White Man’s Burden.”
Like I said, Iraq for the Iraqis to do as they wish.
Ravenman, just saw your latest post, not trying to ignore your points, just pressed for time.
Best that I can answer is that the fact someone can produce a death certificate – which can be issued any Doctor, as it is simply a standard form – does NOT mean said certificate goes on record anywhere else (meaning Governmental offices) beyond the graveyard…and that’s if they have a record-keeping office.
I know this because my Mother died last year, and in a completely peaceful, albeit third-world nation such as this one (Dom Rep), I got the death certificate from her bedside Doctor at home…which was the only think the funeral parlour asked for. When we got to the cemetery, the offices were already closed, thus she was buried without going through the record-keeping department (mind you, this was at the “best” cemetery here). I was simply told by some small-time bureaucrat that I’d have to go within the next few days to some other Gov department to have the certificate placed on the record and then go back to the cemetery’s record-keeping office.
I did as told. But I could just as well have buried my Mother and left it at that. Question, had I done so, who’d know that she’d died other than myself and the rest of her surviving family? And remember, I had a death certificate all along which I could produce if anyone came knocking at my door
Does my explanation make any sense in the context of your question? Trust that it does.
I’ve read it before, thanks. In fact, I read the actual study when we debated this a few months ago. And btw, he didn’t answer MY questions very well…just for the record. He answered the softball questions. For instance, he doesn’t explain how its possible that more Iraqi’s are dieing faster than North Vietnamese did during the war…when America was actively bombing cities, factories and infrastructure. I think he kind of waves this away with this:
Uhuh. However, the BODIES were there to be seen in the above example, which is how they knew they were under reported…where are the bodies in Iraq? Buried under the rubble only goes so far when we are talking about this many bodies.
Too me, while Lancet is interesting, it is comparing apples to oranges and isn’t very useful in looking at those actual killed (or comparing it to the official figures from Iraq or by folks like IBC)…its looking at probability statistics and comparing pre-war death rates to (theoretical) post-war death rates. In addition, they are stretching the definition of what is a war death to those who died of indirect causes, instead of those directly killed due to the war…which is how such things have always been calculated in the past for conflicts.
To me, accepting this at face value is almost a faith based response. We all know (or we all SHOULD know) that Lancet is calculating in a different way, that their results are giving a different answer because they are asking a different question, and that their results MEAN something different too…yet they are being tossed around and compared to previous conflicts (or to the official tallies)as if they are calculated in the same fashion…and as though the official tallies or places like IBC are hiding something for political reasons or something (as I believe you implied in an earlier post).
But its apples to oranges, as I said. The interesting thing is WHY these figures picked up by the more rabid anti-war crowd. Because the impact of 600,000 thousand (or a million, or whatever) is much greater on an uninformed public who doesn’t realize exactly what Lancet is calculating, or why there is a disparity in the official figures (or the official figures for past conflicts)…isn’t it Red?
So, don’t accuse ME of using the IBC figures ‘convinentely’ (I was highly insulted by this…just for the record), when you are using voodoo figures of your own in such a fashion. Since most of the war dead figures are at least an order of magnitude different than Lancet, the easy answer is to just toss out the anomoly. This would be wrong however, as Lancet is calculating a different thing than the others…thus the different result.
While I have no doubt that Lancet’s figures are fuzzy and probably have a fairly high plus or minus, I also don’t think that for what they are actually calculating they are far wrong…its just that they aren’t calculating the same thing as the others.
-XT
I agree. Something closer to 50 to 75 a day for all of Iraq might be a better number. That results in 75000-110000 total.
What I want to know is why I see headlines every other day like “Iraqis Beginning to Fear for Their Safety” and “US Plans to Prevent Impending Sectarian Violence.”
Headline writers, it’s already happening. No matter how conservative you are, no matter how much you want to see any and all bad things in Iraq as “possible future events,” the bad things have been happening for a long time, are happening right now, and will go on happening, regardless of your preferred verb tense.
Sailboat
Erm, British troops are remaining in Basra, they’re only being cut down because they amount needed isn’t required anymore, since the Iraqi Army and Police forces will be patrolling and securing Basra anyway. It’s a catch-22, the minute I say there is success in training and equipping Iraqi security forces who can handle most of the security problems in Basra, is the minute you’ll declare a ‘unanimous retreat’ British forces will still patrol the Iraqi border, provide logistical assistance to Iraqi forces, not to mention training in that region and at Sandhurst in the UK.
If he really was Bushes ‘poodle’ he’d be going at length to keep British forces in Basra regardless, in conjunction with his ‘surge’ in Baghdad, but the fact is whilst you’re happy to ignore the development and training of the Iraqi forces, how are you ever going to come to the conclusion that they’ll ever be able to take over themselves without it being seen as a retreat.
Which is what the British Generals have been saying since day one of the fall of Saddams regime, of course it will be up to the Iraqi forces, but there is a time and situation where you can’t ‘old them by the hand’ anymore, they’ve gotta do it themselves. So why this is translated as ‘defeat’ is anyones guess.
Which won’t happen since the majority of Iraqis don’t want a seperation of their country into arbitrary states. Besides, most of the British zone in Iraqi is homogenous in religion and culture, so the fighting there is more of a fight for power, corruption and influence, which makes it markedly different and a lot less violent than in Baghdad.
Every government from the British themselves have spoke to terrorists to quell the violence, but if the pleads fall on deaf ears, then it’s up to us to allow those Iraqis who see a future democratic state to be as strong as they can to withstand such attacks. It does no use if we withdraw and the entire country implodes and collapses, does it?
That makes a lot of sense in the context of whether a particular person died. But the question isn’t whether this or that Iraqi has been killed, it is how many. Were we to ask a coroner who had issued, but not recorded, some number of death certificates how many certificates he issued in a day, week, or month, it stands to reason he could at least give a ballpark figure of how many certificates were issued. It is like if someone asked me how many phone calls I make on a given day, I don’t record the number, but surely I know if I’ve made around 25 phone calls or if I’ve made 250 phone calls.
As it is now, the Iraqi Ministry of Health is issuing numbers about how many they have counted have been killed, at the very least in Baghdad, and those numbers are consistently one-fifth what the survey finds. One would think that if five times more certificates are being issued than are being reported, someone in the Iraqi bureaucracy should have said something by now?
(Edited to clean up sloppy grammar)
This is typical of a “quiet” day in Iraq:
Friday: 5 GIs, 63 Iraqis Killed; 42 Iraqis Wounded
And with that, I’ll bow out of this discussion. I don’t know what else to tell you.
And apologies to you, xt, if you felt offended by anything I wrote. I was trying to be as impersonal as possible under the circumstances surrounding the discussion.
As I did in response to Wilds post up thread, work the math yourself then. Even if we double that figure we are far from 1 million…or 600,000 for that matter. Even if you triple the figure and say that this is representative of the entire time we’ve been in Iraq, rather than since the insurgency got really rolling. And we all know that things are heating up, not at a steady state.
The thing is…it maybe be, based on how things seem to be going tits up, that one day we will hit or even surpass what you are getting at Red…and thats a fucking scary thought if ever there was one.
No worries Red…I know you by now. Just know…the numbers aren’t ‘convinent’ for me, nor am I happy with them at all. You implied that I’m happy or something…or that the figures I generally accept are off the chart. The reality is that the figures I generally accept are the norm…and its going to take some pretty convincing proofs to shift me toward where you are sitting. Why you think this is unreasonable I have no idea, and I accept that you believe where you are coming from…but I don’t insult you for your stance. Please grant me the same favor in future, if you would. 
(apologies if this post is fairly incoherent and my spelling is worse than usual…I’m barely able to read the screen at this point 
)
-XT
a related issue from The Independent
**British backtrack on Iraq death toll **
By Jill Lawless
Published: 27 March 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2396031.ece
This must also mean that the figure 1.000.000 isn’t such a wild number that many claimes.
What say now, Ravenman? The British Gov itself backs The Lancet Study methodology.
As I said in post 64,
Furthermore, others far more expert than I in these matters are not only defenders of the methodology, but also critics of the findings.
From Wikipedia
And who is Jon Pedersen? According to the article you linked to (“study authors answer your questions” from the BBC), the author of the Johns Hopkins study refers to him as “the highly revered Jon Pedersen.” It appears that Dr. Pedersen used similar methods to produce a study on the health of Iraqis, but the author of the Johns Hopkins study thinks that Dr. Pedersen undercounted casualties.
If Pedersen can use sampling methods and undercount casualties, I’m not quite understanding how one can claim that it is impossible for Dr. Roberts to overcount casualties.
I’m not clear if the British government has now endorsed the conclusion of the study, even if they do not question the methodology. I don’t have problems with the methodology, but I’m not convinced that the conclusions are accurate.
Exactly…I don’t think anyone in this thread (correct me if I’m wrong Red) is saying the methodology is wrong.
-XT
If we assume the population was 25 million and 600,000 civilians have been killed, it’s interesting to see how what that percentage equates to in a population of 300 million (approx. the USA): 600,000 / 25 million x 100 = 2.4%
2.4% of 300 million: the equivalent percentage of US population = 7.2 million deaths.
If 1 million Iraq’s have died, the equivalent percentage of US population = 12 million deaths.
Either way, it’s a chunk of life.
Iraqi deaths survey ‘was robust’
Hmm…let see here:
Therefore, I am aligning myself to a “powerful and/or sound” study. And to that you counter with…skepticism?
Bloody good retort, mate…as I believe the Brits themselves would say.
:dubious:
The dead are not all the damage we have caused. A couple million have fled. They are the educated and wealthier. If we ever leave how do they put it back together. The army is disbanded ,cops gone. middleclass and wealthy gone,homes destroyed ,nonworking infrastructure. What a mess we made of it.