1.7 million Iraqis now refugees -- should the U.S. admit more than 500 of them?

[Der_Trihs]

@Aquila Be

Cluster bombs and napalm are not being used by coalition forces in Iraq.

As Spiny Norman pointed, they were used.

@Aquila Be

If you’re going to lump in every death due to violence, including old fashioned criminal violence, or disease, or accident, or exposure and attribute the cause to the occcupation forces, then you might as well throw in all Iraqi deaths caused by old age.

False analogy. If the deaths in question likely would not have happened without our invasion, they count. The Iraqis are not magically aging because of us. They are being killed due to the lawlessness, chaos, and infrastructure destruction we have inflicted upon Iraq.

[Horza]

In the Johns Hopkins Univerity study (it was published in the Lancet, but the study itself comes from one of the most prestigious Universities in the United States) the authors point out that ‘passive surveillance’ (i.e. counts of reported deaths, a la the Iraq Body Count) frequently underestimate the death tolls in civil conflicts, often by a factor of five or higher (with the exception of Kosovo). Given that Iraqi is in the grips of a heinous civil war, it’s almost certain that public Health Ministry figures are an undercount.

[Aquila_Be]

655,000 Iraqi dead due to the occupation is an even more impossible figure. That death rate of 600 per day would exceed, or at least match, the most active of many theatres of WWII. And why isn’t a total given for the wounded? If the standard death/injured ratio of 1:3 applied here that should result in an additional 2,000,000 wounded Iraqis.

Iraq’s most violent year to date has been 2006. Here are quotes from a Washington Post article that uses a set of more plausible figures than the fantastical figures conjured up by the Johns Hopkins Team and used by Lancet.

WaPo Link

In the first six months of last year, 5,640 Iraqi civilians and police officers were killed, but that number more than tripled to 17,310 in the latter half of the year, according to data provided by a Health Ministry official with direct knowledge of the statistics. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information, said those numbers remained incomplete, suggesting the final tally of violent deaths could be higher.

So they could be a bit higher than that. The UN comes up with a slightly higher figure for 2006:

The United Nations, in a November report, estimated that more than 28,000 Iraqi civilians had died violently in the first 10 months of 2006, but that count was disputed by the government. The differences in the numbers could not be reconciled.

That’s not to say that there is a definitive answer, the article covers the debate and uncertainty involved in making these estimates. However, some of the figures used, such as the supposedly 655,000 dead. are so over the top implausible that they can safely be dismissed as propaganda.

That is not to say that such an obviously phoney figure won’t eventually end up in a history book as a “fact”. Historians as a class are notoriously gullible and innumerate, after all.

[Nancarrow]

@Aquila Be

That’s not to say that there is a definitive answer, the article covers the debate and uncertainty involved in making these estimates. However, some of the figures used, such as the supposedly 655,000 dead. are so over the top implausible that they can safely be dismissed as propaganda.

That is not to say that such an obviously phoney figure won’t eventually end up in a history book as a “fact”. Historians as a class are notoriously gullible and innumerate, after all.

Heh, you almost had me going for a moment. Nice parody of the argument from incredulity there.

[BrainGlutton]

@Aquila Be

655,000 Iraqi dead due to the occupation is an even more impossible figure.

Time for a new thread.

[BrainGlutton]

@FRDE

A few months ago, I heard on the BBC World Service, about Iraqi girls turning up with suitcases in the Green Zone, having a quick marriage service and being whisked off to the airport. It sounded like a common thing.

Probably there is rather a lot of Iraqi GI brides in the USA.

Won’t help much. We only have about 140,000 troops there, many are female or married, and if every single one of the single males took home a war bride – and every single female took home a war groom – that would be only a drop in the bucket WRT the refugee problem.

[Aquila_Be]

@Nancarrow

Heh, you almost had me going for a moment. Nice parody of the argument from incredulity there.

You are free to choose every single component of your belief system.

[BrainGlutton]

@Aquila Be

You are free to choose every single component of your belief system.

You are free to continue the body-count debate in the other thread I started just for that purpose, and everybody please stop hijacking this one, which is about . . . oh, yeah. Refugees. That’s it. Related, but separate, topic.

[BrainGlutton]

According to this article, there are now 3.5 million Iraqi refugees – 1.5 million displaced within Iraq and 2 million outside its borders.

Too late to edit the thread title, Mods?

Indeed, those working as interpreters for the US and British armies and for foreign journalists–not to mention those hired by US companies doing reconstruction and those working in the Green Zone–have been targeted by various insurgent groups. Their lives will be exponentially imperiled once US forces pull out.

“In Iraq there’s no love lost between American soldiers and the locals,” notes Quang X. Pham, author of A Sense of Duty, who fought in the first Persian Gulf War. “Iraqi refugees, unlike Vietnamese refugees, have no champion like President Gerald Ford, and they will find much opposition to their immigration to the United States due to fallout from 9-11 and specifically, the Patriot Act.”

While Congress debated whether to let in Vietnamese refugees in 1975–Sen. George McGovern said it was better for “Vietnamese to stay in Vietnam,” and Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) thought that “barmaids, prostitutes and criminals” should be screened out–President Ford threw his support behind the refugees.

Such an act today, from a President who still speaks of the war in Iraq as winnable, is unimaginable. How could President Bush accept Iraqi refugees when only last year he described post-invasion Iraq as a nation of “freedom” and “democracy”?

On the ground in Iraq, of course, the situation is dire. “The current exodus is the largest long-term population movement in the Middle East since the displacement of Palestinians following the creation of Israel in 1948,” according to the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

[BrainGlutton]

It’s gotten worse:

Let’s start with the numbers, inadequate as they are. The latest UN figures concerning the refugee crisis in Iraq indicate that between 1-1.2 million Iraqis have fled across the border into Syria; about 750,000 have crossed into Jordan (increasing its modest population of 5.5 million by 14%); at least another 150,000 have made it to Lebanon; over 150,000 have emigrated to Egypt; and – these figures are the trickiest of all – over 1.9 million are now estimated to have been internally displaced by civil war and sectarian cleansing within Iraq.

These numbers are staggering in a population estimated in the pre-invasion years at only 26 million. At a bare minimum, in other words, at least one out of every seven Iraqis has had to flee his or her home due to the violence and chaos set off by the Bush administration’s invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Yet, as even the UN officials on the scene admit, these are undoubtedly low-end estimates. “We rely heavily on the official numbers given to us by the Syrian government concerning the Iraqi refugees coming here,” Sybella Wilkes, the regional public information officer for the UNHCR told me, while we talked recently at the main refugee processing center in Douma, a city on the outskirts of the Syrian capital. Even the high-end UNHCR estimate of 1.2 million Iraqi refugees in Syria (a country of only 17 million people) was, she told me, probably too low.

According to Wilkes, the Syrian government, using tallies taken from its southern border posts, privately estimates the number to be closer to 1.4-1.5 million Iraqis in Syria. The UNHCR operation here, desperately under-funded and short of staff, does not have people on the border tallying numbers and has no way to check on the real magnitude of the disaster underway.