[QUOTE=Aquila Be]
Cluster bombs and napalm are not being used by coalition forces in Iraq.
[/quote]
As Spiny Norman pointed, they were used.
[QUOTE=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.
[/quote]
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.
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.
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.
So they could be a bit higher than that. The UN comes up with a slightly higher figure for 2006:
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.
[QUOTE=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.
[/QUOTE]
Heh, you almost had me going for a moment. Nice parody of the argument from incredulity there.
[QUOTE=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.
[/QUOTE]
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.
[QUOTE=Aquila Be]
You are free to choose every single component of your belief system.
[/QUOTE]
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.
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?
[quote=]
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.
[/quote]
