100,000 Iraqi Civilians have died in current war

[Happy Monkey]

OnyxCougar would be happy to oblige you on that account if the Evolution vs Creationism thread weren't so polluted at the moment.

[Schrodinger's Cat]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

OnyxCougar would be happy to oblige you on that account if the Evolution vs Creationism thread weren't so polluted at the moment.

That's okay, thanks. It sounds like the round I had with a lady who came into my office one year just after we switched over to daylight savings time and wanted to berate "You physicists" for tinkering with the rotation of the earth and the tilt of its axis. I sent her over to my colleagues in the geography department, and none of them would speak to me for months afterward!

[xoxoxoBruce]

Americans wouldn't believe an Iraqi count; everyone else wouldn't believe a DOD count, and the one scientific study we have of the problem becomes a quarrel of belief systems.

I don't believe any of them. The DOD and Iraqi counts are tainted with agenda.
The "scientific" count was taken with too many restraints that had to be "accommodated" by changing the parameters of the fly.
Peer reviewed? Sure a bunch of statisticians in their respective ivory towers saying, Oh yeah that's the way to do it. Have any of these peers been to iraq? Do them know how difficult it is to get such information or even get to the locations. They agree that + or - damn near 100% is reasonable?

OK, hows this? What difference does it make? It's done and it can't be changed either way. Coulda/shoulda/woulda doesn't help. How about working on getting it done and getting the hell out of there.

[Undertoad]

Jag, regarding what's left outstanding here, when called on for a motive earlier you said "easier to spray a room and shoot anything that moves" but now that we've established that it's (possibly) untargeted air strikes, that motive doesn't apply.

Given that the US *does* have the GPS-guided bombs (and even developed a GPS-guided concrete rock to take out a few specific targets that were surrounded by things they didn't want to destroy). Given that we had the targetting ability to leave the lights on until day 5. Why would the US have used untargetted munitions that would likely hit civilians? Has anyone seen video of something untargetted? Is there a reason to kill civilians? Are there any missing neighborhoods?

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Jag, regarding what's left outstanding here, when called on for a motive earlier you said "easier to spray a room and shoot anything that moves" but now that we've established that it's (possibly) untargeted air strikes, that motive doesn't apply.

Actually, I suspect that both occur. Why would air strikes rule out infantry? They're hardly mutually exclusive.

[Undertoad]

But remember, not according to the study:

Violence accounted for most of the excess deaths and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for most violent deaths.

Just a paragraph before that it says

Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children.

Q.E.D. if they are not throwing around this word "most", we have untargetted coalition air strikes killing mostly woman and children. Is that even possible? I don't think so.

[Schrodinger's Cat]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Q.E.D. if they are not throwing around this word "most", we have untargetted coalition air strikes killing mostly woman and children. Is that even possible? I don't think so.

Happy Monkey is correct - most DOES mean more than half. Since the study is talking about civilian deaths, it stands to reason that the group which comprises the majority of the civilian population (women and children under 12) would account for most civilian deaths.

I don't know that the study calls the air strikes "untargeted." It questions if the air strikes are as precise as has been claimed.

[tw]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Just a paragraph before that it says
Q.E.D. if they are not throwing around this word "most", we have untargetted coalition air strikes killing mostly woman and children. Is that even possible? I don't think so.

A battlefield is a very dangerous place for everyone. In the Liberation of Kuwait, with every attack being carefully coordinated and with aircraft routinely demanding confirmation before they attacked, then most American deaths were due to friendly fire. How can this be, UT asks? Welcome to war. Even your own friends can be a very deadly threat. And this assumes death only from violent action.

Numbers say that as many as 30% of smart munitions have failed to strike their target. This can vary significantly for so many reasons including the targeting aircraft under fire, failure of the targeting munitions, bad weather, etc. Sometimes dumb bombs may be used because the 'smart' electronics may not be available to upgrade that dumb bomb. It is a battlefield. Use what you have. There are so many reasons why even smart munitions miss their targets. Technical reasons. Human failure.

Do you point an unloaded weapon at anyone? No. Absolutely not. Even an unloaded weapon can unexpectedly fire. Why does UT expect smart weapons to be any more reliable? Battlefields are very complex. Again, even friendly fire is a major source of death and destruction. Just one of so many reasons why people - military and civilian - die.

[Happy Monkey]

Most means more than half.

[richlevy]

Dresden Remembered.
It seems to me that incidents like Dresden and Hiroshima underscore how war changed in the 20th century.

Rape and pillage were the marks of war in Europe. Later however, the destruction of towns seemed to lose in favor of occupation. The fascists bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War seemed to bring back into vogue the terrorizing of civlian populations by the military.

Destoying unarmed merchant ships was always a part of war. In theory, any ship carrying military cargo was an agent of war and a fair target. Apply this theory to cities and you get Guernica, Dresden, and Hiroshima. Extend the concept far enough to say that any economic engine of an enemy is a fair target, and you get the World Trade Center.

The extent to which you are willing to risk your own troops to protect a civilian population is a mark of moral superiority and intelligence. Intelligence in that you are willing to pass on a strategy that might result in short term gains in order to retain 'hearts and minds' and win a long term goal. So sending in a ground unit to take out an anti-aircraft gun next to an orphanage instead of bombing from the air is an attempt to 'win the war' and not just the battle.

[Undertoad]

So how many women and children were killed by ground units?

(It seems like Jag, Cat, and HM have three different narratives for how we got here.)

[Schrodinger's Cat]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

So how many women and children were killed by ground units?

(It seems like Jag, Cat, and HM have three different narratives for how we got here.)

Despite widespread Iraqi casualties, household
interview data do not show evidence of widespread
wrongdoing on the part of individual soldiers on the
ground. To the contrary, only three of 61 incidents (5%)
involved coalition soldiers (all reported to be American
by the respondents) killing Iraqis with small arms fire.
In one of the three cases, the 56-year-old man killed
might have been a combatant. In a second case, a
72-year-old man was shot at a checkpoint. In the third,
an armed guard was mistaken for a combatant and shot
during a skirmish. In the latter two cases, American
soldiers apologised to the families of the decedents for
the killings, indicating a clear understanding of the
adverse consequences of their use of force. The
remaining 58 killings (all attributed to US forces by
interviewees) were caused by helicopter gunships,
rockets, or other forms of aerial weaponry.

(That's the problem with discussing this report in fragments - maybe I should have just cut and pasted the entire damn thing in my OP, but I doubt people would have had the patience to read it all)

[xoxoxoBruce]

Early on, right after the tanks rolled through Baghdad, the Where's Raed Blog described how the insurgents(resistance?) would come into the neighborhood and take over a house. After dark they would launch rockets over the city until they were zeroed in on by what he claimed to be US artillery.
Wonder how many were killed by the rockets and the artillery?

[jaguar]

Ok I'm hung over like hell but I'll give this a boot because I won't have time for a few days.

Jag, regarding what's left outstanding here, when called on for a motive earlier you said "easier to spray a room and shoot anything that moves" but now that we've established that it's (possibly) untargeted air strikes, that motive doesn't apply.

Given that the US *does* have the GPS-guided bombs (and even developed a GPS-guided concrete rock to take out a few specific targets that were surrounded by things they didn't want to destroy). Given that we had the targetting ability to leave the lights on until day 5. Why would the US have used untargetted munitions that would likely hit civilians? Has anyone seen video of something untargetted? Is there a reason to kill civilians? Are there any missing neighborhoods?

HM addressed the issue of mutual exclusivity. The second issue is even simpler. You may be able to drop the bomb in the right place but a: That doesn't mean there's Bad Guys(tm) underneath b: Doesn't mean there isn't civvies as well c: doesn't mean the buildings in all directions for half a block aren't rubble as well. Precision airstrikes are only as good as the intel that guides them and we all know how good US human intel is in the middle east.

As for untargetted munitions, they're cheaper, though the whole JDAM thing reduced that a bit. Secondly, I don't remember talking about bombing raids at all so I'm a tad lost on that one. Which count to believe? There's too much chaos on the ground for *anyone* to do an accurate count even if they wanted to. The best you would do is extrapolate from a combination of all sources.

I also don't get *why* this whole untargetted airstrike thing affects anything I said? I don't put too much stick in this whole 100,000 report, any part of it and that has been clear for a while. The fact it's far easier in an urban combat situation to open fire than wait for the other guy to put one though your chest (or turn out to be a old woman) isn't in any way changed by this report.

[Undertoad]

It's all over. It's all over.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programme...ma/4217413.stm

On Thursday, January 27 2005, the Iraqi ministry of health released to the BBC's Panorama programme statistics stating that for the six-month period from 1 July 2004 to 1 January 2005:

* 3,274 people in Iraq were killed and 12, 657 injured in conflict-related violence
* 2,041 of these deaths were the result of military action, in which 8,542 people were injured
* 1,233 deaths were the result of "terrorist" incidents

These figures were based on records from Iraqi public hospitals.
...
Jack Straw said: "In many cases it would be impossible to make a reliably accurate assessment either of the civilian casualties resulting from any particular attacks or of the overall civilian casualties of a conflict. This is particularly true in the conditions that exist in Iraq.

"However, since 5 April 2004 the Iraqi ministry of health has sought to collect casualty data.

"Explaining the procedure, the Iraqi minister of health stated on 29 October: 'Every hospital reports daily the number of civilians (which may include insurgents) who have been killed or injured in terrorist incidents or as a result of military action. All casualties are likely to be taken to hospital in these circumstances except for some insurgents (who may fear arrest) and those with minor injuries. The figures show that between 5 April 2004 and 5 October 2004, 3,853 civilians were killed and 15,517 were injured. I am satisfied that this information is the most reliable available'."

Mr Straw continued: "We share this view. The ministry's figures do not of course cover the whole of the period since military action was taken, but they do include the months of April and August, when casualty figures were particularly high."

I do hope the regulars have the gonads to check in after this post.

I am often wrong. This time I was right. It doesn't matter because we all start with a pretty-much clean slate every time a new thread starts.

Except for tw. The Iraqi Civvy Body Count now becomes his official aluminum tube albatross. How, tw, could you have BEEN so UTTERLY UTTERLY wrong? How could you write paragraph after paragraph backing information that was this bad? I await your self-analysis and the changes you will make in the future. And most importantly I await your apology for being a complete and total ASS through this whole discussion.

Christ on a fuckin' stick, it covered the same time frame and the actual number was even outside of the study's incredible margin of sampling error!