100,000 women/children killed in Iraq

Pretty tough American soldiers, killing women and kids/babies!! I AM impressed with US military strength. Aren't y'all just so durn proud?

Does C.I. have a soulmate in Englishmajor? Seems that both are deluded.

There are quite a few delusional folk out there...

http://www.iraqbodycount.net/

Seems to be a difference in opinion.

That's right. When will you delusional people understand that they were not killed - they were liberated.

Tell me the large war in which non-combatants have not been killed. The difference is that we do it by accident, while the insurgents often target women and children as the primary, intended targets. You have not succeeded in making any meaningful point by alerting us to things that always happen in war.

"Tell me the large war in which non-combatants have not been killed. The difference is that we do it by accident, while the insurgents often target women and children as the primary, intended targets. You have not succeeded in making any meaningful point by alerting us to things that always happen in war. "

When you initiate a war with a country beginning with an offensive called "Shock and Awe" and drop bombs on civillians, you are not doing it accidentally. You know full well that you are making a devastating attack on civillians. Even if you lie to your public calling it a "liberation."

False. "Shock and Awe" involved shocking and awing the enemy soldiers. The US policy in Iraq or Afghanistan has never been to attack non-combatants. That's what the other side does. Now you are simply lying. It's meaningless to criticize similarities to every other war.

You seem to think we did indescriminate bombing like WW2 in Iraq. That is not the case anymore. We use smart technology that allows precision strikes on infrastructure and military targets. Were it not for Saddam placing military targets within civilian boundaries collateral damage would be greatly reduced.

You go to war to win with the understanding civilian casualties, while unfortunate, will happen. The phrase "war is hell" exists for a reason.

I think they should turn back the hands of time and fight like it was the 1700's again. Line up all willing participants in a battlefield, and let the war of attrition begin, knocking them down line by line, one by one.
That way, impersonal terms like "collateral damge", and "war is hell (for those not fighting the war)" can be banshed from the dialogues about the war.
Those who die, have chosen to do so.

I would love to line up with the cowardly insurgents. They kill just to kill. I think it would be nice for them to stand toe-to-toe. Insurgents know they would lose and they wouldn't get the media attention. I don't see to many people expressing their displeasure when a homicide bomber kills people at a wedding. But let there be one person who is a victim of accidental colatoral damage and people go off the deep end.
Maybe the insurgents can go back to their own countries and kill off their own people.
Whaqt scares me is that most of these countries that have had homicide bombers in them for generations do nothing to try and stop them.

Re: 100,000 women/children killed in Iraq

Well, no, they weren't killed by coalition forces. At most, the study appears to conclude that the 100,000 women and children died as a result of coalition force activities. But even that conclusion looks dubious.


Only if one is confident that the pre-invasion and post-invasion mortality statistics are comparable and accurate.


I don't see that at all.


I'll assume that the study was conducted with scrupulous regard for statistical methods, but I somehow doubt that is possible in a country as chaotic as Iraq.


So the method for obtaining the pre-invasion mortality rate is not the same as the method for obtaining the post-invasion rate. That alone leads me to question the results.


That's saying two different things. If the mortality rate is higher than would otherwise be expected, then that is infering a causal connection between an event (i.e. the invasion) and a subsequent event (i.e. increased mortality). That is at least an arguable connection, but it strikes me as rather simplistic to ascribe almost the entire increase to the activities of coalition forces. The inference of a causal connection, however, is not the same thing as the survey responses indicating actual causes of mortality. I'm not sure how the survey squared these two distinct methods of determining responsibility for the excess deaths, but mixing the two doesn't fill me with confidence that the researchers got their conclusions right.


Well, if one is relying on random sampling techniques and has a large enough sample to begin with, one shouldn't be excluding significant populations because of "unrepresentativeness."


And this illustrates the potential problems with the two different methods of estimating mortality. The first method uses a "but for" approach to determining if deaths are "caused" by coalition forces: i.e. but for the invasion, would these excess deaths have occurred? Car bombing victims no doubt should be included in mortality statistics, and a good case can be made that there wouldn't be any car bombings but for the presence of coalition troops, but to say that those deaths were caused by coalition troops is a rather large logical leap.

Likewise, if one is relying on survey responses, it is not clear how the victims of car bombings can be attributed to coalition activity (except by using a "but for" analysis). Furthermore, it seems implausible that, if 84% of the excess deaths were caused by coalition forces, that the other 16% represent the sum total of deaths attributable to all other causes, including insurgent activity -- the interruption of health, water, and electric services in major urban areas together should probably account for more than 16% of the excess deaths. Indeed, if a country suffered the kinds of massive service interruptions as Iraq has witnessed without an invasion and saw its mortality rate only rise by a small fraction*, that would be nearly miraculous.

My guess is that the survey lumped all violent deaths into the 84% of excess deaths attributable to coaltion forces, including such deaths as those caused by insurgent activities. That, I would argue, is confusing at best and deceptive at worst.


*The fraction would be the difference between the pre-invasion and post-invasion mortality rates multiplied by .16.

You can play the statistics game all you want. Here's another article from the Washington Post, also quoting the Lancet, a very well respected MD magazine. That the US will not admit to so many deaths is not surprising. That they don't even care is less so. Get your calculator out and start downplaying the facts, if you can:

100,000 Civilian Deaths Estimated in Iraq

By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 29, 2004; Page A16

One of the first attempts to independently estimate the loss of civilian life from the Iraqi war has concluded that at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians may have died because of the U.S. invasion.

The analysis, an extrapolation based on a relatively small number of documented deaths, indicated that many of the excess deaths have occurred due to aerial attacks by coalition forces, with women and children being frequent victims, wrote the international team of public health researchers making the calculations.

• Death Rates in Iraq: A survey published in the journal Lancet said death rates rose significantly after the U.S.-led invasion.

Pentagon officials say they do not keep tallies of civilian casua
lties, and a spokesman said yesterday there is no way to validate estimates by others. The spokesman said that the past 18 months of fighting in Iraq have been "prosecuted in the most precise fashion of any conflict in the history of modern warfare," and that "the loss of any innocent lives is a tragedy, something that Iraqi security forces and the multinational force painstakingly work to avoid."

Previous independent estimates of civilian deaths in Iraq were far lower, never exceeding 16,000. Other experts immediately challenged the new estimate, saying the small number of documented deaths upon which it was based make the conclusions suspect.

"The methods that they used are certainly prone to inflation due to overcounting," said Marc E. Garlasco, senior military analyst for Human Rights Watch, which investigated the number of civilian deaths that occurred during the invasion. "These numbers seem to be inflated."

The estimate is based on a September door-to-door survey of 988 Iraqi households -- containing 7,868 people in 33 neighborhoods -- selected to provide a representative sampling. Two survey teams gathered detailed information about the date, cause and circumstances of any deaths in the 14.6 months before the invasion and the 17.8 months after it, documenting the fatalities with death certificates in most cases.

The project was designed by Les Roberts and Gilbert M. Burnham of the Center for International Emergency, Disaster and Refugee Studies at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore; Richard Garfield of Columbia University in New York; and Riyadh Lafta and Jamal Kudhairi of Baghdad's Al-Mustansiriya University College of Medicine.

Based on the number of Iraqi fatalities recorded by the survey teams, the researchers calculated that the death rate since the invasion had increased from 5 percent annually to 7.9 percent. That works out to an excess of about 100,000 deaths since the war, the researchers reported in a paper released early by the Lancet, a British medical journal.

The researchers called their estimate conservative because they excluded deaths in Fallujah, a city west of Baghdad that has been the scene of particularly intense fighting and has accounted for a disproportionately large number of deaths in the survey.

"We are quite confident that there's been somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 deaths, but it could be much higher," Roberts said.

When the researchers examined the causes of the 73 violent deaths collected in the study, 84 percent were due to the actions of coalition forces, although the researchers stressed that none was the result of what would have been considered misconduct. Ninety-five percent were due to airstrikes by helicopter gunships, rockets or other types of aerial weaponry.

Forty-six percent of the violent deaths involving coalition forces were men ages 15 to 60, but 46 percent were children younger than 15, and 7 percent were women, the researchers reported.

The researchers and the Lancet editors acknowledged that the study has clear limitations, including a relatively small sample of violent deaths that were examined directly and the researchers' reliance on individual memories for some information. But the researchers said the findings represent the most reliable estimate to date.

The paper was "extensively peer-reviewed, revised, edited" and rushed into print "because of its importance to the evolving security situation in Iraq, Richard Horton, the journal's editor, wrote in an accompanying editorial.

But Garlasco of Human Rights Watch said it is extremely difficult to estimate civilian casualties, especially based on relatively small numbers. "I certainly think that 100,000 is a reach," Garlasco said.

In addition, his group's investigation indicated that the ground war, not the air war, caused more of the deaths that have occurred.

Staff writer Josh White and research editor Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.

Well, duh, the US 'doesn't do body counts" but others do, who happen to care. So if the US doesn't do body counts you don't have a clue how many died do you? Nor do you care. Your stupid link above is nothing but Army propanganda. Absolute truth, of course, Mr. Braindead.

There are many, many other links on the net if you cared to look that support Iraqi deaths at 100,000 or more.

War IS Terrorism. When will you dummy Americans get that? No wonder the world thinks the US is full of shallow, consumeristic people.
It is.

By the way, brainiac, Iraq had no WMD's and was not responsible for 9/11. America is in Iraq for OIL. The world knows it if America won't admit it.

Some links:

911forthetruth.com
communitycurrency.org/9-11.html
www.septembereleventh.org
fromthewilderness.com
ny911truth.org
globalresearch.ca
standdown.net
911inquiry.org
www.newpearlharbor.com
deceptiondollar.com
911dossier.co.uk

Oh- and this one, onlinejournal.com

maybe you can expand your brains yet. If you think you're so right, then it should not upset you to check out the sites here, should it?

Chicken little.

I think JOEFROMCHICAGO did a great job in slicing up the facts you hold so dear.

Also, to continue to "slice up" your childish rants, we know and have always known Iraq had no direct involvement in 9-11. We also know we are concerned about stability in Iraq becuase of Oil.

I'm not sure how another article, based on the same study, would convince anyone who wasn't convinced by the first article based on that study. Flawed information doesn't gain accuracy through repetition.

Despite my misgivings about the survey's methodology, I must point out that I don't deny that US forces are responsible for inflicting casualties on the civilian population of Iraq. Indeed, I am convinced that US forces have inflicted quite significant civilian casualties there. I just have my doubts that this study accurately estimated the number of those casualties.

Whatever.

When the sky falls, it'll be on your American heads.

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it. (M. Twain).

You refuse to accept any article as factual, even from the LA Times, NY Times, Wash. Post, etc. Why don't you write your own version of the war in Iraq? You admit, NOW, that you went in for oil. Big difference from the original claim of WMD's. Yet, because America has no cojones, you accept whatever pablum the Bush Adm. dribbles out as fact.

If you think martial law is not a possiblity in the US, think again. Check out the Patriot Act, which none of you will, because you're afraid of the truth of what your country really is.

That a comment from one of you regarding the fact that no one in the world admires/respects America was 'so?" indicates your diminished sense of what is right morally. You will continue saying 'so?" until you realize you are quite alone on the planet. Then the rest of the world will say 'so?" to you. Indeed, it is already happening.

Adversus solem ne loquitor.