It's a shame when formerly repectable organizations stoop to producing propaganda or lend their names for such purposes.
Study: 655,000 Iraqis Die Because of War
Oct 11 6:09 AM US/Eastern
By MALCOLM RITTER
AP Science Writer
NEW YORK
A controversial new study contends nearly 655,000 Iraqis have died because of the war, suggesting a far higher death toll than other estimates. The timing of the survey's release, just a few weeks before the U.S. congressional elections, led one expert to call it "politics." In the new study, researchers attempt to calculate how many more Iraqis have died since March 2003 than one would expect without the war. Their conclusion, based on interviews of households and not a body count, is that about 600,000 died from violence, mostly gunfire. They also found a small increase in deaths from other causes like heart disease and cancer. "Deaths are occurring in Iraq now at a rate more than three times that from before the invasion of March 2003," Dr. Gilbert Burnham, lead author of the study, said in a statement. The study by Burnham, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School Public Health, and others is to be published Thursday on the Web site of The Lancet, a medical journal.John Hopkins should disassociate themselves from this report. Look at the way they arrived at the estimated dead figure. Please, "interviews with families"? In the middle of a war zone? Remember outside the New Orleans civic center in the days after Katrina. Those head bobbing women would have said anything to get out of there faster. I suspect that talking to Sunnis or Shias could be a similar experience.
This in not the first time Lancet has been associated with over inflated Iraqi casualty numbers. I'm not surprised by the Lancet but Johns Hopkins disappoints me. What's their point? To get the US out of Iraq so that they can then conduct another study showing:
Study: 650,000 Iraqis Have Died After US Withdrawal from Iraq.
BBC is on it Whit,
ReplyDeleteIraqi war death toll 'at 655,000'
..."Anti-US insurgents launch daily attacks with civilian casualties
An estimated 655,000 Iraqis have died since 2003 who might still be alive but for the US-led invasion, according to a survey by a US university.
The research compares mortality rates before and after the invasion from 47 randomly chosen areas in Iraq.
The figure is considerably higher than estimates by official sources or the number of deaths reported in the media.
Critics have dismissed the findings because they are based on a statistical prediction rather than body counts."
So what is the number?
ReplyDelete500,000, or less perhaps?
300,000, 200,000?
What has been the blood price the Iraqi have paid.
One hundred times that of the US, incountry? That would put them at 250,000 dead, 2,500,000 wounded.
Bet the real number is near there.
The World needs to know, for the truth will win out.
Statistics are fun. Go to this interactive website and choose your poison (literally). An estimated 90,000 Americans have died since 2003 who might still be alive but for the 2nd Amendment.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you DR that there should be an accounting of the real number. I am not sure what you do with the number when we get it. Clearly, have been too many killed while we searched for missions after the WMD mission was eclipsed. There are too many being killed daily. There are far too many being killed in Darfur.
ReplyDeleteIt is not useful forming a circular firing squad. We have a global problem with Islam. If the Islamists could, they would kill as many of us as they could find. We live in a world where the term "innocents" relating to casualities has become meaningless.
Iraq body counts that have been MSM reported have been tabulated to be just shy of 50,000 civilian deaths in Iraq.
ReplyDeleteAdd to that the 4,000 foreign fighters and the 15 to 20,000 Iraqi enemy combatants KIA. Brings the total to around 75,000 dead, in forty months.
It is an interesting number in that it has had no effect on the Iraqi. The body count is not so high as to cause the Iraqi to take the actions required to stop the War. Or we have not allowed them to.
Funny, that is what Abracadbra says. That US "Catch & Release" policy is proof that we choose to incite the Iraqi War. It is also the meme from Shia leaders in Parliment.
US control of the ISF has led to the failure of the ISF and the Unity Government to provide security. So say the Iraqi MPs.
Who is the enemy in Iraq?
DR wrote:
ReplyDelete"Who is the enemy in Iraq?"
Where have you been? Are you not listening to our glorious leader? Terror, we are fighting terror. Right?
Not precisely, Ash.
ReplyDeleteTerror is just one of the tactics. What we are fighting is a many-faced global enemy that seeks to supplant the world position of western liberal democracy.
The energy supplies of the ME, turned toward this enemy and against us, would fund and empower this enemy at the same time as impoverising, weakening, and destabilizing--thru economic damage--the western liberal democracies, and the nations in our orbit or leaning our way.
The stakes couldn't be higher--especially for those who care about the world we will leave behind the end of our own personal existence.
The choice is becoming a little more clear, lately.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, it's getting to the point that the most important question the voter should ask him/herself is, "Do I want an administration that shoots its domestic opposition, or not?"
Buddy, interesting, now you've come around to the position that it is all about oil.
ReplyDeleteEven if that were true, Ash, even if your trivialization and minimization were the truth of the matter, would the difference between being economically free vs being an economic prisoner be any less a casus belli than the world has seen in virtually all past wars?
ReplyDeleteAs usual, you're using words to hide, not to see, the truth.
And, before you say it, let me say it, it, it ain't this.
ReplyDeleteIt's about North America in the 21st & 22nd century not becoming a Europe of the 19th & 20th.
You know, these statistics fail to appreciate some basic facts of life known to anyone in healthcare, for instance. This is a field that deals daily with harm and managing it with limited means. It does so with minimal advocacy and propaganda on the side of the harm.
ReplyDeleteIn the entreprise of healing someone, you have to accept imperfect methods and these methods sometimes result in harming people.
Theoretically, you have to decide whether to heal 90% of your patients at the expense of 10%. What do you do?
Those critical of the methods that produced 40k, 100k or 600k fail to address the assertion that those deaths are not car crashes resulting from shitty engineering but deaths from a new vaccine...sorta. That is to say they are not described solely by some existential binary of those alive and those dead; what the Lancet would have us believe is "moral" is that which results in a different number in a different column or a different histogram. These numbers fail to appreciate that these deaths are also described by sacrifice, by cost and by the objective pursued in the course of those sacrifices and costs. This is the only truly tragic thing I see about the OIF entreprise: that those who die get to be appropriated, not venerated. No true glory.
These big numbers are supposed to spook us or revolt us into discarding our methods for doing nothing, for any agency responsible for such numbers must necessarily be malicious. I think that logic is hilarious on its face.
But I have seen the spirited protestations of young westerners who convince themselves of all sorts of transcendental regimes for man to submit to, forgetting always those imposed upon us by nature, a nature that includes man, cowboy or muslim.
That's going to be far too fatalistic for Ash to accept, pastry. But in the large sense, you can't be challenged--we are part of nature when it comes to the drive to hold futures on survival.
ReplyDeletebloodydarkpastryman,
ReplyDeletere: health care
The second factor of the health care equation is allowing death with dignity, recognizing that death is the ultimate end of all life. Death is one of those things about which modern Western man is in denial.