Posted on 12/02/2004 9:52:17 AM PST by dukeman
Personally, I think they should be grateful we are doing it the way we are doing this. As a nation we had the power to start and end the war in just a few minutes without sending any troops in and with ZERO casualties on our side.
Instead we too the humane approach, and went in after specific individuals with hopes to make it a better place.
But for the sake of argument, lets say 100,000 have been killed.
And let's say that that number is far less than are killed in this country each year thru abortion. Now their point was......?
If I may, I'd like to borrow your London blitz angle in my letter to respond to the "Bush = Hitler" affront.
Baghdad Bob.
Of course, no problem.
I believe MIT's Technology Review showed that the report in the Lancet used invalid sample extrapolation, overweighted by deaths in the Sunni triangle applied to the whole country, as summarized in the Fumento article linked in 32 above.
I didn't bookmark it, but you can probably find it at the Technology Review website.
Or how about the constantly cited figure of 100,000 Iraqis killed by Americans since the war began, a statistic that is thrown about with total and irresponsible abandon by opponents of the war. That number, which should be disputed at every turn by those who care about the truth of what is going on in Iraq was derived from a controversial study by the British journal of medicine the Lancet. It is five to six times higher than the highest estimates from other sources of all Iraqi deaths, be they military or civilian. The Lancet study relied on reporting of deaths self-reported by 998 families from clusters of 33 households throughout Iraq, a very limited sample from which to generalize. As the Financial Times reported on Nov. 19, even the Lancet study's authors are now having second thoughts. Iraq's Health Ministry estimates by comparison that all told, 3,853 Iraqis have been killed and 15,167 wounded.
The original number wounded in the last line was 155K, but the Times put out a correction today.
There is not a single chance in hell that that 100,000 figure was produced by any sort of responsible modelling. They appear to have counted everyone that died from almost any cause, threw in the mortality figure for canines over the age of 5, and made purely asinine assumptions about so-called imputed deaths into the bargain.
As someone noted earlier, this ''study'' was the purest of political ploys, which sentiment is instantly confirmed by both its incompetence and the timing of its release.
Dear Editor,
When I first read a recently published letter, “Moral values appear to be selective”, I was tempted to ignore it as just another fevered post-election rant by a whining Bush-hater. But the writer’s claim of 100,000 dead civilian Iraqis at the hands of our armed forces and his comparison of the Bush Administration to the Third Reich requires a response. The letter is wrong-headed and offensive on several levels.
First, nowhere near 100,000 civilians have died in Iraq from U.S. action. That figure, first published in the British medical journal, The Lancet, has been spread across TV and the Internet as gospel. As a bogus number produced by an agenda, it has been thoroughly discredited. An excellent article discussing this (“Lancet Civilian Death Report Kills the Truth”) may be found at www.techcentralstation.com.
Second, terms such as “genocidal” and “slaughter” insult our fighting men and women by making them out to be monsters. This may sound odd to the PC crowd, but the professional American military wages war in a humane manner. The recent assault on Fallujah is an example. Does anyone doubt we could have flattened that city into a parking lot from the air if we wished? Instead, around 150 fine Marines and soldiers lost their lives in house to house fighting to protect the innocent. It costs us lives to be humane in combat.
Third, describing the level of regrettable, unintentional civilian deaths in Iraq as “genocide” dilutes the meaning of that term and diminishes the experience and anguish of actual victims of genocide such as the Jews, Armenians, and Rwandans.
Finally, equating the Bush administration with the Third Reich (and President Bush with Hitler) simply ignores the facts. We all know the evil of the aggressor, Hitler. In contrast, the military actions of the Bush administration are in response to terrorist attacks upon our nation. Saddam Hussein harbored, financed, and assisted with the training of radical Islamic terrorists. He is no longer in that business. These people want me, the letter writer, and our families dead for no other reason than we’re live infidels. And whether he likes it or not, the letter writer is protected when the war against terrorism is waged over there by our professional military and not on Main Street America (as is Israel’s experience).
Anyone is free to hate President Bush for any reason or no reason at all. You’re entitled to your own opinion. But you’re not entitled to your own facts."
IIRC, it's from a poor-done hit-piece (masquerading as "research") in The Lancet
Some other replies have already been published in the paper, but they all seemed to accept the premise that 100,000 civilian deaths was an accurate figure.
There was an article in our paper this morning about that. It included natural deaths, infant deaths, crime deaths, etc. In other words that is how many people have died from all causes, not only military deaths.
Check this out.
http://www.iraqbodycount.net/
Certainly doesn't reflect 100,000 or even close to it.
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