In my rebuttal letter I'm planning on using just a few words to cast doubt on the 100,000 figure while pointing out that our losses could be much less if we decided to unleash our full military force from the air. Like the Israelis, we take more casualties because we fight humanely with respect to civilians. I also want to say "If the war is about our controlling Iraq's oil, where's my 50 cents per gallon gas?"
Thanks again for the input!
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.