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To: pythagorean
Nobody knows for sure how many Iraqi civilians have been killed.

Right at last. Which also directly undermines your previous assertions concerning the higher number of civilian casualties in Iraq versus Kosovo. You don't know. We can make some reasonable approximations, but as for the 100,000 Lancet figure that you eagerly trotted out and now "might be willing" to ignore, the margin of error in that study was 9,000 to 194,000, the author admitted he was opposed to the war and U.S. imperialism, and a "clarification" has since been issued which in essence debunks the study for invalid assumptions, cherry-picking data, and small sample size.

Another anti-war source, iraqbodycount.com which counts every single casualty of war, Iraq Army & insurgent & terrorist & policeman & civilian alike regardless of who inflicted the casualty, currently runs a range from 15,635 to 17,582 total casualties since the U.S. invasion. Even bin Laden has weighed in; in his pre-election video he said "over 15,000 of our people have been killed." So your choice of citing the Lancet's 100,000 casualties in Iraq (180 killed every day of the war--yeah, right) over-states what even bin Laden says by a factor of seven.

I can only surmise that you chose to cite the Lancet's 100,000 in an attempt to bolster your contention of moral equivalence between the operations of U.S. troops in Iraq with those of the Serb forces deliberately murdering thousands of noncombatants, looting houses, burning villages, blowing up mosques, and expelling well over a million Kosovars from their homes in Kosovo. What utter B.S. I've spent a career in the U.S. military and I know how we operate. I've also seen what the Serbs deliberately did in Kosovo. There's no comparison.

16 posted on 01/20/2005 5:01:45 AM PST by mark502inf
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To: mark502inf
Your ideas about Kosovo appear to rely a bit too much on people like KLA-attached translator/propagandists, professional spies / liars like William Walker and second hand hearsay outlets with obvious political connections to NATO. Cliché rhetoric such as "deliberately murdering thousands of noncombatants, looting houses, burning villages, blowing up mosques... ", rich in emotion and poor in convincing detail, sounds more like an Al Jazeera commentary or rantings of a Sorosian mouthpiece.

Why don't you share some details of your alleged personal Kosovo experiences instead of continuously citing these unreliable sources? Did you see mosques burning? Can you testify that KLA insurgents were not holed inside, sniping at Serbian forces? Did you care to notice any burnt churches by any chance? Can you tell how many of the burnt houses belonged to Roma, Serbs or anti-KLA Albanians? How many schools were destroyed by NATO bombing? How many of the civilians were expelled by scum like commander Remi?

Even Blair's military attaché, himself obviously a spy and a de facto ally of the KLA at the time, had so much to say incriminating the KLA. One has to wonder why a U.S. military veteran has so much venom against "the Serbs".

17 posted on 01/20/2005 6:42:01 AM PST by pythagorean
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