Re: 15,000 people killed in invasion

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1072955,00.html
> 
> 
> Up to 15,000 people killed in invasion, claims thinktank 
> 
> 
> Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
> 
> 
> Wednesday October 29, 2003
> 
> 
> The Guardian
> 
> As many as 15,000 Iraqis were killed in the first days of America's 
> invasion and occupation of Iraq, a study produced by an independent US 
> thinktank said yesterday. Up to 4,300 of the dead were civilian 
> noncombatants. 
> 
> The report, by Project on Defence Alternatives, a research institute 
> from Cambridge, Massachussets, offers the most comprehensive account so 
> far of how many Iraqis died. 
> 
> The toll of Iraq's war dead covered by the report is limited to the 
> early stages of the war, from March 19 when American tanks crossed the 
> Kuwaiti border, to April 20, when US troops had consolidated their hold 
> on Baghdad. 
> 
> Researchers drew on hospital records, official US military statistics, 
> news reports, and survey methodology to arrive at their figures. 
> 
> They were also able to make use of two earlier studies on Iraq's war 
> dead from Iraq Body Count, a website which has kept a running total of 
> those killed, and the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, which 
> has sought to count the dead and injured of the war in order to pursue 
> compensation claims for their families. 
> 
> The new report, which estimates Iraq's war dead at between 10,800 and 
> 15,100, uses a far more rigorous definition of civilian than the other 
> studies to arrive at a figure of between 3,200 and 4,300 civilian 
> noncombatants. 
> 
> It breaks down the combat deaths of up to 10,800 Iraqis who fought the 
> American invasion. The figures include regular Iraqi troops, as well as 
> members of the Ba'ath party and other militias. 
> 
> The killing was concentrated - with heavy casualties at the southern 
> entrances of Baghdad - but as many as 80% of the Iraqi army units 
> survived the war relatively unscathed, in part because troops deserted. 
> 
> As many as 5,726 Iraqis were killed in the US assault on Baghdad, when 
> the streets of the Iraqi capital were strewn with the bodies of people 
> trying to flee the fighting. 
> 
> As many as 3,531 - more than half - of the dead in the assault on the 
> capital were noncombatant civilians, according to the report. 
> 
> Overall in Iraq, the ratio of civilian to military deaths is almost 
> twice as high as it was in the last Gulf war in 1991. The overall toll 
> of the first war was far higher - with estimates of 20,000 Iraqi 
> soldiers and 3,500 civilians killed. 
> 
> However, Operation Iraqi Freedom, as the US military calls this year's 
> war, has proved far deadlier to Iraqi civilians both in absolute 
> numbers, and in the proportion of noncombatant to military deaths. 
> 
> The findings defy the reasoning that precision-guided weapons spare 
> civilian lives. According to the author of the study, Carol Conetta, 68% 
> of the munitions used in this war were precision-guided, compared with 
> 6.5 % in 1991. 
> 
> However, he argued yesterday that his report demonstrated that 
> sophisticated weaponry did not necessarily offer protection to civilians 
> in war zones. 
> 
> "Many of the recent wars have been fought with the notion of a new type 
> of warfare that produce very low civilian casualties. What we see here 
> is that in fact we don't have that magic bullet," he said. 
> 
> "In this war in particular we see that improved capabilities in 
> precision attacks have been used to pursue more ambitious objectives 
> rather than achieve lower numbers of civilian dead." 
> 
> Counting the human cost
> 
> Total war dead (Iraq) 
> 
> Between 10,800 and 15,100, with a midpoint of 12,950 


even the low estimate of 10,800 far exceeds the death toll of 9/11
here in america.  who's to say that number is inaccurate, when the US
government refuses to keep track of iraqi death tolls themselves?

this brings to mind a tv program i saw a few weeks ago (frontline?)
where the camera rushed towards a firefight on a baghdad street and
witnessed an iraqi bystander get shot and killed.  afterwards, a US
officer made the most cursory of inquiries and within minutes, left
the scene.

i like to think of myself as objective and fair-minded but let me say
this:  if iraqi soldiers barged into my hometown, talked about freeing
america from the bush admin, screaming orders at me in arabic, getting
furious at me for not speaking arabic, detaining/searching/manhandling
my mother/sister/wife/girlfriend, and then i saw that frontline scene
play out to someone i knew was innocent...  right then and there, i
would drop everything else in my life and spend every waking minute
thereafter into kicking those fucking iraqi occupation soldiers out of
my country.

and lemme say something else:  you cannot manage something that you
cannot or will not measure.  it's that simple.  for the US military
not to know how many iraqis are getting killed is to ignore a problem
that cannot be ignored.  they simply cannot have faith in their young
soldiers that all is being done to minimize innocent deaths.  they
must first measure, then manage the situation or the whole freaking
enterprise will gradually spin out of control.







> 
> Combatants killed (Iraq) 
> 
> Between 7,600 and 10,800, with a midpoint of 9,200 
> 
> Noncombatants killed (Iraq) 
> 
> Between 3,200 and 4,300, with a midpoint of 3,750 
> 
> War dead (Baghdad) 
> 
> Between 4,376 and 5,726, with a midpoint of 5,051 
> 
> Combatants killed (Baghdad) 
> 
> Between 2,224 and 3,531, with a midpoint of 2,878 
> 
> Noncombatants killed (Baghdad) 
> 
> Between 1,990 and 2,357, with a midpoint of 2,174
> 
> · Source: Project on Defence Alternatives research
> 
> www.comw.org/pda 
> Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003