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Mortality in Iraq Associated with the 2003–2011 War and Occupation

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Re: Mortality in Iraq Associated with the 2003–2011 War and Occupation

#61

Post by einhverfr »

berntb wrote: post #58
gokuismyhero wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue the US contributed to "W2" through "De-Ba'athification," disbanding the Iraqi military, and the incompetence of the occupation (eg insufficient troops to enforce martial law/secure weapons caches). This isn't simply claiming the benefit of hindsight because there were many people warning about these decisions at the time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_End_in_Sight

I answered someone arguing that legally -- someone that starts a war is absolutely responsible for the effects. But then he turned around and wrote that one group was responsible for starting a war they weren't really involved in, except for trying to stop it . There is a contradiction in there, if you think about it. (People do make lots of mistakes in war, but the Bush administration did make a new face for f-ckups…

> I answered someone arguing that legally -- someone that starts a war is absolutely responsible for the effects. But then he turned around and wrote that one group was responsible for starting a war they weren't really involved in, except for trying to stop it.

So let's consider this story. Germany invades Poland and tries to resolve the tension between itself and France and Britain. France and Britain declare war on Germany.

Who is the aggressor? Are we to agree, in the end, with Reichspresident und Grossadmiral Karl Doenitz and recognize that who is the aggressor is a political determination (presumably dependent on who wins the war)? Or do we accept that since the situation seems reversed in Iraq we should hold ourselves accountable?

It seems to me that this is largely confirmation that Doenitz was right, that "aggressor" is a term to be decided by the victor. I suppose we can say that aggressors never win wars ;-)

Re: Mortality in Iraq Associated with the 2003–2011 War and Occupation

#62

Post by briandear »

aric wrote: post #48
lambda wrote: post #3

According to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Saddam_Hussein'... , estimates of Iraqis killed by Saddam range from a quarter million to a million, and estimates of Iranians killed in the Iran-Iraq are in a similar range. So, let's call his death toll a half million to two million. About a decade after the Gulf War, which had pretty much put a stop to Saddam's killing spree, the US decided to inv…

How did "we" come to this? You're asking the largest military wielder and prison population and the only nation to have used nuclear weapons on real people, people going about their contained lives wanting to wake up to see another day, how "we" came to this. - Hiroshima - Nagasaki - Vietnam - Constant US policy to support genocidal dictators around the world who mass slaughter "their" people, so long as US corporate…

I'm curious why you leave Pol Pot, Rwanda, the Soviet Union out of your statement. The US doesn't have a monopoly on killing people or supporting bad actors. I also see no criticism of the EU that has supported their share of dictators. The anti-American tripe that constantly gets brought up by people that have actually never lived under true oppression is just silly without applying context. You mention Hiroshima -- what about the Nanjing Massacre? You mentioned Vietnam.. The reeducation camps run by the Communists were pretty brutal. Know anything about the Cultural Revolution in China? What about human experimentation conducted by Germans and Japanese? What about 1989 in China? How about the Turks and Greeks? Chechnya? Serbia? Kosovo?

Your one-sided rant reads like a freshman regurgitation of a Robert Jensen lecture. You can't blame America for everything, despite your desire to do just that.

Re: Mortality in Iraq Associated with the 2003–2011 War and Occupation

#63

Post by trobertson »

briandear wrote: post #59
aric wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did "we" come to this? You're asking the largest military wielder and prison population and the only nation to have used nuclear weapons on real people, people going about their contained lives wanting to wake up to see another day, how "we" came to this. - Hiroshima - Nagasaki - Vietnam - Constant US policy to support genocidal dictators around the world who mass slaughter "their" people, so long as US corporate…

"Largest prison population" sorry but China wis that award.

Certifiably false.

USA imprisons ~6x more of its citizens than China does [1], as a matter of percentage. Considering that the USA has ~1/4 the population of China [2], we can determine that the USA has more people in prisons than China, by a factor of roughly 1.5 USA prisoners per 1 Chinese prisoner.

---

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populatio...

Re: Mortality in Iraq Associated with the 2003–2011 War and Occupation

#64

Post by aric »

briandear wrote: post #62
aric wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did "we" come to this? You're asking the largest military wielder and prison population and the only nation to have used nuclear weapons on real people, people going about their contained lives wanting to wake up to see another day, how "we" came to this. - Hiroshima - Nagasaki - Vietnam - Constant US policy to support genocidal dictators around the world who mass slaughter "their" people, so long as US corporate…

I'm curious why you leave Pol Pot, Rwanda, the Soviet Union out of your statement. The US doesn't have a monopoly on killing people or supporting bad actors. I also see no criticism of the EU that has supported their share of dictators. The anti-American tripe that constantly gets brought up by people that have actually never lived under true oppression is just silly without applying context. You mention Hiroshima --…

I'm curious why you think acknowledging the US's ills is equivalent to overlooking the countless ills of many other extremely violent nations and despots. The difference between us, perhaps, is that I care about and acknowledge all aspects of global atrocities.

Re: Mortality in Iraq Associated with the 2003–2011 War and Occupation

#65

Post by gruseom »

berntb wrote: post #54
gruseom wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you know much more about this than I do. My memory is that the Lancet authors were serious, qualified researchers who had done much similar work in the past and whose objectivity had not previously been disputed. If there's a critique to be made of their work, a snarky "that can't be right" blog post certainly doesn't cut it. The authors of the new PLoS study say that they've taken into account criticisms of…

Uh, I can't see how that is relevant to the specific points I raised. (It isn't relevant to talk about someone else using the IBC data in a way IBC don't recommend. And there were lots of criticism before, see the first Lancet report. It is not good with a political motive either -- timing reports to influence an election.) 1. So you have no answer to the Iraq Body Count reality check and just ignore it? (E.g. where…

I'm not having the kind of argument with you that you seem to think I am. I looked at the articles you mentioned. Certainly their criticisms are devastating if, and only if, they are true and fair. Are they? I can't say. I don't have time to read the studies. If you have, and you've arrived at your beliefs based on factual analysis rather than ideology, that's good.

My point about IBC was not intended to dispute what you said, but rather to vent something that has bothered me for a long time. Sorry that wasn't clear. I feel slightly justified by the fact that your second link does the very thing I was complaining about:

these results were anywhere from seven to 14 times as high as other credible estimates, including those made by the non-partisan Iraq Body Count, a consortium of U.S. and U.K researchers, also concerned about the human toll of the war

This is deeply misleading. IBC's number is guaranteed to be a far underestimate: there's no credible scenario under which all or even most of the deaths in a bloody, messy war could be neatly individually documented, not to mention accessible to foreign researchers over the internet. That's like counting individual raindrops and adding only the drops you counted to produce an estimate of total rainfall. A proper statistical study would be expected to come up with a much higher number; an order of magnitude difference is probably not unreasonable. That doesn't prove the Lancet study was proper; perhaps other criticisms are more serious. But this is the only one I feel able to comment on and the fact that they included it without pointing out that it is comparing an apple with a raisin does not give me confidence. (Neither does your description of these documents as "hilarious". I don't see any hilarity there. I do smell an ideological agenda.)

This may be unfair of me, but I can't help feeling suspicious of the fact that IBC hasn't done more to counteract this widespread—I'd even say universal, based on what I've seen—misuse of their data for absurd lowballing of the damage caused by that war. They say their motivation is to do justice to the human tragedy of the war. Shouldn't they be the first to object to dishonest uses of their work which obscure how tragic it was?

Re: Mortality in Iraq Associated with the 2003–2011 War and Occupation

#66

Post by aric »

briandear wrote: post #59
aric wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did "we" come to this? You're asking the largest military wielder and prison population and the only nation to have used nuclear weapons on real people, people going about their contained lives wanting to wake up to see another day, how "we" came to this. - Hiroshima - Nagasaki - Vietnam - Constant US policy to support genocidal dictators around the world who mass slaughter "their" people, so long as US corporate…

"Largest prison population" sorry but China wis that award.

Even if it were true that China cages more people relatively, that would be a laughably low standard to flaunt.

Re: Mortality in Iraq Associated with the 2003–2011 War and Occupation

#67

Post by pessimizer »

briandear wrote: post #62
aric wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did "we" come to this? You're asking the largest military wielder and prison population and the only nation to have used nuclear weapons on real people, people going about their contained lives wanting to wake up to see another day, how "we" came to this. - Hiroshima - Nagasaki - Vietnam - Constant US policy to support genocidal dictators around the world who mass slaughter "their" people, so long as US corporate…

I'm curious why you leave Pol Pot, Rwanda, the Soviet Union out of your statement. The US doesn't have a monopoly on killing people or supporting bad actors. I also see no criticism of the EU that has supported their share of dictators. The anti-American tripe that constantly gets brought up by people that have actually never lived under true oppression is just silly without applying context. You mention Hiroshima --…

>I'm curious why you leave Pol Pot, Rwanda, the Soviet Union out of your statement.

That's like asking why someone left Cheetos out of their discussion of Twinkies. 1) Irrelevant, 2) Not a flattering comparison.

It does tell us who you think the United States' peers are. I wouldn't think to compare the US to machete-wielding Hutus or the horrific Japanese invasion of China during WWII; you seem to think that's pretty fair.

Re: Mortality in Iraq Associated with the 2003–2011 War and Occupation

#68

Post by berntb »

gruseom wrote: post #65
berntb wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, I can't see how that is relevant to the specific points I raised. (It isn't relevant to talk about someone else using the IBC data in a way IBC don't recommend. And there were lots of criticism before, see the first Lancet report. It is not good with a political motive either -- timing reports to influence an election.) 1. So you have no answer to the Iraq Body Count reality check and just ignore it? (E.g. where…

I'm not having the kind of argument with you that you seem to think I am. I looked at the articles you mentioned. Certainly their criticisms are devastating if, and only if, they are true and fair. Are they? I can't say. I don't have time to read the studies. If you have, and you've arrived at your beliefs based on factual analysis rather than ideology, that's good. My point about IBC was not intended to dispute what…

You still ignore every argument I wrote. Including the internal documents (Wikileaks).

So I'll not add more arguments, just a quick note:

AGAIN -- IBC write explicitly they are a lower bound.

Claims 7-14 times greater than the IBC do need good papers -- from authors that haven't been criticized on moral grounds, for not releasing data timely and doesn't look to have political motives. That is not the Lancet Report...

(And what an organization specialized in polling write about other subjects is not so interesting anyway, but you lack everything else?)

Re: Mortality in Iraq Associated with the 2003–2011 War and Occupation

#69

Post by berntb »

einhverfr wrote: post #61
berntb wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I answered someone arguing that legally -- someone that starts a war is absolutely responsible for the effects. But then he turned around and wrote that one group was responsible for starting a war they weren't really involved in, except for trying to stop it . There is a contradiction in there, if you think about it. (People do make lots of mistakes in war, but the Bush administration did make a new face for f-ckups…

> I answered someone arguing that legally -- someone that starts a war is absolutely responsible for the effects. But then he turned around and wrote that one group was responsible for starting a war they weren't really involved in, except for trying to stop it. So let's consider this story. Germany invades Poland and tries to resolve the tension between itself and France and Britain. France and Britain declare war o…

Wasn't there an ultimatum re WWII that if you start this war -- then we are part of it?

That is, joining an attacked ally in an existing war.

Re: Mortality in Iraq Associated with the 2003–2011 War and Occupation

#70

Post by pessimizer »

berntb wrote: post #25
arcadeparade wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of the sanctions in the 90's there were also up to half a million excess deaths of children aged under 5. It was called genocide by both men who were in charge of it, both of whom resigned in protest. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iraq#Estimate... I also find it interesting that many people who deny that this many people were killed in Iraq since the 2003 invasion will have no problem believi…

>>Because of the sanctions in the 90's there were also up to half a million excess deaths of children aged under 5 Saddam wanted to get rid of the sanctions, it was in his direct interest to inflate the statistics. (There were reports of e.g. multiple funerals for a given dead child, too.) His regime also had "extra" income from smuggling, which could have been used to alleviate suffering of civilians under his boot.…

>His regime also had "extra" income from smuggling, which could have been used to alleviate suffering of civilians under his boot.

Because he was a horrible dictator who had little regard for human life. Would you expect him to put any of his people's needs ahead of his own? If not, then it's a bit stupid to pretend it's not your fault if when you reduce the resources available to Iraq, children die and Saddam's control gets even tighter.

If you hear that someone is abusive to their 5 children, is your solution to cut their wages in half?

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