Sat 14 May 2005
The results of the Iraq Living Conditions Survey 2004 have been published. (Earlier discussion of the study is here.) As Iraqi Minister of Planning Barham Salih said, “This survey shows a rather tragic situation of the quality of life in Iraq.” The study shows that living condition have deteriorated following the war with, for example, chronic malnutrition increasing from 4% to 8% and access to safe water falling from 95% to 60% in urban areas.
The survey also had a question on war-related deaths that provides more support for the Lancet study on excess mortality. Question HM01 (questionnaire available here) was “Has any person(s) who was a regular household member died or gone missing during the past 24 months?” Question HM05 asked for the cause of death: Disease / Traffic Accident / War related death / Pregnancy or childbirth / Other. The resulting estimate for war-related deaths was 24,000 (95% CI 18,000-29,000, see page 54 of report). since the field work was carried in April 2004, this only counts deaths in the invasion and the following year. The corresponding number from the Lancet study is 33,000 (the rest of the excess deaths are from increases in disease, accidents and murders). When you allow for the fact that the Lancet study covered eighteen months rather than one year, the ILCS gives a slightly higher death rate. So an independent study has confirmed that part of the Lancet study.
Unfortunately, because the mortality question in the ILCS study doesn’t distinguish between the pre and post-war periods it can’t be used to verify the increase in accidents and murders that the Lancet found. However, it does estimate changes in infant mortality mortality. Some of the critics of the Lancet study attacked it because the Lancet study found an infant mortality rate in the year before the war of 29 per 1000 births, arguing that was contradicted by a UNICEF estimate of 107 (For example, Andrew Bolt.) The ILCS survey estimate for 2002 is 32. (See Figure 26.) Lancet confirmed again. However, it also only shows an increase to 35 in 2003, while the Lancet found an increase to 59 after the war. 2003 only includes part of the post-war period, but this still suggests that the increase infant mortality was less than what the Lancet study found. The ILCS found much lower figures for infant mortality in the 1990s (around 30) than previous studies (which found figures of about 100). Those high infant mortality figures provided the basis for the claims that sanctions killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, so the ILCS study calls those claims into question.
Unfortunately, the Times reports the ILCS results like this:
This makes a misleading comparison between the Lancet number for all excess deaths (which includes the increase in murder, accidents and disease) and the ILCS number for deaths directly related to the war (which just includes deaths caused by the coalition and the insurgents). It also misses that the time periods were different. Naturally, the Lancet denialists have seized on this as proof that the Lancet estimate is wrong. For examples, see Leigh Cartwright and Tim Blair. Sigh.The 370-page report said that it was 95 per cent confident that the toll during the war and the first year of occupation was 24,000, but could have been between 18,000 and 29,000. About 12 per cent of those were under 18.
The figure is far lower than the 98,000 deaths estimated in The Lancet last October, which said that it had interviewed nearly 1,000 households. But it is far higher than other figures.
May 15th, 2005 at 1:44 am
The UNDP report appears to go out of its way to cause confusion on this point, by saying:
“Another source (Roberts et al 2004) [the Lancet report] estimates the number to be 98,000, with a confidence interval of 8,000 to 194,000. The website �raq Body Count�estimates that between 14,619 and 16,804 deaths have occurred between the beginning of 2003 and 7 December 2004.”
Since the IBC and Lancet estimates are not comparable with each other, obviously they can’t both be comparable with the UNDP (in fact, neither are). Whoever wrote that paragraph ought to have a word with himself.
May 15th, 2005 at 3:31 am
Lancet found 8,000 deaths with 95% confidence, not 98,000. If all you have to do to be vindicated is have someone else’s estimate fall within +/- 90,000, it isn’t hard to be “vindicated”.
May 15th, 2005 at 3:58 am
The Lancet study authors themselves can be blamed for a lot of this confusion. It is the Lancet itself after all that started equating deaths from aerial bombardment by coalition forces with excess death.
More importantly, this much more thorough study (over twenty times the number of households of the Lancet study) was actually conducted before the Lancet study. It just didn’t get rushed into print right before the US election to generate a headline grabbing number obviously intended to hurt the coalition (thereby indirectly supporting the insurgents who are morally responsible for most of the killing after May 2003).
May 15th, 2005 at 3:58 am
Tim makes some good points above — these studies really don’t measure the same things.
So again, we’re left with the fact the Lancet study’s only statistically significant finding is that there were between 8,000 and 194,000 excess deaths — which still leaves open the possiblity that aside from ~30,000 war-related deaths, mortality actually decreased due to better conditions in sanitation, etc. Other surveys suggest that might have been the case, as I’ve noted before.
Vindication is a bit of a stretch, I think, though this does not seem to contradict Lancet, and does support the violent deaths estimate.
May 15th, 2005 at 4:11 am
One thing I think we can all agree on is that a freely elected democratic gov’t in Iraq is likely to work a lot harder to improve conditions than Saddam was ever going to. There is some question how long it will be before the number of lives saved exceeds those killed in the war, directly or indirectly, but I wonder if even the most vociferous Iraq war opponents would argue they were better off left to Saddam’s care.
May 15th, 2005 at 4:39 am
Actually, they are doing that just now, from both the left and the far right. Inconceivable as it may be.
May 15th, 2005 at 5:50 am
The Times article is a travesty. In addition to the false implications that Tim points out, the innumeracy displayed in the first paragraph that Tim quotes is pathetic. This paragraph is pure gibberish.
The whole tone of the article is mendacious. Unbelievably, it tries to put the blame for the current misery in Iraq on Saddam, even though the study compares the situation now disfavorably with the situation before the invasion. Also, the Lancet study is described not as having used a sample of a 1000 households but rather as claiming to have used such a sample.
One more thing is that it talks about some “other”, lower, figures for the number of victims of the war. What exactly are those other “figures”? The Lancet study was the only real attempt at estimating the war’s toll - Iraq Body Count being clearly a very conservative lower bound.
May 15th, 2005 at 5:52 am
“The corresponding number from the Lancet study is 33,000 (the rest of the excess deaths are from increases in disease, accidents and murders).”
Not that I doubt it as such, but how is that number calculated? I’ve read the Lancet study but I can’t figure it out.
May 15th, 2005 at 5:55 am
I wonder if even the most vociferous Iraq war opponents would argue they were better off left to Saddam’s care.
At least several tens of thousands Iraqis would have been better off under “Saddam’s care”. Wouldn’t you agree?
May 15th, 2005 at 6:13 am
No.
May 15th, 2005 at 10:39 am
Reid,
So instead of “better dead than red” it’s now “better dead than Ba’athist”?
May 15th, 2005 at 11:54 am
Reid is willing to have tens of thousands die rather than have them live under Saddam! He’s just that brave with other people’s lives!
May 15th, 2005 at 1:30 pm
The changes to date since the overthrow of Saddam.
1. Tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands more Iraqis are dead than would have been killed by the Ba’athists had they remained in power.
2. There have been some improvements in some aspects of human rights. However torture, summary executions and press censoriship all persist. for women, the slight improvement in political rights has been offset by severe restrictions in other areas such as the right ot work.
3. Standards of many basic services (such as electricity) are still below pre-war levels.
Pro-dead-Iraqi commentators will point to the hypothetical possibility that living standards will improve (despite constant attacks on the country’s infrastructure) and that democracy will grow out of the barrel of a gun.
Realists will note the recent remarks from the former chief Pentagon intelligence expert on the middle east that ethnic and religious civil war in Iraq is no longer a possibility - it has already started.
May 15th, 2005 at 2:30 pm
Rob is willing to let other darker skinned peole live in subhuman misery just so long as it doesn’t set back his tee time.
May 15th, 2005 at 3:09 pm
Reid - you’re ability to tell Rob’s skin color from his typing style is quite remarkable.
May 15th, 2005 at 4:46 pm
And, your ability to use proper grammar is appalling.
May 15th, 2005 at 5:13 pm
I’m with you Reid. Now lets go on and liberate those dark skinned people next door to Iraq in Iran and Syria. Why should they remain oppressed while the Iraqis have been given freedom?
May 15th, 2005 at 7:22 pm
Yes, I used “you’re” instead of “your”. However I am capable of recognising the error.
Can you identify the error in this earlier statement of your own: “Lancet found 8,000 deaths with 95% confidence, not 98,000.”
Hint: 95% confidence intervals have both an upper and lower limit.
May 15th, 2005 at 9:05 pm
Its been a bad week for the crime family in Washington D.C. and for the grand imperial strategy of these gangsters (TallDave NOTE). The Lancet study is vindicated by this report. There are anti-U.S. demonstrations in Afghanistan, and the puppet and frankly inept Karzai regime is effectivey powerless to do anything about them. But, WORST of all, the Karimov regime in Uzbekistan is showing its true colors (its on par with Saddam Hussein’s brutality), and the Washington D.C. junta has been alarmingly silent about the great unraveling there. Why? Because as horrific and violent a leader as Karimov is (and he presides over one of the most UNdemocratic regimes in central Asia), he is a U.S. client. The U.S. has just completed one of the largest, purpose-built military camps in the country, and has many more bases there. Karimov was wined and dined in Washington by the neocons a couple of years ago see: link
and the last thing the U.S. wants is to see demcracy break out in a situation where a U.S. stooge won’t be elected (more like another Islamic theocracy would prevail). So, far from endorsing the resistance to Karimov’s brutlality, its quite likely the U.S. will try and prop up his abhorrent regime.
Let us be quite honest here, then, the U.S. couldn’t give a rat’s butt for bottom-up democracy and the spread of ‘freedom’ - it supports rogue regimes that further American corporate, military, economic and strategic objectives. Where these coincide with so-called democracy (as in Georgia, Ukraine etc.) the U.S. is ‘gung-ho’, at least for the election of far right corporate friendly governments. But where this conflicts with U.S. ojectives (as in Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Colombia, Nigeria etc.) they couldn’t give a hoot about democracy. The former U.K. ambassador to Uzbekistan stated yesterday that the U.S. could support the anti-Karimov forces, but in all liklihood it will try and support him. Hark back now to Saddam Hussein’as regime: its almost certain that successive U.S. administrations (Bush I, Clinton, and now Bush II) would have continued to support Saddam had he not become ‘uppity’ (like Noriega in Panama) and invaded Kuwait. Once he did this, in a flash he became a new “Hitler” who had to be overthrown. The U.S. demands obedience and stability from its clients, and the Iraqi and Panamanian regimes (and that of the Taliban, whom Clinton and the Bushes were quite happy to support through the 1990’s) became to independent for their own good and ‘had to go’. At what point the U.S. petrocrats will abandon Karimov remains to be seen. Moreover, its going to be hard for the corporate media to avoid drawing parallels between the hypocrisy of U.S. support for Karimov versus their supposed embracing of ‘freedom and demcracy”, which of course is a big lie. The whole episode shreds Dave’s arguments of U.S. support for democracy across the world. There are many other examples that the media chooses to bury.
May 15th, 2005 at 9:08 pm
Let me repeat Dennis’s question: Where does Lancet’s “corresponding number” of 33,000 war deaths come from? Is that in the Johns Hopkins (Lancet) study?
As I look at the Lancet study, it seems to show at least 43,000 excess deaths from violence alone (about 60,000 for the 18-month study period), in contrast to the 24,000 in the U.N. study.
May 15th, 2005 at 9:13 pm
Jeff
How dare you call Karzai incompetent?
After all, he was one of the founders of the Taliban - and look what an excellent job he did there.
May 15th, 2005 at 9:18 pm
Each death in the Lancet study stands for 3,000 deaths in Iraq. Outside Falluja, there were nine deaths caused by coalition forces and two by the insurgents. 11*3,000 is 33,000.
May 16th, 2005 at 1:05 am
Patriot - I’m with you 100%. But, Syria and Iran demand different strategies than Iraq. So far, we’ve gotten Syria out of Lebanon and, Iran is ripe to fall from its own internal contradictions.
Ian - which is why you can only count the lower bound as 95% confident. It’s really very simple, if you put on your thinking cap.
Jeff Harvey - words fail me. You are one messed up dude.
Ian again - Karzai a founder of the Taliban? Uh, no. Karzai and family were running a restaurant business here in Maryland when the war broke out.
May 16th, 2005 at 3:09 am
reid, do you actually understand the statistical principle underpinning a 95% C.I.? not all values (in this case, numbers of excess deaths) have the same likelihood of being the correct one.
May 16th, 2005 at 8:17 am
Just a tiny point which clearly irritates others as much as it does me; even if you’re going to talk only about the lower end of the confidence interval (in my terminology, to commit “Kaplan’s Fallacy”), then for God’s sake get the number right. The survey found a 95% confidence interval of 8k-194k. This is a symmetric confidence interval. Therefore, we can say with 97.5% confidence that the number of excess deaths was greater than 8k, not 95%.
May 16th, 2005 at 8:17 am
Saint - jeez, it’s like I’m in a class of slow learners.
The 95% confidence interval is based on the sample mean and the sample variance, which can be converted into a single statistic which has a pdf of Student’s t-distribution. When a confidence interval is given, it means that the true Gaussian mean is located within the given bounds with probability 0.95.
If, however, you want to say that a specific value for the true mean is 95% certain, the best you can say is what the lower bound is and that it is at least 95% certain that the true value is greater than that. This is very elementary. It is almost painful having to explain it. Please do not count on me to educate you for free again.
May 16th, 2005 at 8:18 am
d^2 - yes, that is true. You get an extra 2.5%. Hooray!
May 16th, 2005 at 8:50 am
Well, actually, except for the fact that you can’t have negative deaths so, the Gaussian approximation for the underlying distribution is not exact and, there is a little bit of skewing.
May 16th, 2005 at 10:22 am
Of course you can have negative ‘excess’ deaths - ie that less people died after the invasion than before. So the Gaussian approximation blah, blah is not skewed. jeez, it’s like I’m in a class of slow learners.
May 16th, 2005 at 10:37 am
Dear Simon, would that the no learners would be slow learners.
May 16th, 2005 at 11:05 am
Tim- I have looked at the Un report but can not see clear wording of the question related to war-related mortality. It simply indicates that a question was asked about people dead or missing in the past two years. Consequently I can’t see how you have determined that the UN study reflects only deaths due to direct military action. Is this made clear elsewhere?
May 16th, 2005 at 11:34 am
SimonC - Brilliant. But, there is an absolute lower bound and, it is a lot closer than the absolute upper bound so, the distribution is slightly skewed. Sorry, you’re still just a little too slow.
May 16th, 2005 at 11:52 am
What the?? What is the ‘absolute’ lower and upper bound? and how does this effect the Gaussian distribution?
May 16th, 2005 at 1:36 pm
Nell, you can find the wording of the question in the questionairre. Which I linked in my post above.
SimonC, the absolute upper bound is the population of Iraq nad the absolute lower bound is negative the number of deaths in the “before” period. These bounds are so far out into the tails that they can be ignored.
May 16th, 2005 at 1:48 pm
Reid: “Ian again - Karzai a founder of the Taliban?”,p> link Quote: When the Taliban emerged onto the political scene in the 1990s, Karzai was initially among their supporters. However, he later broke with the Taliban, citing distrust of their links to Pakistan. After the Taliban overthrew Rabbani in 1996, Karzai refused to serve as their U.N. ambassador.”
Read Simon Reston’s “Warriors of God” - published pre-9/11. In it Karazai is interviewed extensively and very sympathetically. He boasts about his role in the foundation of the Taliban while admitting that they later fell under the influence of undesirable elements.
May 16th, 2005 at 2:07 pm
Ian, what the Taliban were and what they became are two very different things. I find it very distasteful that you would try to assassinate the character of a man by trying to associate him with the unsavory elements of an organization that he grew to oppose because of those very unsavory elements. Good God, this is a man whose father was killed by these thugs, and who risked his life to rid his country of them. Have you no shame?
May 16th, 2005 at 2:11 pm
They can be. But, the distribution is still skewed, however small. Did you guys really think I was making anything but a flippant remark in the first place? We were arguing about the trivial difference between a 95% and a 97.5% confidence interval, for crying out loud.
May 16th, 2005 at 2:24 pm
Thanks Tim. That’s what I assumed. I just wanted to check if that’s what Reid meant. So the lower bound is -150000 and the upper about 26 million? I’d like to hear from Reid how these bounds would affect the Guassian distribution and how what his definition of ’slight’ is. Oh Reid, I’d lay-off calling people slow - especially after you got the ‘negative deaths’ thing wrong.
May 16th, 2005 at 2:55 pm
When a confidence interval is given, it means that the true Gaussian mean is located within the given bounds with probability 0.95.
This statement is false. The 95% statement only holds for the CI procedure, not for any specific realization. Once the interval is given, the true mean is either in inside or outside - no probability involved.
This is very elementary. It is almost painful having to explain it. Please do not count on me to educate you for free again.
Hmmm…
May 16th, 2005 at 3:04 pm
Thanks Tim- I should have seen that.
It still doesn’t look very clear though. For example there is a seperation of “war-related deaths” and disease, but what if a respondant considered a that a death was a war-related death by disease?
What was the definition of “war-related death” as presented to the respondants; did it explicitly exclude death by disease or other causes secondary to the war?
May 16th, 2005 at 3:11 pm
TallDave:
“One thing I think we can all agree on is that a freely elected democratic gov’t in Iraq is likely to work a lot harder to improve conditions than Saddam was ever going to.“
If we ever get a freely elected government in Iraq, then we will be able to test your assertion, TallDave. So far, however, we have not had any free elections in Iraq, and we do not have an elected government, so what we have now in Iraq does not meet either of the criteria for a freely elected government.
May 16th, 2005 at 3:15 pm
“I wonder if even the most vociferous Iraq war opponents would argue they were better off left to Saddam’s care“
It is so very tiresome to keep being bombarded with the same fallicies over and over and over and over again. There is no net positive effect if a brutal, corrupt dictator is replaced by an even more brutal, even more corrupt occupation.
May 16th, 2005 at 3:21 pm
“for women, the slight improvement in political rights has been offset by severe restrictions in other areas such as the right ot work.“
It is not all that clear that there has been any improvement, however slight, in political rights for women. It is 100% clear that overall the situation in Iraq for women and girls is the worst it has ever been in Iraq’s history.
May 16th, 2005 at 3:28 pm
Apparently the only argument Mr. Reid can offer to counter Mr. Rob’s comments is an ad hominem snipe that is empty of any real content:
“Rob is willing to let other darker skinned peole live in subhuman misery…“
And Mr. Reid appears willing to pretend that the even greater, even more widespread even more subhuman misery Iraqis are living in now is a great gift to them because it is not Saddam Hussein, but the United States that has brought that misery upon them.
May 16th, 2005 at 4:12 pm
“Did you guys really think I was making anything but a flippant remark in the first place?”
So, after calling people slow, complaining that this is very elementary and that it is almost painful having to explain it, you now say that yes, well, actually, you guys are correct but it doesn’t matter anyway because you weren’t being serious?
May 16th, 2005 at 4:16 pm
No, Simon. You were wrong. You did not read my post correctly. This has taken several posts to explain. If that is not slow, what would you call it?
Pro-bono: Thanks for once again proving that you get what you pay for.
May 16th, 2005 at 4:38 pm
Shirin - the present misery is being brought to them by the same jihadis who plowed a couple of makeshift missiles into two NYC office towers, killing and maiming 3000 innocents in the name of the God that they imagine condones such actions. It is not US troops who are setting off bombs in the middle of crowds, killing and mutilating Muslim schoolchildren with wild abandon. Maybe someday you will learn that there are completely evil people in this world and, if you do not rise up to defend the people affected when you are able and have a clear moral and legal right to do so, you are complicit in their crimes.
May 16th, 2005 at 4:44 pm
Plus, it is farcical to imagine that Iraqi suffering is more widespread now than under the tender mercies of self-described Saeed Hussein. Have you no knowledge of the mass graves unearthed in Iraq? Are you not aware of the sons’ depredations? Does the city of Halabja not resonate in your memory? Do you even have a clue?
May 16th, 2005 at 4:52 pm
How was I wrong?
May 16th, 2005 at 5:04 pm
Have you no shame?
you wrote with righteous fury that Karzai was not a founder of the Taliban. Faced with the truth you were unwilling to admit your error and resorted to rhetoric.
Have you no shame?
May 16th, 2005 at 5:06 pm
Reid
Are you aware than Shirin is an Iraqi?
May 16th, 2005 at 6:27 pm
More sad bluffing, Reid, pls.
May 16th, 2005 at 8:10 pm
Tim, where are the more complete results of the Johns Hopkins (Lancet) study?
You said:
The article I have reports only post-invasion “violent deaths”: 52 in Falluja and 21 outside of Falluja. I assume you also have a breakdown of those 21 outside Falluja. Otherwise, your number wouldn’t be 11.
May 16th, 2005 at 8:22 pm
Reid,
Sorry ‘dude’, but its the likes of you, Patriot and Tall dave who are seriously messed up (I suppose that my PhD indicates that, by refusing to accept the ‘conventional wisdom’ of the likes you espouse, that my views must be marginalised. This explains why journalists like William Safire, Judith Miller, Charles Krauthammer and George Will, who write imperial nonsense, are considered ‘mainstream’ whereas academics like Edward Herman, Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky, Mark Curtis, John Pilger and many others who demolish accredited lies are constantly ridiculed by the corporate media, or else are ignored entirely).
If you honestly believe that the Syrian occupation of Lebanon was somehow ‘illegal’ but that of the U.S. in Iraq is not, then you guys need serious pychiatric treatment. Preferably that you can afford. Moreover, there is absolutely no relationship between Syrian withdrawl from Lebanon and the myth of U.S. supporting ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. It makes me wonder how media dupes like you people ever decided to contribute to a blog (Tim’s) which openly challenges the so-called ‘conventional wisdom’ of the establishment media. Americans such as TallDave (and you, I also suspect), have been drip fed lies for years alluding to the myths of the ‘basic benevolence’ of western governments (in particular, the current Bush regime) and, as my link showed yesterday, send all inconvenient facts down the ‘memory hole’.
…This comes from obtaining the all of your information from media outlets lke CBS (owned by Westinghouse) or NBC (ownned by General Electric). Both are, in art, defense contractors who I suspect have profited handsomely from conflicts in the Middle East and Asia. Furthermore, its journalism like that of Safire and Miller, who write for the NY Times, that made the invasion of Iraq (aggression, actually) possible in the first place, based on serial lies gleaned from the likes of Achmed Chalabi. These were never challenged, and mostly not corrected. But Miller retains her place on the paper.
May 16th, 2005 at 9:26 pm
“If you honestly believe that the Syrian occupation of Lebanon was somehow ‘illegal’ but that of the U.S. in Iraq is not, then you guys need serious pychiatric treatment.”
While the original Syrian military intervention in Lebanon was authorised by the UN Security Council (including the US), there was a subsequent Security Council resolution calling for Syria to withdraw.
I’d need to check this but I beleive that that second resolution was under the Chapter of the UN Charter dealing with “peaceful resolution of international disputes” - the same chapter under which the various UN resolutions regarding Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories were passed.
You know, the ones the US and Israel insist are nonbinding.
Of course this will be Reid’s cue to respond with some variant of “Israel good. Syria Bad.”
May 16th, 2005 at 10:04 pm
Frank,the breakdown of the violent deaths is given inthe study.
May 16th, 2005 at 11:00 pm
Reid, TallDave, Patriot etc: I’d just like to raise a couple of questions with you as defenders of U.S. imperialism.
1. Why did the U.S./U.K so-called “coalition of the willing” use clearly dishonest reasoning (WMD, links with terror groups, responsibility for 9-11) for invading Iraq? If the main reason was to ’spread democracy in the Middle East’, why not come out and say this at the very beginning? Why use it only after all of the other excuses were shown to be bogus?
2. Why does the U.S. continue to bolster - usually with huge aid or military budgets - some of the most repressive regimes on Earth? Why doesn’t Bush include such ‘allies’ with atrocious human rights records as Colombia, Algeria, Uzbekistan, and Nigeria in his “axis of evil”? Why no claim to want real democracy in these lands? In each of these countries tens ad eve hundreds of thousands of people have been detained, tortured and murdered by the incumbent regimes. Why the silence over the murder of hundreds of protesters in Uzbekistan?
Why does the U.S. harbor known human rights violaters, terrorists and murderers? Prosper Avril and Emmanuel Constant (Haiti) are two such people who are living comfortably in the U.S., which refuses to extradite them to Haiti for charges of complicity in genocide, despite repeated attempts by Haitian authorities. There are plenty of other examples of military personnel from death squads in El Salvador, Honduras and Cambodia who have retired in the U.S. despite their role i the killng of civilians (usually in Florida or California).
May 17th, 2005 at 1:24 am
No, Ian, I am not aware of that. How are you so sure? And, I wasn’t resorting to rhetoric. I think the way you tried unfairly to defame a good man is utterly contemptible.
Jeff - There is no country on Earth for which you can’t dig up dirt if you make an effort. The French blew up an environmental protest ship. The Germans sold ready made chemical weapons plants to Saddam. The Russians - you could fill volumes. Yet, these are supposed to be the good guys in the present debate?
You and your kind talk as if the US lives in a vacuum, that every other country on Earth is kind and gentle, and that we always have a choice between good and bad rather than, as is so often the case, between bad and worse. And, you seem to imagine that there really are people here who do awful things just for the thrill of it or to add a few measly dollars to their huge fortunes.
It doesn’t work like that, Jeff. Mere acquisition of filthy lucre is not what motivates people in powerful positions. They are not demons with little horns growing out of their foreheads. These are people with families - not just sons and daughters but, nephews and nieces and whatnot who they care about deeply and who aren’t necessarily as well-to-do and whose futures are not as assured as their own. Your heroes, Chomsky, Pilger, et al. are paranoid lunatics.
There is no power on Earth that you cannot make look bad by focusing incessantly on the negative and always ignoring the positive. Nothing and nobody is 100% good or 100% bad. On balance, the US is far better than most. We don’t claim to be perfect but, we do our best and, when we err, we generally try to right the wrongs.
Just a final caveat, if you get all your news from raving paranoid lunatics, you will yourself become a raving paranoid lunatic. You are clearly well down the path already. Come back into the light. Branch out in your reading and, for crying out loud… grow up.
May 17th, 2005 at 1:52 am
Why does the UN official report or 24,000 deaths differ from the Lancet study?
May 17th, 2005 at 2:18 am
Because, John, the Lancet study was trumped up to say that 98,000 innocents had died based on statistical margins that were so large as to be virtually meaningless.
May 17th, 2005 at 2:24 am
with all that crap last time round regarding the non-parametric distribution, I think nitpicking about 2.5% is more than a bit ridiculous. Nobody here knows the shape of the bootstrapped probability function, so expressing interior confidence intervals to such fineness is unrefined BS.
May 17th, 2005 at 2:28 am
Are you aware than Shirin is an Iraqi
As far as I can tell Shirin does not live in Iraq right now (maybe she can answer that one for us.) Chalabi is also an Iraqi expat, just like Shirin. So is Kanan Makiya, who argued most forcefully for Husseins ouster. Not sure what that proves.
May 17th, 2005 at 2:33 am
Ried,
This is not about the US being evil and everyone else being good. Some people may be putting it in those terms, but I’m not. It’s easy to be cynical about the current US administrations reasons for the Iraq war, but it’s equally easy to be cynical about the reasons for France & Russia to have been against the war.
I’m naturally suspicious about all those in power, power corrupts remember, and even more suspicious about those who provide the money for the political campaigns of those in power. This suspicion allies pretty much to all countries.
If there is a reason for singling out the US, it’s simply that the US is the most powerful, ergo most dangerous. If this were the 19th century my greatest suspicions would be directed towards the UK.
“the US is far better than most”
May be you didn’t intend it, but this sounds a lot like “the US is better than everyone else”, a position that is likely to piss off a few people.
I don’t believe I’m concentrating on just the negative results, rather I believe, given imperfect information and processing, that the Iraq war has been detremental overall. More importantly I can’t help but wonder if there was not a better way.
May 17th, 2005 at 2:39 am
“Why does the UN official report or 24,000 deaths differ from the Lancet study?“
Mainly because, as Tim pointed out, the UN report covers a much shorter time period. The UN report covers the time period of March 19, 2003-April, 2004, whereas the report published in the Lancet covers March 19,2003-September, 2004.
May 17th, 2005 at 2:42 am
academics like..John Pilger…Gore Vidal
um…excuse me? academics?
If you honestly believe that the Syrian occupation of Lebanon was somehow ‘illegal’ but that of the U.S. in Iraq is not
Per UN resolutions that remains exactly correct.
obtaining the all of your information
Surely not all our information. Why do you imagine John Pilger and Gore Vidal to be inaccessible to US readers?
May 17th, 2005 at 2:50 am
Speaking of Gore Vidal, how is that Afghan pipeline coming along? Have they broken ground yet?
May 17th, 2005 at 2:56 am
“As far as I can tell Shirin does not live in Iraq right now“
Oh really? And how exactly can you tell? And if I don’t, so what? Does it make what I have to say about Iraq less valid than what some American has to say who has never set foot in the country?
“Chalabi is n Iraqi expat, just like Shirin. So is Kanan Makiya, who argued most forcefully for Husseins ouster.“
Two opportunists who lied their tongues out of their heads, cheated and stole like common criminals, who have proven to be completely out of touch with Iraqi reality, and who are among the most despised political figures in the country - whose only following in Iraq consists, in fact, of their own people who rode in with them on the back of American tanks.
“Not sure what that proves.“
It proves exactly nothing.
May 17th, 2005 at 3:06 am
IF Shirin is an Iraqi, he is apparently on the side of the bomb throwers who are murdering MUSLIM children.
Perhaps he is an unreformed Baathist who saw all his perks washed away by the advent of democracy for the people of Iraq.
May 17th, 2005 at 3:08 am
We tried other ways for 8 years and with enormous suffering for the people of Iraq. They all failed.
May 17th, 2005 at 3:10 am
And extrapolates linearly that the deaths are proportional. That only works if the deaths are at a constant rate throughout the interval, a dubious proposition at best.
May 17th, 2005 at 3:51 am
“Chalabi is n Iraqi expat, just like Shirin. So is Kanan Makiya“
Just for the record, Chalabi and Kan’an Makiya are not even remotely like Shirin.
May 17th, 2005 at 3:58 am
“IF Shirin is an Iraqi, he is apparently on the side of the bomb throwers who are murdering MUSLIM children.“
Which bomb throwers would that be - the ones who throw one ton bombs out of airplanes?
Oh - and make that IRAQI children they are killing, Reid. Many of the children who have been killed by those one ton bombs, missiles, and other death-dealing weapons have been Christian children - like the entire family that was among the 26 civilians known killed by those bomb throwers when they threw down three bombs on a building in the resential area of Mansour because they thought there might be a chance Saddam was in one of the buildings. Or like all the Christian children they have killed in Mosul, and in Tal Afar - just to name a few that come immediately to mind.
“Perhaps he is an unreformed Baathist who saw all his perks washed away by the advent of democracy for the people of Iraq.“
When you cannot argue the issues, go ad hominem all over your opponent, right, Reid?
May 17th, 2005 at 4:06 am
their own people who rode in with them on the back of American tanks.
As far as I know, Makiya is teaching at Brandeis, not riding around on tanks. Not sure what opportunities are meant to await him in the new Iraq.
go ad hominem all over your opponent, right, Reid?
This is hilarious.
May 17th, 2005 at 4:09 am
responsibility for 9-11
Was never argued by any administration figure. Illegal WMD programs and support for terror groups remain fact, forgetting the many other violations of the 91 ceasefire (firing on US/UK air patrols, kicking UN inspectors out of the country etc etc etc.)
May 17th, 2005 at 4:10 am
And extrapolates linearly that the deaths are proportional.
Indeed. A completely idiotic assumption.
May 17th, 2005 at 4:12 am
BTW Tim, does the study vindicate your earlier notion that 30,000 Iraqis may have died from aerial bombardment? Because I suspect it doesn’t.
May 17th, 2005 at 4:40 am
BTW Tim, does the study vindicate the Lancet’s conclusion that 30,000 excess infant deaths likely occurred as a result of the war? Because I suspect it doesn’t do that either.
May 17th, 2005 at 4:55 am
“Makiya is teaching at Brandeis, not riding around on tanks.“
I was speaking figuratively, Telluride, not literally.
May 17th, 2005 at 5:03 am
I was speaking figuratively, Telluride, not literally.
Maybe you can elaborate on your figure of speech. You seem especially sensitive to ad hominem comments, yet you call Makiya an “opportunist” who lied his tongue out of his head, and who cheated and stole like a common criminal. Care to back any of those claims up? To the rest of us, Makiya is a highly regarded academic and the author of two award winning books on Iraq. You seem to think he is some kind of thief and a liar. Care to substantiate either libelous comment?
BTW, what you have in common with Makiya and Chalabi is that you are all Iraqis. I’m glad we all agree such ‘credentials’ are broadly irrelevant.
May 17th, 2005 at 5:04 am
“responsibility for 9-11…
Was never argued by any administration figure.“
Perhaps not, but enough administration figures implied it so strongly and so persistently that a majority of Americans actually bought into it, and a shocking number apparently still believe it.
“Illegal WMD programs and support for terror groups remain fact.“
1) Iraq dismantled its unconventional weapons programs more than a decade before Bush decided to invade and take over the country.
2) Support for what terror groups? When? Where? In what way?
May 17th, 2005 at 5:05 am
Tim,
Frank had good reasons to ask. It’s not broken down in sufficient detail in the study. They don’t say whether the deaths were in Fallujah or ex Fallujah.
The only reason you can make your calculation is because Mike sent the authors an email and they clarified the matter.
The “war related” deaths figure in the UNDP is indeed not directly comparable. It includes war related deaths pre spring 2003, and includes non-violent war related death.
Also, you exclude the two “unknowns” and the regime caused death and we don’t know the cause of the pre-war death. Furthermore, the 7 murders may be “war related”.
I completely disagree with your contention that the 100,000 figure is vindicated. War related deaths are around 24,000 according to UNDP and the other categories (particularly disease and accidents) are too uncertain to say much about.
May 17th, 2005 at 5:08 am
Which bomb throwers would that be - the ones who throw one ton bombs out of airplanes?
Shirin, who do you imagine is doing most of the killing in Iraq nowadays? Most of the dying? “American soldiers” answers neither question.
May 17th, 2005 at 5:18 am
I said:
One thing I think we can all agree on is that a freely elected democratic gov’t in Iraq is likely to work a lot harder to improve conditions than Saddam was ever going to.
Hmmm, apparently that was optimistic. Well, if you can’t agree to that, I can only feel sorry for you. Reality is not your friend, and you are no friend to the Iraqi people.
May 17th, 2005 at 5:23 am
Perhaps not, but enough administration figures implied it so strongly and so persistently that a majority of Americans actually bought into it, and a shocking number apparently still believe it.
This is a picture perfect straw man fallacy. Addressing a claim no responsible party has advanced.
2) Support for what terror groups? When? Where? In what way?
Abu Nidal. HAMAS. PLF/Abu Abbas. Mujahedin-e-Khalq. Salman Pak. $25,000 bounties to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. Please acquaint yourself with the terms of the 1991 cease fire /UNSCR 687. ANY of these facts constitutes a violation and a casus belli.
You also seem not to care much about SAMs routinely targeting US and UK surveillance aircraft. Also a violation of 687, alsoa casus belli. Or the several expulsions of UN inspectors, also a violation, also a casus belli.
Any nuclear weapons program post 1991 would have been a point blank violation of 687 and a casus belli.
May 17th, 2005 at 5:26 am
Jeff,
You can claim that “shreds” the idea that the U.S. does more for democracy than anyone else, but your claim really just shreds the notion you have any grasp on reality. Japan, Germany, S Korea, Taiwan, Iraq, Afghanistan. None of those countries would be democracies if not for US military force and benevolence. The essential flaw in your argument, oft-pointed out to you and obvious to anyone possessing a passing familiarity with history, is that while every country has relations with unsavory (even brutal) regimes, you’d be hard-pressed to name any other country that can claim to have stood up so many free democratic gov’ts.
May 17th, 2005 at 5:27 am
“who do you imagine is doing most of the killing in Iraq nowadays?“
Without a question occupation forces and their Iraqi proxy forces have done and continue to do most of the killing, and destroying. The fact that the vast majority of their actions and the death and destruction they cause do not reach the media does not alter that fact. And even if they were NOT doing most of the killing, as the occupying power the U.S. is responsible for the safety and security of the human beings and property under their occupation. They have done a spectacularly bad job there to say the least.
“Most of the dying?“
That is obvious. And yet even though U.S. forces are more and more sending underequipped, undertrained Iraqis out to do their dirty work, and act as cannon fodder for them, Americans forces are still dying at a steady rate. What a shame it all is, really. All that death, all that pain, all that destruction because enough people believed enough lies.
May 17th, 2005 at 5:33 am
Writeback,
With all deference to your PhD (long may it boost your ego), as is generally the case with academics it does not seem to have imbued you with any understanding of morality or reality. The Syrians are not there to stand up a democratic Lebanese gov’t; they are there for precisely the opposite reason. That is a real, moral difference, and the most important. Like yur idols, all you can offer in defense of your position is ahistorical amoral sophistry.
May 17th, 2005 at 5:34 am
You also seem not to care much about SAMs routinely targeting US and UK surveillance aircraft. Also a violation of 687,
correction, a violation here of UNSCR 688, and 707.
link
May 17th, 2005 at 5:40 am
The fact that the vast majority of their actions and the death and destruction they cause do not reach the media does not alter that fact.
Right, I guess we’ll have to go on your say-so. From what country are you posting again? On what media beyond the media in Iraq are you basing your information? because it doesnt seem very well supported by any known data.
May 17th, 2005 at 5:46 am
writeback, ph. d seems to be a Gore vidal enthusiast. Vidal’s position is that the Afghan war had nothing to do with Al Qaeda but rather was a cover for a pipeline project that has yet to materialise. Vidal also believes Bush had foreknowledge of the 9/11 plot.
For his part, Pilger vastly overstated the death toll related to sanctions, if we are to believe the lancet study at all.
May 17th, 2005 at 5:48 am
Without a question occupation forces and their Iraqi proxy forces have done and continue to do most of the killing, and destroying.
Argument from assertion, followed by empty editorial. Please document any of your numerous outlandish claims.
May 17th, 2005 at 5:51 am
Ian,
Tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands more Iraqis are dead than would have been killed by the Ba’athists had they remained in power.
Oh, so your psychic abilities now extend to predictions of what Saddam would have done? Great, you tell the families of the 300,000 Iraqis in mass graves and the million killed in the Iran-Iraq war that they were better off taking their chances with Saddam. I hope your clairvoyance will also enable to you to dodge their angry blows afterward.
that democracy will grow out of the barrel of a gun.
It’s been done before. Japan. Germany. Doesn’t anyone read history anymore? They’ve already held elections in Iraq. Doesn’t anyone follow current events? I suppose reality is rather passe these days.
for women, the slight improvement in political rights has been offset by severe restrictions in other areas such as the right ot work.
Yes, it has to come to this: the Hussein regime, who operated a network of state-sanctioned official rape rooms, is now being touted as an advocate of women’s right to work. Maybe you consider it “working” when Uday raped them and, as was his wont, paid their families afterward.
May 17th, 2005 at 6:01 am
Shirin, still waiting to hear how Kanan Makiya is a thief and a liar, particularly the first charge. Why stop there? Do you suppose he cheats on his taxes and beats his children? I see no reason to suppose otherwise (I’m appealing here to your love of ad ignorantium fallacies.)
May 17th, 2005 at 8:15 am
Oh, so your psychic abilities now extend to predictions of what Saddam would have done? Great
Hey, there no better than your psychic abilities that allow you to state with absolute confidence that while conditions in Iraq are worse now than before the war they’ll improve.
ou tell the families of the 300,000 Iraqis in mass graves and the million killed in the Iran-Iraq war that they were better off taking their chances with Saddam.
Tell you what, you go first. Go tell the people who lost family members in the invasion that it was for their own good.
the Hussein regime, who operated a network of state-sanctioned official rape rooms, is now being touted as an advocate of women’s right to work.
Iraq had the highest level of women’s literacy in the middle east and the highest level of women in the workforce. The majority of doctors in Iraq were women.
Mussolini made the traisn run on time. hitler built the autobahn. Lee Kwan Yu banned chewing gum. Dictators sometimes do good things. This doesn;t justify their other actions but it’s a fact.
May 17th, 2005 at 10:44 am
I am confident that the Lancet (100,000) and ILCS (24,000) figures are consistent because Lancet covers a longer time (L = 18 m v ICLS = 5 m) frame and the larger set of mortality (L = total attrition v ICLS = war-violence).
There are two matters that I am unclear about.
The Lancet estimate of the total number of (Fallujah-excluded) military mortalities which I read them as giving ~15,000. This is rougly equivalent to Iraq Body Count estimate. But it implies a Iraq’s excess demographic attrition level of ~85,000. This seems to be inconsistent with the claim that the bulk of excess deaths are due to coalition military violence. Is this correct?
Lancet futher estimates, but excludes as an outlier, that 37% of all post-war mortalities occurred in Fallujah ie assuming the Fallujah cluster sample is representative this implies that more than half of Iraq’s military death toll has occurred in Fallujah. If this cluster is included the Lancet estimate of Iraq’s post-war mortality is blown out to 200,000, right? Assuming Fallujah has been a blood-bath this would explain the upsurge in insurgent attacks - simply Suuni revenge killings against soft Shiite targets.
The other issue is whether ICLS’s ~24,000 mortality estimate is only for direct war-inflicted battle deaths or whether it covers indirect war-related mortality due to social break down and so on. If the latter is the case, then this clearly implies Lancet overestimates. Can anyone clarify?
I would be grateful if numerical and lexical experts (ie those who can count and read better than me!) will assist me on this one.
May 17th, 2005 at 10:49 am
Correction:
May 17th, 2005 at 10:53 am
By any objective measure other than jihadis blowing up people in the streets, conditions in Iraq now are far better than they were prior to the invasion. But, by all means, don’t let facts get in your way. Shirin, who I’d bet a lot is no Iraqi, makes ‘em up as he pleases.
May 17th, 2005 at 10:57 am
My previous message was addressed to Ian.
May 17th, 2005 at 11:36 am
“Tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands more Iraqis are dead than would have been killed by the Ba’athists had they remained in power.”
Ian, this is like saying that at large, unidentified serial killers pose no further threat to society, so long as they appear to be in the midst of a several year lull in their murdering.
You and I have been over this ground before. When we did, it was over your statement that there was “every probability that Saddam or his successors would have been overthrown by a coup or a popular uprising in the next few years.”
You claim that regime change has killed far more Iraqis than Saddam and the Baathist would have, had they been left in power, while knowing that Saddam’s butcher’s bill had reached an estimated 300,000 Iraqis.
You claim that Saddam and his sons would likely have been overthrown in the near future, even though Saddam had ruled for nearly three decades, and there was absolutely no evidence his rule was threatened internally even when regime change was imminent.
You evidently believe that a “popular uprising” that succeeded in removing Saddam would not result in tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths, even though the insurgency we are currently witnessing would likely be a mere shadow of the carnage resulting from the populace taking on Saddam’s security forces.
None of this makes any sense. Before disparaging the ” what if’s,” of those who supported regime change, you should take stock of just how flimsy and illogical are your own.
Saddam had succeeded in imprinting on the Iraqi people the stark reality of their plight; endure economic ruin and the murder of potential threats in the hundreds and thousands each year to ensure Saddam’s continued hold on power, or rise up and die by the tens and hundreds of thousands in an attempt to remove him.
That is the status quo you have been advocating Ian. Make no mistake about it.
May 17th, 2005 at 12:19 pm
[Post deleted. Please do not make personal attacks on other commentors. TL]
May 17th, 2005 at 2:05 pm
Ian,
Of course I didn’t “state with absolute confidence that while conditions in Iraq are worse now than before the war they’ll improve”, I said:
One thing I think we can all agree on is that a freely elected democratic gov’t in Iraq is likely to work a lot harder to improve conditions than Saddam was ever going to.
No psychic ability needed.
Go tell the people who lost family members in the invasion that it was for their own good.
We don’t need to, surveys say Iraqis believe getting rid of Saddam was worth it.
Dictators sometimes do good things. This doesn;t justify their other actions but it’s a fact.
You’re right, it doesn’t justify their actions, or make much of an argument for leaving them in power.
May 17th, 2005 at 3:23 pm
Telluride, I know this will come as a huge shock to you, but I do not spend all my time sitting breathlessly by the computer with nothing to do but wait for you to post something for me to respond to. Sometimes I have other things to do at a computer that are more pressing - or even more interesting. Sometimes I am even away from a computer for a stretch of time. Believe it or not, now and then, I even sleep! And sometimes I simply do not have time to respond to everything that is thrown my way, and I have to pick and choose to what I will respond and when I will do so.
So, Telluride, don’t waste your time reminding me sarcastically every few minutes that you are still waiting to hear my response. I will respond to you if I decide to, and when I have time to do so. Please do feel free, however, to remind me politely if I have not responded within a day or so.
“You seem especially sensitive to ad hominem comments“
I am not at all sensitive to ad hominem comments directed at me. I am particularly non-sensitive to them when they come at me from someone who knows nothing at all about me, and most particularly when they bear no resemblance at all to reality. Their use as a debate technique is, however rather fascinating to me, and it is a mystery how this technique is supposed to advance the users’ arguments.
“yet you call Makiya an “opportunist” who lied his tongue out of his head, and who cheated and stole like a common criminal.“
I believe I said that about both Ahmad Chalabi and Kan’an Makiya, though I notice you do not challenge me regarding Chalabi. Can that be because you actually know something about Chalabi?
There is a difference between commenting on a public person’s character based on a known history, and taking personal pot shots, or making nasty personal accusations against someone you are arguing with, particularly when you know nothing whatsoever about that person.
“Care to back any of those claims up?“
I am sorry, Telluride, but at the moment I do not have a lot of time, and I have something else I would rather respond to.
I will say that I may have been somewhat unfair in lumping Chalabi and Kan’an together. They are not exactly alike in every way. I have no reliable evidence that Kan’an Makiya has stolen hundreds of millions of dollars in three different countries. Kan’an may not be as big a liar as Chalabi is - in fact, he may actually believe most of what he says. That he is an opportunist who has allied himself with whomever and whatever he thought he could gain from - including Saddam Hussein’s regime - is well known. It is also clear that he was from the beginning and remains completely out of touch with the reality of what he was advocating.
“To the rest of us, Makiya is a highly regarded academic…“
Highly regarded by whom? His fellow academics in his field of specialty, or lay persons whose politics he appeals to?
“the author of two award winning books on Iraq.“
Lots of books win awards.
“Care to substantiate either libelous comment?“
You should find out what libel is before you throw the term around.
“BTW, what you have in common with Makiya and Chalabi is that you are all Iraqis. I’m glad we all agree such ‘credentials’ are broadly irrelevant.“
You made the comment that Kan’an Makiya and Ahmad Chalabi are Iraqis “just like Shirin”. No, they are not.
May 17th, 2005 at 3:34 pm
“By any objective measure other than jihadis blowing up people in the streets, conditions in Iraq now are far better than they were prior to the invasion.“
Great! I am very happy to hear it. Please name 10 objective measures by which conditions are far better now than they were prior to the invasion.
May 17th, 2005 at 4:44 pm
“Abu Nidal.”
Oh yes! The well worn loving relationship between Saddam and Abu Nidal about which so many claims have been made (especially post-9/11/01) and for which so little -i.e. zero - actual evidence exists. According to Jane’s, relations were so warm and cozy between Saddam and Abu Nidal, that the latter had to sneak into Iraq using a fake Yemeni passport, was placed under house arrest when discovered, and then assassinated by the Mukhabarat, for involvement in a plot to overthrow Saddam’s regime.
Oh - and Abu Nidal had, despite a few wild claims to the contrary, absolutely no connection whatsoever to Al Qa`eda, bin Laden, or any similar group or individual. In fact, he was anathema to such groups, as was Saddam.
“HAMAS.”
Really? How interesting! I would love to see some evidence for THAT!
“PLF/Abu Abbas.”
Abu Abbas’ entry into Iraq took place in 1994, years after he had renounced terrorism, and become a participant in the “peace process”. During the ’90’s the State of Israel admitted him as a VIP, and allowed him to move freely throughout the Occupied Territories, and to enter Israel. Shall we also bomb Israel into shock and awe for that terrible crime?
“Mujahedin-e-Khalq.“
Ah yes - the cultishly fanatical Iranian group that focuses exclusively on opposition to the current regime in Iran. The group which the Bush administration has worked very hard to cultivate as an ally despite the fact that it is on the State Department’s official list of terrorist groups. The group that the Bush administration has proposed renaming to get around the embarrassing fact that it is on said list. How terrible that Saddam allowed such a group to operate from his territory! Why, that alone justifies attacking Iraq!
“Salman Pak.“
Ah, the hazards of googling for information when you don’t know what you are talking about! Salman Pak is not a terrorist group, it is a place in Iraq about 20 or so miles from Baghdad.
“$25,000 bounties to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.“
This is incorrect. Saddam Hussein gave stipends to the families of all Palestinians who were killed by the state of Israel, not just to the families of suicide bombers. As anyone would know who attended one of the ceremonies in which these stipends were given out the purpose was not to “support terrorism”, but blatant self-aggrandisement for Saddam Hussein as a supporter of the Palestinian cause and leader of the Arab world. Awarding stipends to the families of all individuals killed in a conflict is a very ineffecient way to support terrorism. Had he intended to support terrorism he would have gotten far better return on investment had he donated one tenth that money directly to terrorist organizations.
“Please acquaint yourself with the terms of the 1991 cease fire /UNSCR 687. ANY of these facts constitutes a violation and a casus belli.“
Please acquaint yourself with reality. The basis is a UNSC resolution, and they constitute a casus belli only if the UNSC decides they do. The UNSC clearly decided they did not. The U.S. invasion of Iraq was, simply, illegal under international law.
“You also seem not to care much about SAMs routinely targeting US and UK surveillance aircraft. Also a violation of 687, alsoa casus belli.“
Ummmmmmmmmm - no. A legal - or even logical - explanation should not be necessary, but if you insist, I will provide one.
“Or the several expulsions of UN inspectors, also a violation, also a casus belli.“
There were no expulsions of UN inspectors, but even if there had been, those would have been a casus belli from the POV of the UN only when they took place, not years and years later when the Bush administration decided to try to use them as an excuse for a war of aggression.
“Any nuclear weapons program post 1991 would have been a point blank violation of 687 and a casus belli.“
This is utterly irrelevant, since it is clear based on solid evidence that there was no nuclear weapons program post 1991.
May 17th, 2005 at 5:39 pm
Reid 17/5/2005 10:53:17
By any objective measure other than jihadis blowing up people in the streets, conditions in Iraq now are far better than they were prior to the invasion. But, by all means, don’t let facts get in your way. Shirin, who I’d bet a lot is no Iraqi, makes ‘em up as he pleases.
so presumably child mortality; malnutrition; electricity production, access to clean water; crime rates and unemployment levels aren’t “objective measures”.
It’s alreayd been linked to here on a couple of occasiosn so it shouldn’t be too hard for yu to find a copy of the Brookings Institute’s “Iraq Index”.
May 17th, 2005 at 6:24 pm
What I find most amusing amongst the imperial denialists who are contaminating this site is the fact that they have the right to judge the value of human life within the context of ‘triage’ (e.g. using puny arguments to assess whether the death toll had Saddam remained in power would have been higher than under the current brutal U.S. occupation). But these same pundits flush down their memory holes all of the examples where the U.S. is and has bolstered regimes under the full knowledge that they were systematically torturing and murdering their own citizens. I have an appropriate word for you people: HYPOCRITES. Why aren’t you debating how many lives the U.S. would ’save’ if it had invaded Indonesia during the terror reign of Suharto, one of the biggest torturers and mass murderers of the last century. Instead, the U.S. supported him virtually until the very end in full knowledge of his crimes. Why no debate over the deaths of thousands of Chileans under Pinochet, another U.S. client. Or the thousands of dead in Colombia under Uribe, still another U.S. stooge. Or Abesanjo in Nigeria. The list is endless. The U.S. supported Pol Pot at the U.N. when they were fully aware of the ‘killing fields’ and the genocide his regime had committed (this, after the secret bombing campaign under Nixon and Kissinger had left 600,000 dead in that country). The U.S. has claimed that Algeria is a proactive partner in the non-existent ‘war on terror’; more than 100,000 people have been slaughtered by this regime since it assumed power in 1990. There are ‘good Kurds’ in Iraq and ‘bad Kurds’ in Turkey, which has turned more than 3000 villages into virtual dungeons and tortured and killed more than 50,000 since 1993. Where are the public U.S. condemnations? And now Uzbekistan, where the Bush government remains alarmingly silent over the rising death toll and the killing of those opposed to Karimov’s warped rule. Why the silence? Because he’s another U.S. client.
Gore Vidal’s latest book, “Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia” is a relevant read for the Reid’s, Mike’s, TallDave’s and their ilk who have paraded their ignorance on this site along with their twelve hour memories. Guys, the fact is this: the current U.S regime couldn’t give a damn about democracy or human rights (not that previous ones could, either). Afghans, Iraqi’s, Colombians, in fact any third world inhabitants outside of the established classes are UNPEOPLE according to this mob. Instead of empty argments about the U.S. as a ‘benevolent superpower’ and similar such garbage, its about time that you confronted the current hypocrisy of U.S. actions with the facts on the ground. Debating with you is an utter waste of time because you see the world through a one-way moral mirror. We attack them, and its business as usual. They attack us, and the world is coming to a end. TallDave calls genocide as a result of ‘our’ actions ‘unfortunate’. That’s it. ‘Unfortunate’.
The only redress for the apologists is to label those who underscore their hypocrisy as ‘anti-Americans’. The Germans first honed this smear before World War II. Those who criticized the atrocities of the Third Reich were labeled ‘anti-German’ which was enough to marginalize them. Similarly, the imperial denialists who have somehow found their way into Tim’s site are implying the same. Moreover, as Anatol Lieven explains in his book, “America: Right or Wrong”, the same tactic is used to disarm academic critics of U.S. foreign policy. Esteemed scholars like Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, or scribes like John Pilger and Robert Fisk are attacked as being ‘loony’ and ‘deluded’ or else are ignored entirely by the mainstream right wing press. On the other hand, unrestrained apologists of U.S. power like Charles Krauthamer, William Safire, Thomas Friedman, Chris Hitchens, Judith Miller and George Will write columns for the mainstream U.S. print media. The strategy of ‘marginalization’ of dissenting voices could not be more clear. Sadly, from some of the opinions I read here, its obvious that the ‘drip-feeding lies’ system of mainstream U.S. journalism has worked very well for people who I would otherwise think are educated and intelligent. They have swallowed whole a lifetime set of myths that have promoted the U.S. as a mostly peaceful nation and a bringer of democracy to oppressed masses around the world. The must have been shocked to see that much of the rest of the world does not share this vision. It does not take much effort to ‘read between the lnes’, and from there to see the truth, as ugly as it is, staring at you. But what I have learned from some of the contributors here is that they truly believe the hype and propoganda I alluded to earlier. They honestly think that the main U.S. objective in Iraq was to spread democracy and freedom, when there are reams of evidence contradicting this that are not hard to find. They remind me of alcoholics who, in the face of their obvious affliction, claim that the ‘opposite of everything is true’.
May 17th, 2005 at 8:10 pm
Personal attack? I was just wondering why someone using a Comcast email account was pretending to be posting from Iraq. I take exception to the charge of using a “personal attack”.
I didn’t use a single epithet or insult, just an inquiry (heck, I even offered a suggestion to aid his/her subterfuge - quite sporting, no?). I sure as heck didn’t bandy about a personal insult as charged as “imperial denialist” or “hypocrite”.
I guess I’ll have to follow the posts here a little longer to see what worldviews, and questions, are encouraged and which are suppressed.
May 17th, 2005 at 10:18 pm
Hi Jack,
your questions are good ones. It is true that the two surveys aren’t directly comparable for a number of reasons, though I do draw a different conclusion from Tim’s.
The UNDP survey included a question on deaths with 5 categories: traffic accident, disease, pregnancy, war related and other.
The interpretation of these categories is unclear, it depends on how the question was explained and how it was understood. If respondents thought a particular death was war related, they could have classified it as such, even it was from accident or disease or crime.
Furthermore, no distinction was made for before and after the invasion. Even if the number of deaths pre-invasion due to war-related causes is small (rather than negligible) the impact on excess death will be significant. 2,500 deaths in the total that occurred before the invasion would subtract 2,500 from the post-invasion total, and 5,000 from the excess death figure.
There is a further apparent difference, namely in the Lancet study there is a requirement that the household member in question lived in the household before they died. This seems to not be the case in the UNDP survey, and would allow the counting of deaths in prisons and army barracks excluded from the Lancet figure.
The Lancet summary doesn’t actually say that the bulk of excess death is due to coalition violence. It says that violence accounted for most of the excess death (which is true based on their numbers with or without Fallujah) and coalition airstrikes for most violent deaths. That latter statement is only true when including Fallujah, as there are only 6 reported bombing deaths ex Fallujah (with 1 reported incident responsible for half that total).
The composition of the violent deaths post-war in the Lancet study by cause is as follows:
6 coalition bombings
3 coalition small arms fire
2 anti-coalition forces
2 unknown
1 former regime during the invasion
7 crime
Tim’s tried to break this down into “war related” and not “war related” classifying 11 of those 21 ex Fallujah deaths as “war related” and the other 10 as not “war related”.
link
Here you’ll find a detailed explanation for what to make of the Lancet findings. The findings for the categories disease and accident are not statistically significant, and violence is up by several ten thousand.
Phrased like that it’s comparable to the UNDP figures, though the latter do indicate that even violence appears to have been overestimated by roughly a factor 2 by the extremely small Lancet study.
The UNDP survey provides very little information on the composition of violent deaths. It does say that 12% of war related deaths were less than 18 years of age, ie about 3000 deaths.
Considering the young population of Iraq, that’s a hefty skewing towards adults. They don’t mention women, but it’s not unreasonable to expect the majority of the deaths to be of adult males (the age limit in the Lancet study is 15 rather than 18, it’s not clear how great a proportion of the 3000 deaths for under 18 were also under 15) and of combatants. It’s also not unreasonable to expect a majority of innocent civilians to have been killed at the hands of Baathists/terrorists, a quick overview of the kinds of deaths recorded by the Iraqi body count would tend to confirm that: link
(just look through the first page and you’ll find in excess of 90% of innocent civilians due to insurgent/terrorist activity).
My view is therefore that the UNDP indicates a lower level of carnage than the very unreliable (due to its small sample size) Lancet study, and while it doesn’t break down the composition of the deaths, it appears reasonable to me that extrapolated to now, we are talking about 20000 insurgent/terrorist deaths, 10000 deaths among civilians caused by Baathists/terrorists, a few thousand innocent civilians killed by the coalition and a few thousand dead among the Iraqi security forces.
May 17th, 2005 at 11:07 pm
Kerry, I wasn’t referring to you. Sorry if it appeared that way. Its just that I get a bit annoyed when someone (Reid) with virtually no knowledge of international affairs calls me a “messed up dude” simply because I dare challenge the standard establishment/elite version of world events.
Some of the comments I have seen here astound me in their simplicity. For instance, that people swallow the myth that the U.S. is promoting democracy in the Middle East and elsewhere, while conveniently ignoring the many examples which completely contradict this (e.g. one need go no further than several neighbouring countries and U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf: Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait etc. to see the hypocrisy). Furthermore, they try and suggest that the slaughter of up to 100,000 civlians (the UNPEOPLE I refererred to in my last post) was somehow a good trade off with the number of people who may have been killed had Saddam remained in power. Why do the likes of Reid and TallDave restrict this trade-off to Iraq? Why not apply to to the vast number of rogue regimes the U.S. props up because they support its business and military interests? Why are the lives of civilians in U.S.-supported military regimes any different? Its amazing how people here are arguing over pedantic details of how many people the coalition actually slaughtered, as if to say, “Hey! We probably only killed 50,000 Iraqis! That is less than half of the Lancet estimate! This proves our humanitarian/freedom agenda!” and similar nonsense.
The person who makes the most sense on ths thread is Shirin, and this is because he sees thorough the propoganda and transparent myths. One needs only read the aims and objectives of the ‘Project for the New American Century’ (2000), authored by a veritable list of who’s who in the Bush-Cheney administration, to understand exactly what the real aims and agenda of this administration are.
May 18th, 2005 at 12:01 am
Their use as a debate technique is, however rather fascinating to me
Too funny. Every single one of your posts contains ad hominems. Even if your outrageous libel concerning Makiya (”thief”) were true, it would be an ad hominem irrelevance, to say nothing of your more recent ad hominems regarding his opportunism etc. Your own touting of Iraq credentials is of course also an ad hominem, in the form of irrelevant authority, unless you are posting from Iraq and your testimony is direct. I havent seen any ad hominems directed at you, only replies to the fellow who touted your [irrelevant] Iraqi credentials. This entire sidebar concerns the sterile fact that you are ostensibly Iraqi, and so are those with whom you disagree. No need for defensive posturing or touchiness; I’m not claiming you’re a thief and an opportunist after all, just an Iraqi (maybe you aren’t an Iraqi?) But of course, you’re not sensitive to ad hominems anyway so maybe I am imagining the touchiness :).
Re terrorism: Salman Pak was the site of a terrorist training camp throughout Hussein’s regime. The MEK is a terror group whose sponsorship violates 687 . I’m glad you are willing to admit that Hussein sponsored them contra 687. I am also glad you admit that Abu Nidal is a terrorist, and that Hussein hosted him in Iraq contra 687. So we seem to agree that Hussein violated at least this term of 687. Progress!
“There were no expulsions of UN inspectors”
This is completely false. US UNSCOM arms inspectors were ordered to leave Iraq in 1997. In 1998, Hussein suspended cooperation with reintroduced inspectors in August and expelled more UNSCOM inspectors in October. Please note any timeline relating to 687 non-compliance:
link
Of course, since contra your assertions Hussein DID kick UN inspectors out in 1998 (as well as violate every other term relating to unfettered access to his weapons sites) it certainly constituted a violation of 687.
I would love to hear a legal or logical explanation of why SAMs should be permitted to target UN and US surveillance aircraft guaranteed unlimited access to Iraqi airspace by UNSC resolution. I am not even addressing the legality of no-fly zones, the product of other UNSC resolutions you seem not to care about:
1137 - “”Condemns the continued violations by Iraq” of previous UN resolutions, including its “implicit threat to the safety of” aircraft operated by UN inspectors and its tampering with UN inspector monitoring equipment.
link
May 18th, 2005 at 12:06 am
Heiko, you never cease to amaze me. You dismiss results from the Lancet study that are backed with real data because they are “not statistically significant”, while advancing your own numbers which you just pluck out of the air. Your breakdown of the ILCS numbers is pure fantasy and contradicted by other parts of the study.
I suggest you read chapter 5 that looks at people with chronic injuries due to the war (you know, missing limbs and the like):
May 18th, 2005 at 12:07 am
Jeff Harvey, claiming the US sponsors other autocrats is a tu quoque fallacy. It says nothing whatsoever about Hussein or Iraq. Identifying supposed inconsistencies in foreign policy is a rather shallow exercise.
May 18th, 2005 at 12:11 am
“I was just wondering why someone using a Comcast email account was pretending to be posting from Iraq.“
I don’t know where you got the idea that I have been pretending to post from Iraq, or anywhere else for that matter. Perhaps you would be good enough to point out where I did that.
On a technical note, most ISP’s, including Comcast, allow for several different email accounts - you know, for different members of the household. A subscriber to the ISP can allow anyone s/he wants to use these email addresses. It is also possible to access one’s email from any computer with an internet connection. In addition to that, one person can have lots of different email accounts from the same, or different, providers.
It IS rather fascinating to me that the location from which I am posting appears to be of more interest to you than the content of my posts.
May 18th, 2005 at 12:50 am
Tellride
Why is identifying inconsistencies a pointless exercise? What’s the point of someone treating their friends well if they beat their wife and kids? The Bush regime is making a big point about spreading democracy in Iraq (as a last resort, after all of the other pretexts were shown to be based on serial lies). There was Bush last week in Europe, pontificating about U.S. support for freedom. If this is so, why not condemn rogue regimes across the board? Why the selectivity? Why all of the exceptionalsm, triumphalism, unilateralism and isolationism? Where has this administration been with respect to Uzbek brutality? To repeat: the U.S. supports restricted democracy (read: Latin American countries such as El Salvador and Guatemala) when it suits its political, economic and military agenda. Where this conflicts they are quite happy to support repressive anti-democratic regimes. The U.S. attacked Iraq because it knew the country was defenseless. It also knew how strategically important it is. Its time to dump all of this phony pretext about freedom and democracy and look at the real reasons for the aggression.
May 18th, 2005 at 12:54 am
“claiming the US sponsors other autocrats is a tu quoque fallacy.“
Ummmm - no, it isn’t.
“It says nothing whatsoever about Hussein or Iraq.“
Jeff Harvey was not trying to say anything about Hussein (sic) or Iraq. What he was talking about was the obvious hypocrisy of U.S. claims.
May 18th, 2005 at 2:11 am
Why is identifying inconsistencies a pointless exercise?
Because you can do it for virtually any country in the world, so it’s meaningless in a relative sense. For instnce, where’s your condemnation of the “neutral” Swiss that held money for some of the worst regimes ever? What you can’t do is identify any country that has removed tyrannies and stood up democratic gov’ts the way the US has done, regardless of how you feel about their other actions.
And democratizing Iraq was not a “last resort” (it was mentioned in numerous 2002 and 2003 Presidential and Senate discussions) any more than any of the other justifications were “serial lies.” This kind of counterfactual rhetoric just illustrates you’re emotionally committed to your point of view whether the facts support it or not.
May 18th, 2005 at 2:15 am
Its time to dump all of this phony pretext about freedom and democracy
Again, you keep saying this despite the fact free elections have been held. I don’t know what to call this behavior other than delusional.
It’s pretty clear nothing the U.S. did would ever convince you it was other than nefariously intended.
May 18th, 2005 at 3:10 am
Ummmm - no, it isn’t.
Umm yes it is. Claiming the [anthropomorphised] US government is hypocritical says nothing interesting at all. And it is off topic and for that reason fallacious. It is a textbook tu quoque.
link
May 18th, 2005 at 3:13 am
No foreign policy is historically consistent, nor would such a policy necessarily be virtuous. Stalin was once a US ally. Does that makes FDR complicit with the gulags, purges etc? Also, it’s tu quoque.
May 18th, 2005 at 3:15 am
Jeff Harvey read here: link
May 18th, 2005 at 3:38 am
It IS rather fascinating to me that the location from which I am posting appears to be of more interest to you than the content of my posts.
It’s an issue only because you’ve made it an issue. We would not know you were Iraqi had you not told us in earlier threads…and yes it is irrelevant.
May 18th, 2005 at 4:13 am
“Every single one of your posts contains ad hominems.“
I think anyone can objectively see, Telluride, that this is incorrect, but if it is your perception, you are welcome to it. Even if you are right, though, I am quite sure my posts consist mainly of discussions of the issues.
“Even if your outrageous libel concerning Makiya (”thief”) were true, it would be an ad hominem irrelevance, to say nothing of your more recent ad hominems regarding his opportunism etc.“
Please learn what libel is before accusing someone of it.
You have a right to your opinion as to what is and is not relevant, and I have a right to mine. I happen to think that a person’s character and past conduct is very relevant when assessing his present-day conduct.
“Your own touting of Iraq credentials…“
I don’t know where you got the idea that I have touted any “Iraqi credentials”. Perhaps you got it from the same place Kerry got the idea that I claim to be posting from Iraq? In fact, I have not mentioned any “Iraq credentials”, though the existence and validity of my “Iraq credentials” does appear to have been the subject of considerable discussion by others here. It is so much easier, I guess, to focus on the personal than on the issues.
“Re terrorism:“
Ah! Finally, you get off the ad hominem and decide to address the issues. I will address this in a separate post.
May 18th, 2005 at 4:13 am
What he was talking about was the obvious hypocrisy of U.S. claims.
Falsifiability is a useful way to test the informational value of propositions like “___ government is hypocritical.” Since the US government changes every four years, and policies shift even within such governments, you can expect it (and all other governments) to be ‘hypocritical’ viewed against history. Of course, claims of hypocrisy (even if true) are both irrelevant to any useful thesis, and in the case of foreign policy, completely unfalsifiable. No government on earth has pursued an utterly consistent foreign policy. It is a sophomoric way of discussing politics.
May 18th, 2005 at 4:22 am
It fascinates and irritates me that some posters here seem to vomit up rather a large number of posts each one addressing only one point. Most people seem to be perfectly satisfied to address all points in one post. It’s rather maddening to come here seeing a large number of new posts and to find out (as I have on a couple of occasions) they all belong to one or two people. Just a peeve I have about some people’s posting “style”. I don’t think we get paid per post here, do we?
May 18th, 2005 at 4:43 am
Tim,
the chapter you cite deals with war related chronic illness, the “most recent war” there refers to the period from 1996! to the time of the study.
The study is quite clear that only 12% of war related deaths in the 2 year period before the survey were under 18’s. They make up nearly half the population, however.
The numbers I’ve advanced are well supported, I’ve given you the basis for these estimates in the past. These are in particular the Iraqi Body Count database, reports by Human Rights Watch, figures released by the Iraqi Ministry of Health, morgue data and military analyst estimates for insurgent deaths.
They are certainly much better supported than extrapolations for trends in disease and accidents based on the tiny Lancet sample, where even assuming perfect sampling they can easily get it wrong by 50,000 plus deaths either way, as AMac’s little exercise so clearly shows.
We just don’t know enough about non-violent mortality trends yet, something you are unfortunately unwilling to acknowledge.
May 18th, 2005 at 6:16 am
“Claiming the [anthropomorphised] US government is hypocritical says nothing interesting at all.“
That is not an absolute, but very much a matter of opinion. You are entitled to yours, of course, and others are equally entitled to theirs, even if they are different from yours.
“It is a textbook tu quoque.“
Okay, I see your point, but I wouldn’t say it is textbook.
In any case, there are times when tu quo que is a valid argument as when it goes to the sincerity of the complaint.