Our liberal friends can’t even keep their own propaganda straight!
Our liberal friends were quick to jump on the bandwagon of the misbegotten Lancet report that some 655,000 Iraqis had died due to the invasion.
Well, today comes a report from the United Nations (surely an organization our liberal friends trust), forwarded to me by TruthOut:
- UN: Iraqi Civilian Deaths at New High
By Sameer N. Yacoub, The Associated Press
Wednesday 22 November 2006
Baghdad, Iraq - The United Nations said Wednesday that 3,709 Iraqi civilians were killed in October, the highest monthly toll since the March 2003 U.S. invasion and another sign of the severity of Iraq’s sectarian bloodbath. . . .
Based on figures from the Iraqi Health Ministry, the country’s hospitals and the Medico-Legal Institute in Baghdad, the report said October’s figure was higher than July’s previously unprecedented civilian death toll of 3,590.
If 3,709 was the highest monthly toll since the invasion began, and 3,590 was second, if we assume that every other month had a civilian death toll of 3,589, for the duration of the war, we max out at 158,037 for the entire course of the war. Not exactly 655,000, is it?
Of course, the number is lower than that: using 3,589 as the total for every other month is worst case, and didn’t happen. You might be able to justify 100,000 Iraqi civilians killed, a number that is still too high and certainly regrettable, but, spread over 44 months of the war isn’t that much greater than the number of Iraqis the Ba’athists were killing to retain dictatorial power.
Of course, it wasn’t long ago that the claimed civilian death toll in Iraq was 50,000. I noted, in that article, that the low end of estimates for civilians killed by the Ba’ath Party in its efforts to retain power averaged 8,700 a year. That’s significantly lower than the estimated civilian casualty rate due to the war, but absent the war, Saddam Hussein’s government would have continued and continued, and when the old man died, continued again under his brutal son Qusay. If far too many Iraqis have been killed due to the war, at least the war has ended the Ba’ath Party government.
Serving the People of Iraq and Iran:
[...] few… ;-)Labels: Death, Iraq, Terrorism, United Nations posted by Frank Staheli at 23:49 | Permalink | 3Comments: [...]
26 November 2006, 4:51 amOne Utah » Blog Archive » Free Speech v Fair and Balanced v Lets Get Real:
[...] The journal Lancet, that paragon of truthfulness and impartiality, recently ‘reported’ that at least 655,000 Iraqis have been killed since the American invasion in 2003. I never put a pencil to the numbers, but Common Sense Political Thought has [...]
14 December 2006, 10:50 amCliff:
Hi Ken and Dana,
I’d like to inject a little common sense here since this seems to be the modus operandi here.
I wonder if you still stand by the logic of multiplying ‘reported’ monthy death tolls by the number of months in Iraq to refute the Lancet study?
Would you be satified if your childrens’ education resulted in this kind of unscientific argument?
Do you think that would fly on an SAT question? Or do you consider a college education a waste of time?
Let me put it a simpler way. If the police reported an average of 100 DUIs per month in the town of Shitferbrainsville, could we conclude that 1200 (12×100) people drive drunk in that city (assuming all DUI offenders go to jail for one year)?
Perhaps you can tell us what the Iraqi death toll was in February 2002? Do you even know when we began bombing Iraq?
How about March 2002 when we invaded? Do you have an ‘official’ death toll for that month? hmmm.
I don’t see much difference between your challenging this scientific study, with the agenda of the Holocaust deniers meeting in Iran as we speak.
14 December 2006, 12:58 pmDana :
Cliff, my apologies, but your math is terrible. Please note that the report was that:
That’s the UN, Cliff, not exactly an organization which favored the invasion. If 3,709 was the highest monthly toll since the invasion, that means that no other month has exceeded 3,709, period.
Well, if no other month has exceeded that number, it is mathematically impossible to reach the 655,000 number published by Lancet. When the Lancet numbers were published a few months ago, it would have required an average of 504 such deaths per day to reach the total; I’ve never seen even one single day where there were 500 Iraqis killed reported.
And, if you’ll think back just a bit, you’ll notice that even the responsible media have ceased using the Lancet numbers. Oh, they never came out with a story (at least, not that I saw) stating that the lancet numbers were bogus, but they quietly quit using those numbers because they were simply indefensible.
14 December 2006, 5:30 pmCliff:
Dana, so now you are an expert on the UN loudly proclaiming their collective motives to support your rediculous argument.
Then you conjure up a ‘responsible’ media which I’m guessing is also liberal (because Rush Limbaugh says so) to further support your exceptional confidence in a UN you would otherwise consider corrupt.
Is there no end to your hypocracy?
I will ask you another question dispite the fact that you didn’t anser the others…Are you absolutly sure the Lancet report is wrong?
14 December 2006, 10:05 pmDana:
Yes, absolutely: the Lancet report is wrong.
If there had been 655,000 people killed, the bodies would have been piled up; more than half a million bodies don’t just disappear. (That was one of the Nazis’ problems during the Holocaust, how to dispose of all of those corpses.)
For the Lancet report to be correct, we’d have had to have seen at least some reports from other sources detailing how a thousand people were killed one day, or that there were literally hundreds of corpses found someplace. Sources like al Jazeera, which certainly has a motive for showing such, would have gotten the news, and the pictures, out.
None of that has happened. What we have to support the 655,000 figure is one study, by a respected source, which extrapolated casualties from surveys. With such methodology, several things can go wrong; in this case, it has.
15 December 2006, 6:20 amCliff:
On the subject of the Lancet survey, I think a lot of the debate has missed the distinction between “excess deaths†and civilian war casualties. Excess deaths are based on a comparison of the pre-war mortality rate with the rate in subsequent years. For example, someone who dies of a heart attack during curfew who would have lived if he could have been taken to a hospital is an excess death but not technically a war casualty. The methods used in the study are the same as the US government uses everywhere but Iraq.
Look Dana, you can dispute this study without reading it or holding it up to scientific standard all day long. It won’t change the fact that we do things a certain way in this country called the scientific method; a set of rules which if satisfied can be characterized as compelling evidence or proof in some cases. It is the backbone of our legal, judicial, and scientifc insitutions. Without a strict adherence to this standard our country would crumble. Without it, countries like Iraq cannot have democracy.
Your failure to understand this is, like Bush’s, the reason there was never any chance Iraq would emerge as a democracy in any reasonable period of time.
This is a really basic and widely accepted concept.
So if you really want to challenge the Lancet Study AS MANY DO, I would start be saying to yourself, “Dana, you are a nice person, but you are full of shit, because you really have no education or understanding of the scientific method.”
But you are smart enough to know that there are people out there who are smarter than you and so you don’t need to be an expert, you just need to be smart enough to go find someone who is and who HAS challenged or refuted the Lancet Study, then determine if this person is a. credible and b. without bias, then bring me that person’s argument and we can discuss that. Otherwise, this is just ignorant babble at 4th of July picnic in trailer park.
…and you are just one more person who is more proud of having an opinion than actually having objective knowledge. Your choice. I’m guessing you surround yourself with people who don’t challenge your corrupt uninformed logic (as evidenced by the emptiness of this blog).
15 December 2006, 10:50 am