I remain very skeptical because the hospitals and morgue issue death certificates and those counts suggest numbers far lower than Lancet, which itself cites death certificates in 92% of the survey sample death reports.

I’m frustrated that Lancet does not simply take the reported deaths and compare to the online Iraq Body Count reports. If the Lancet study is correct we’d expect only a 10% overlap in these two sets of death reports. If the overlap is higher it suggests the sampling was flawed.

Tony Scott

Can anyone can point me (with link please) to any news article that sites any day since the invasion that detailed 500 deaths in a single day, outside of the actuall invasion of course.

AFAICT no one in the country – least of all the CPA – has even tried to collate reports of all the deaths that have taken place. News organisations have reported them when they have taken place near to where they or the coalition is operating.

What would you say the civilian casualties were? Try to keep your answer away from the vague.

http://unspeak.net/some-percentage/

There are almost as many western contractors/security forces/mercinaries (take your pick) as US troops in Iraq, all of whom are heavily armed with state-of-the-art weaponary and who kill with impunity, am explicit demand that was decreed immediately after the invasion and occupation.

It can only be the Coalition/MNF’s fault that a paucity of informed planning prior to the war has contributed to the death toll. If US and UK didn’t plan, or speak out about lack of planning and allowed criminality and lawlessness to reign in the immediate aftermath of Saddam’s statue falling – “Freedom is messy” – then we are responsible.

The repercussions of a hastily won war without any idea real plan of what to do next were always obvious and being widely discussed in the run up to war. Pro-war types especially on the “muscular Left” simply chose to ignore such articles, many by highly qualified academics and military planners, or malign them as unduely or irrationally pessimistic. But such insults only highlighted the lack of understanding about the country we were invading.

Being anti-war was never the simple banary logic of prefering him to remain in power that Blair claims repeatedly and hypocritically.(See bob wareing’s question to Blair during a PMQ in Hansard.)

The most important question when going to war is: what is the best way of gaining the most preferable outcome?
Going to war the way Bush and Blair did was always destined to failure.

The Iraqi invasion began: March 20, 2003
Number of days since: 1,305

655,000 / 1305 = average of 501.92 deaths per day

Of course, it should also be pointed out that this average is in fact slightly low, since the study obviously was completed at a point in time prior to its public release; therefore the number of days used to calculate the “Iraqi deaths per day” average will be lower. If once reduces the number of days the study covers, the resulting average will be necessarily higher. (It may be necessary to explain these mathematical realities to liberals who were educated in American public schools, where 2+2=5 if that validates the student as a person.)

Can anyone can point me (with link please) to any news article that sites any day since the invasion that detailed 500 deaths in a single day, outside of the actuall invasion of course.

Question: If no single day is documented having a body count of 500 how in the hell can this “study” have an average of that number?

That aside, Lancet has been caught putting out trash on Iraqi deaths previously. What makes anyone think they haven’t done the same again.

Of far greater seriousness, however, is that one consequence of the events in Iraq is that, no matter how heinious the activities of very wicked people in Darfur, Zimbabwe or any other of the God forsaken spots on this planet may be, no one now will argue the case for armed intervention. Indeed, the very crimes that the United Nations was allegedly set up to prevent, genocide in particular, will go unprevented and unpunished in the present ‘pacifist at any price’ climate.

Some of this is due to the left wing pacifist tendency that has always been a force in countries such as Britain and the United States. They are the sort of people who cheered Chamberlain’s appeasement policy in the face of Hitler, refused to believe stories about the horrors of Uncle Joe Stalin’s gulags and repression of Eastern Europe and, yes, called Reagan & Thatcher murderers because they faced down the Soviet Union threat to the West in the 1970/80′s.

And yes, this pacifist climate has also been helped by the media. Certainly the BBC is delighted to report any story about Iraq that rubbishes the American or British Armies:- even if the story is patently silly. But will never tell its viewers or listeners about some of the good things that have resulted from the Iraq intervention.

However, the major causes of this new pacifism are not left wing arguments or media bias. People have been disillusioned by the sheer incompetence with respect to planning for the immediate post-War period:- not least in the case of implementing reconstruction works. And people in Britain, at least, have been disilluioned by the perceived lack of integrity on the part of Tony Blair. He did not need to lie about WMD to justify military action:- there was sufficient good cause to remove Saddam Hussein without that deceit. Nor did he help his own credibility by claiming that British troops would receive everything they needed, when it is manifestly certain that they went to war ill equipped.

It will be some time before people in Britain, or the United States, can once again put their trust in their political leaders to order soldiers to take action. It is to be hoped that, during this period, no one of the ilk of Hitler, Stalin or any similar megalomaniac decides to take advantage of this pacifist climate.

For the study’s conclusion to be valid it seem that the death certificates they say were produced 92% of the time [I’ve also seen 80% ] *are not counted* by the health ministry.

This seems highly unlikely since the ministry currently publishes death counts far below the counts the study suggests are going on right now.

The discrepancy between the study noting that there are death certificates issued and the ministry counts really should be reconciled by the researchers immediately, since their credibility seems to be at stake and their result conflicts with *every* other reporting mechanism.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/daniel_davies/2006/10/how_to_not_lie_with_statistics.html

great post #66 Kismet:)

Yes, that’s right – that’s exactly what the intention was.

Fuck’s sake!

There are so many things wrong with this sentence, allow me to amuse myself by trying to analyse it

1. Sonia it’s not your business that your government has caused the death of so many people that live far away. My eyes are blinkered, stop showing me things that make me question what I choose to belief
2. Your talk of linear-paradigm is making me feel intellectually inadequate. Please get off your high horse
3. There are bigger issues at stake than your personal feelings. Like, for instance, my feelings
4. I’m so used to being a knob, I’ve stopped caring who knows it anymore

Using muller with toffee crunch, on the other hand, would be Wrong

Me, I scoop up and eat what’s Left

do you like raspberry yoghurt? no. Oh you must be on the Left then..