Shocking to consider if the estimate is even close to accurate.

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.j...toryID=6648889

LONDON (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed in violence since the U.S.-led invasion last year, American public health experts have calculated in a report that estimates there were 100,000 "excess deaths" in 18 months.

The rise in the death rate was mainly due to violence and much of it was caused by U.S. air strikes on towns and cities.

"Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq," said Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in a report published online by The Lancet medical journal.

"The use of air power in areas with lots of civilians appears to be killing a lot of women and children," Roberts told Reuters.

The report came just days before the U.S. presidential election in which the Iraq war has been a major issue.

Mortality was already high in Iraq before the war because of United Nations sanctions blocking food and medical imports but the researchers described what they found as shocking.

The new figures are based on surveys done by the researchers in Iraq in September 2004. They compared Iraqi deaths during 14.6 months before the invasion in March 2003 and the 17.8 months after it by conducting household surveys in randomly selected neighborhoods.

Previous estimates based on think tank and media sources put the Iraqi civilian death toll at up to 16,053 and military fatalities as high as 6,370.

By comparison about 849 U.S. military were killed in combat or attacks and another 258 died in accidents or incidents not related to fighting, according to the Pentagon.

VERY BAD FOR IRAQI CIVILIANS

The researchers blamed air strikes for many of the deaths.

"What we have evidence of is the use of air power in populated urban areas and the bad consequences of it," Roberts said.
Gilbert Burnham, who collaborated on the research, said U.S. military action in Iraq was "very bad for Iraqi civilians."

"We were not expecting the level of deaths from violence that we found in this study and we hope this will lead to some serious discussions of how military and political aims can be achieved in a way that is not so detrimental to civilians populations," he told Reuters in an interview.

The researchers did 33 cluster surveys of 30 households each, recording the date, circumstances and cause of deaths.

They found that the risk of death from violence in the period after the invasion was 58 times higher than before the war.

Before the war the major causes of death were heart attacks, chronic disorders and accidents. That changed after the war.

Two-thirds of violent deaths in the study were reported in Falluja, the insurgent held city 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad which had been repeatedly hit by U.S. air strikes.

"Our results need further verification and should lead to changes to reduce non-combatant deaths from air strikes," Roberts added in the study.

Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, said the research which was submitted to the journal earlier this month had been peer-reviewed, edited and fast-tracked for publication because of its importance in the evolving security situation in Iraq.

"But these findings also raise questions for those far removed from Iraq -- in the governments of the countries responsible for launching a pre-emptive war," Horton said in an editorial.

Here is another link with some more info on how the survey was conducted.

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996596

<font color = lightgreen>I suppose none of the blame is to be laid at the doorstep of militant groups who house themselves next door to places like schools, hospitals, and homes in an effort to give themselves some human shields, right?
If more Iraqi people would rise up against the radical groups who do more damage to the country than we ever could then some of those deaths could be avoided. </font>

<font face="COMIC Sans MS" size="3" color="#7c9bc4">
Azred, we also can't blame those suicide bombers who detonate in the middle of crowds of civilians...nope this is obviously the work of Bush and his desire to cleanse the world of all things arabic. [img]smile.gif[/img]
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Its their home, and thier turf, and thier people. In some places like Fallujah-where the civilain death rate ( and the number of airstrikes) has been much higher than the average the insurgence have the support of alot of the very people you think should rise up against them.

But this is discussing the ripples in the pond, not the pebble thrown in which caused them.

Well, it's hard to figure out casualty numbers in a war zone, and even harder to attribute deaths to what caused them. There could be just as many deaths from loss of infrastructure (transport of water, food, medical supplies) as there are from bombing. I really don't know.

100 000 seems on the high side. That said, even if it's as "low" as 20 000, that's still a lot of death.

The sample size makes me a little suspicious. 988 households surveyed (according to the article Chewbacca linked to) is actually not that many in a country of however many million people. For argument's sake, say that covers one hundred thousand citizens (100 per household surveyed). What's Iraq's population? 20 million? So the extrapolation is based on a sample size of maybe 0.5%. Moreover, there was actually only 30 locations surveyed. The margin of error for that study is likely quite high.

At any rate, war is nasty, regardless of the actual numbers. Bickering about the numbers is a side topic to the real issue. If American citizens have a problem with the Iraq situation, they should speak with their vote. There's not much that wringing of the hands can do.

<font color = lightgreen>Well, I suppose that makes it all right, then. I have news for the people who support the insurgents, though: the insurgents don't give a damn about the average people of Iraq, only in pursuing their own short-term power-grab goals.</font>

There are innocents in a combat zone! Bombs and bullets do not discriminate, I've said all along that war is terrible and people die, it must not be entered into lightly, but when entered into it must be done with extreme predjudgedice(sp?).

True enough Aerich, but I'll add something I learned from a social science stats class (very amateur I know lol). It's only 12 away from 1000, which is an acceptable number of individuals assuming a reasonably random sampling OR if they're proportioned by the percentages reflected in the population (city vs village, Sunni, Shi'i, and Kurd, man and woman, young and old) AND randomized within those groups. You aren't likely to fall victim to simple mathmatical anomalies assuming that your sample is as random as you hope. That being said, it probably falls into a 5% margin of error, as so much statistics do. By the way, I've often seen samples three times the size used for the whole of the United States. Practically, it can take researchers a lot of time to compile all of those answers and run the tests depending on how many variables (questions and personal info usually) there are.

However, one study is never enough to conclude anything by. There's a lot of room for error in statistics, so it's important to do more studies.

[ 10-30-2004, 02:54 PM: Message edited by: Lucern ]

100,000 seems like an awfully high estimate and probbaly has a margin of error. Regardless of the exact number , that's a shit load of deaths! Am I the only person here who thinks too many innocent people are dying in an unnecessary war, for a democracy that may be unacheivable? Also adding to the fact that we were mislead into this war to begin with (Saddam never had WMDs or posed any real threat to America), I can only conclude that this war is immoral and not worth the cost in lives.

[ 10-30-2004, 04:21 PM: Message edited by: Gab ]

I kinda feel like that too, Gab, but Righteous Indignation by non-Americans is arguably worth nothing to the people who make the decisions. It's out of your hands, my hands, and the hands of everyone on this forum.

It'll stay that way until public reaction in the US of A reaches Vietnam levels (not likely anytime soon) and forces the administration to pull out. Alternatively, Kerry seems less committed to staying in Iraq than Bush, and he may pull out (if elected). That's part of the reason why the upcoming election is so important regarding future American foreign policy.

I am glad for a discussion the accuracy of survey itself. The seemingly small sample size, the huge causuality numbers and the TIMING of the report's release made me somewhat skeptical, especially consdering the highest estimate I heard previously, from the Iraq Body Count site, (which cross-references media reports to achieve it's estimate) was in the 15,000 range. In addition, even the authors of the report admit the difficulty of conducting such a survey considering the challenging circumstances on the ground.

Thanks Lucern, for putting the sample size in perspective from a statistics standpoint and I agree that even if the margin of error is greater than the 5%, this report warrants further investigation.

Considering how we were sold a safer, more precise type of warfare- full of "smart" weapons and low collateral damage. If it turns out these official pre-war stated estimates were more wrong than some of the far-left's estimates of hundreds of thousands civilian deaths than certainly the dcotrine of pre-emptive war deserves even more skepticism from the people, our elected representatives, and the media.

Isn't the word 'collateral damage' just chillingly easy to use?....

As for the stats, having done a bit myself at uni, Lucern is correct in that 1,000 is a very reasonable size for a sample providing the base is good enough to extrapolate from. In the UK virtually every survey and poll you hear in the news is done by conducting a survey of 1,000 households so if you compare Iraq's population of 24 million with the UK's 60 million it's probably quite accurate.

For me, the freaky term is "pre-emptive war." The dividing line between it and "aggression" is quite thin, and depends a lot on judgment and reliability of intelligence sources.

And re: the sample size - just because a similar size sample is done elsewhere doesn't mean it is accurate. It merely means that those statistics are just as (non?) accurate as the other ones we use.

You have a point Aerich, and I've got a healthy dose of skepticism about these numbers from a statistical standpoint as well. The 1000 respondents is pretty standard, as it allows you to run any hypothesis-testing tool, assuming the respondents are sufficiently random. However, this is only data collection - and one variable at that. There's no hypothesis here, and more respondents never hurt any data. I make this distinction because if they ran some sort of hypothesis test, we'd see if it was statistically significant. There's no way to see if the number collected is accurate with one survey since there's nothing to test it with.

Their random GPS coordinate system was creative, and I don't think it would create any problems in choosing a random sample. It sounds like the methodological equivalent of a plant biologist spinning in a field and throwing a ring to count the abundance of plant species. The more throws you do, of course, the better off your data is. You're also going to run into problems collecting it. Where the ring bounces off of bushes and trees, I'm sure the researchers ran across empty houses or uncooperative inhabitants.

One of those random points, by the way, was apparently Faluja (sp?). If they inferred their sample to the whole of Iraq even with 1 of 30 regions being Faluja, that might give them a skew to the upper numbers of casualties. It's probably a fair one though, since it's been bombed so consistently. The opposite would be true of a tiny village near Kuwait or something that hasn't seen much action, but I'm not positive about the specifics of the survey.

My point - I hope this is only the first of several studies. It could be valid, especially among 4 or 5 studies. If they give similar results, then we'll know they're accurate, or that all have the same flaw in their methods.

I was surprised that this kind of survey was even going on in Iraq.

Note that under any system of nomenclature I've seen, an "insurgent" or a "terrorist" would aslo be classified as a "civilian."

<font face="COMIC Sans MS" size="3" color="#7c9bc4">What defines a death as being excess?

According to some here, the planet is over populated with humans and thus any human death should be a reason to cheer.... [img]smile.gif[/img] </font>

Fair enough. But given that Tony Blair is the person who takes the decision to send British forces into war we should at least be able to voice our concerns.

Fair enough. But given that Tony Blair is the person who takes the decision to send British forces into war we should at least be able to voice our concerns. </font>[/QUOTE]Yep, go ahead, Donut. My intention there was not to say that we SHOULDN'T voice our concerns - it was just to say that we cannot reasonably expect to get anywhere by shouting about them. I've gone past the voicing-of-concerns stage and moved on to the resigned stage. I have to admit, that post was also an attempt to derail the possibility of a flaming reply by a Bush/Iraq war supporter to Gab's strongly-worded post.

Perhaps it would have been more accurate to say that "RI directed at the American administration by non-Americans is arguably worth nothing to the people who make the decisions in the American context."

RI by British citizens and members of the EU IS arguably worth something to Blair. Bush has shown little or no signs of concern about what the rest of the world thinks, so the comment was actually aimed at him.

<font color = lightgreen>I shall restate a point I have made both here and elsewhere before: if the insurgents in Iraq were to put down their weapons and quit disrupting the rebuilding of their own country then we would be gone relatively quickly. Each and every death, whether American, Iraqi, British, Spanish, etc. may be blamed on the insurgents and the insurgents only. </font>

An Iraqi insurgent would probably say that if the foreigners left, they could continue rebuilding their country. Sure, they would still have to defeat the other insurgent groups, but hey, nothing's perfect. :D

In any case, I don't think you can blame the insurgents alone on deaths caused by Coalition soldiers. It takes two to tango.

Fair enough. But given that Tony Blair is the person who takes the decision to send British forces into war we should at least be able to voice our concerns. </font>[/QUOTE]<font face="COMIC Sans MS" size="3" color="#7c9bc4">I've been getting irritated with politicians on both sides of the aisle over here, who seem to forget that The British, and Australians and the Pols and others are suffering casualties too....I think any member of a nation who has people fighting has valid reason to voice their concerns...even if I disagree with their particular stance.
</font>

<font face="COMIC Sans MS" size="3" color="#7c9bc4">Your analogy is flawed...yes it does take two to tango...but in this case it IS THE TANGO that is getting people killed.....if the "insurgants" or Terrorists as I call them were to go back to Syria and Iran where a large number of them came from.....the problem of unnecessary deaths would go waaaaay down.
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No, it isn't. [img]tongue.gif[/img]

Technically, if the Coalition troops were to leave to where THEY come, most of the killings would stop as well as the attacks are aimed at foreigners.

Now, I don't support the troops just leaving, I just wanted to point out that it's not reasonable to blame the insurgents alone on the deaths. It's sounds like you're saying "Sure, we bombed some people, but THEY made us do it".

No, the Coalition is to be "blamed" for the death they cause, just as the insurgents/terrorists are to be blamed for theirs.

i almost cried when i saw the figures of death and wounded tolls for both sides. yet what really irks me are the many fellow americans who are still for the war when it has been made clear that there was an error in intelligence. no womd, no connections to osama. wrong country we've attacked.

<font color = lightgreen>I continue to lay the blame at the feet of the insurgents, because they are the ones who continue to fight when there is no reason to do so and they are the ones who prevent Iraq from being rebuilt as expeditiously as possible. They obviously don't want thier fellow countrymen to enjoy electricity or water.

Jonas, that is why I always argued that the war was to remove Hussein. He had continually defied many UN sanctions in place since 1992, perpetuated a brutal regime that prevented the Iraqi people from enjoying basic rights much of the rest of the world take for granted, and was a destabilizing force in that area of the world. Which country should we have attacked? [img]graemlins/beigesmilewinkgrin.gif[/img] </font>

[ 11-02-2004, 01:32 PM: Message edited by: Azred ]

<font face="COMIC Sans MS" size="3" color="#7c9bc4">You got this partially right....There were no stockpiles of WoMD, however the final analysis of the data and the 9/11 reports show there was connections between terrorism and Saddam, no one in the Bush administration said Saddam was behind 9/11. Also the UN, Hans Blix, the French Intelligence community the British Intelligence community and the US Intelligence community all believed that he was holding out, and after lots of blustering it turns out that the leftists who said Saddam wasn't seeking yellowcake in Africa turned out to be wrong and that he was in fact doing just that....and it has also been revealed that documents found in Iraq shows that Saddam was buying off key Governmental officials and getting close to getting sanctions lifted so he COULD restart his WoMD production.....Your information is out of date and incomplete.

Unlike what John Kerry said...in the end..it was the right war and the right time in the right place AND now that that war is over, it is OUR responsibility to continue to help the people of Iraq to become a free and democratic society....and to continue the GWOT (Global War on Terrorism)
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[ 11-02-2004, 01:44 PM: Message edited by: MagiK ]

Just because somebody is doing something wrong does that give the terrorest the right to dosomething wrong also? Where does the leave the two wrongs don't make a right crowd? The same ones that say it is wrong for the Coalition to go into Iraq?

Me, I say "Strike up the band and Let's Dance". I'm the nicest kindest well mannered Hard case SOB you'll ever meet , I'll give you the shirt off my back, but if you try to take the shirt off my back I'll rip your head off and urinate on your twitch'n corpse. A Tiger, is a Tiger, is a Tiger, you go poke'n a Tiger with a stick and he rips your face off don't come complain'n to me.

In the minds of the insurgents, there obviously is a need to continue fighting. People doens't always think completely rationally; nationalistic feelings, a dislike of the West and a fear of being marginalized plays a part as well.

I also note that there are several insurgent groups, all of whom have their own agenda. The only thing these have in common is a hate against the Coalition and most foreigners, and these would probably just fight each other if they didn't have the Coalition to worry about.

<font face="COMIC Sans MS" size="3" color="#7c9bc4">You got this partially right....There were no stockpiles of WoMD, however the final analysis of the data and the 9/11 reports show there was connections between terrorism and Saddam, no one in the Bush administration said Saddam was behind 9/11.</font>[/QUOTE]You got this partially right ;) What the administration did do was repeatedly and repeatedly say that there were links between Al-Qaeda and Iraq (cleverly not specifically saying September 11th). Even the day after the 9/11 commission report concluding there were no links, Cheney gave a news conference and repeated that there was a connection.

This administration just lies to your face man, constantly. The upshot of all this misinformation was that over 66% of the American public thought that Saddam Hussein was responsible for September 11th, rising to over 80% in America's armed forces. It's true that the administration didn't specifically link Sep 11th with Iraq, but you can be sure as hell that they wanted the American people to make that little extra (and, from the public's point of view, reasonable) assumption.

Now, you may not think this is much of a problem. But mass deception and delusion like this strikes at the core of democracy in your country.

Edits for clarity and corrections

[ 11-02-2004, 07:04 PM: Message edited by: shamrock_uk ]

</font>[/QUOTE]I wont try to put my answers inside the box above, I would just mess up the tags. I'll quote directly.

"You cannot and must not judge both sides as if they are the same or equal or even that both ideologies are valid... in this conflict"
If you don't judge them by the same standards, then what standards to use and what are then the justifications for them? If you judge the two sides by the same, or similar standards, you are automatically doing a comparison between them and I would bet the insurgents and terrorists wont score high at all. Issues can be raised on how the Coalition have handled the conlict, but the terrorists are just a hopeless case.

"Both sides do not have to be suicidal immoral anti-humanitarian religious zealots...only one side has to be."
Not all of them are all these, there are many different insurgent groups. Just wondering, what exactly do you mean by immoral and anti-humanitarian?

" The sides are not even, one side is for Human liberty and for freedoms and rights, the other represents islamofacism and supression of human rights and equality."
Only from our perspective. They appearantly think they're doing the right thing, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it. If it's right or wrong in a absolute way is a different matter. In any case, they islamists have their own brand of human rights and equality based on religious laws. They don't like ours and believe theirs is superior.

"Again, you are placing both sides on the same moral level and this is wrong. (in my opinion...I know people who can justify any murder or killing so others may have different views)"
Whomever pulls the trigger is responsible for the resulting death. It might be seen as justified given the situation, perhaps, but the responsibility is clear, in my opinion.

<font face="COMIC Sans MS" size="3" color="#7c9bc4">You got this partially right....There were no stockpiles of WoMD, however the final analysis of the data and the 9/11 reports show there was connections between terrorism and Saddam, no one in the Bush administration said Saddam was behind 9/11.</font>[/QUOTE]You got this partially right ;) What the administration did do was repeatedly and repeatedly say that there were links between Al-Qaeda and Iraq (cleverly not specifically saying September 11th). Even the day after the 9/11 commission report concluding there were no links, Cheney gave a news conference and repeated that there was a connection.

This administration just lies to your face man, constantly. The upshot of all this misinformation was that over 66% of the American public thought that Saddam Hussein was responsible for September 11th, rising to over 80% in America's armed forces. It's true that the administration didn't specifically link Sep 11th with Iraq, but you can be sure as hell that they wanted the American people to make that little extra (and, from the public's point of view, reasonable) assumption.

Now, you may not think this is much of a problem. But mass deception and delusion like this strikes at the core of democracy in your country.

Edits for clarity and corrections </font>[/QUOTE]<font face="COMIC Sans MS" size="3" color="#7c9bc4">
I have a copy of the report...there is credible evidence of links between Saddam Hussein and terrorism and Al-queda. THere is no credible link between Hussein and 9/11 the Bush administration wasn't being "clever" when they didn't link him to 9/11...they were being honest andusing the intelligence they had on hand. If I get the chance tonight after my math homework is done I'll quote the document directly.


See it's people like you who make those kind of statements as if it's fact....as if you KNOW what they are thinking so that you can claim what they were doing even though they never said it...and never implied it...you just Bet to hell they were thinking this or that... brother....
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[ 11-02-2004, 09:17 PM: Message edited by: MagiK ]

I also have a copy of the 9/11 commision report, No links between Iraq and the terror atcks on 11 Sept., 2001 is what the report says. Not that there are no links between at all on anything between Iraq and Al Queda, as many try to make it say when they spout the "No Links" line of happy horse manure. If they are going to be honest at less finish the thought and idea presented by the report, there are no links between Iraq and Al Queda on the ATTACKS of 11 Sept., 2001. Anything else is deceitful at best plain old fashsioned out right lie at worse.

And equally, it's people like you who make these kinds of statements as if they're fact. But lets not make this personal, as that has no place in a debate. Instead, I shall answer your accusation with a bundle of fact, because I have no interest in basing my opinions on anything but.

Allow me to quote from the 9/11 Commission panel responding directly to allegations by Bush and Cheney about Iraq and al-Qaeda links:

Of course they were ignored, the last people Saddam would have wanted to work with were Islamic fundamentalists. He's a Ba'athist not an Islamist.

Yep, looking like they had a great working relationship here.

Briefly to respond to John D:

Are these quotes not in the report John D? Do you still think it's 'horse manure'? They are clearly referring to long-term possibilities of a relationship here. You can choose to interpret them as only saying they "didn't have a relationship for the attacks of Sep 11th" but it seems pretty clear upon reading that the intention of the wording is "didn't have a relationship, period".


Bush finally stops lying through his teeth months too late.

General Wesley Clark identifies the push by the administration to pin the two together:

I mean, this guy was one of your top military men (the top?). Surely you're not going to tell me he's making this all up? The Bush administration wanted a link, even before September 11th ever happened.


Diplomats (who are, after all the Middle-East experts):

Former Bush administration intelligence figures:

Donald Rumsfeld catching himself out:

Comments from Al Gore

Ranking members of the Senate Intelligence Committee:

I'm sure you'll discount this one out of hand because it was commissioned by the UN, but:

I might as well add this one in as there are no British documents as yet. This comes from a leaked intelligence document:

With specific reference to the connection between Saddam and September 11th and your claim that the administration never claimed that:

That's what they want you to believe of course. But look here:

Also Cheney:

Here he offers no evidence for links, and clearly is encouraging the American public to continue making the connection that I referred to in my original post. How can you tell me I'm making falsehoods about the attempts of the administration to not discourage links when you see a quote like that?


As for the more general link between Saddam and Al-Qaeda:

Yet the New York Times reported that according to documents I could go on for hours, but frankly, I'm getting bored and tired because its 3am. You are more than welcome to go on selectively interpreting the reports and playing with semantics about exactly what type of co-operation they did or did not engage in. You've heard it from the 9/11 Commission, the Senate Intelligence Committee, current and former Bush administration figures. I don't see how a greater body of evidence from so many separate sources can fail to convince people, when all you have is the word of an administration who hasn't been straight with the American people about the war from Day 1.

I think I'll leave you with this little gem from President Bush:

I mean, come on! As if Osama would ever let himself be commanded by someone else. And as if Hussein would let anyone like that near him. These policy makers in the Bush administration just live in a different world to reality. That quote of his is straw-clutching at its very worst, and unfortunately some people just lap it up.

[ 11-02-2004, 10:41 PM: Message edited by: shamrock_uk ]

<font color = lightgreen>Bottom line, every death in Iraq due to conflict is the sole fault of the insurgents who want only to kill people regardless of national origin. We, of course, are not in the wrong. </font>

</font>[/QUOTE]1. It doesn't matter if the Nazi's didn't have the right to commit genocide, they took themselves the "right" by might alone. In any case, a good deal of them had to have thought it was "right"; it would be impossible to carry out something like the Holocaust if you thought it was morally repulsive.

Now, this doesn't make it right, and I never claimed it did, I just wanted to point out that ALL people who commit genocide or carry out terrorist attacks believe they are doing the right thing. They sleep well at night because they think they did the "right thing", regardless of what they did. Further, I never said that they were equally moral, what I meant was that we should judge them by the same standards. As I see it, that's the only reasonable thing to do. Use different standards and your subjective opinion comes into play.

Only one side commited genocide during WW2, and only one side cut the heads of people in this current conflict in Iraq. That alone mean the both sides aren't on the same moral level, even if you judge them by the same standards.

2. I just found it mildly "amusing" that religionists such as the islamists always claim they're morally superior. How blowing up civilians is morally defencible is beyond me.

3. Yes, they are against several Western values regarding human rights, but they nonetheless claim their own version of human rights are better. The islamist would probably say that following the religious leader is the best thing to do since he's in better contact with God, that the womans role is in the home and that homosexuality is a mortal sin, punishable by death. They probably think God made these laws, and since God is absolutely fair, so are his laws.

4. I really wonders how many bombs dropped by American bombers malfunctions or hits the wrong target. No, civilians killed by these bombs died because the were near the spot the bombers aimed at. They were obviously not the target, but they were there. The motives and targets of the Coalition and the insurgents are completely different; they're not morally equal and I never said they were. What I meant was that you cannot judge them as morally inequal if you don't judge them by the same standards.

[ 11-03-2004, 06:36 AM: Message edited by: Stratos ]

Hey, whatever makes you sleep well at night. [img]smile.gif[/img]