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| Iraq |
| BBC: Iraqi war deaths ’total 13,000’ |
| 2003-10-29 |
| EFL Yesterday, Old Patriot tried to explain why the US military doesn’t publish, "body count" figures of enemy soldiers in particular. Here is an example of a 5th Column Think Tank with an agenda being echoed in the BBC. About 13,000 Iraqis, including as many as 4,300 civilians, were killed during the major combat phase of the Iraq war, according to a US research group. It said the estimates were based on US combat data, battlefield press reports, and Iraqi hospital surveys. Translation - we surfed the net and read everything the NY Times printed. Despite the advent of precision weapons, more civilians died in the latest conflict than in the 1991 war, the group suggests. Why don’t we wait a while on the Gulf War I numbers, we still digging up Kuwaitis... in fact, we may need to revise the numbers for the Iran-Iraq War as well. The US military has published no details on Iraqi deaths in either war. Because no matter what number was estimated the NY Times publish a piece crtical of the US mititary for using brutal tactics that killed too many civilians and enemy soldiers as well. On the very same page of the NY Times there would be another article purporting that the US military had inflated the number of killed to give the illusion that the American military as an effective fighting force. For those that are unfamiliar with the Times, this page would not be the OPED page. The study by the Project on Defense Alternatives (PDA) covers the period from 19 March to the end of April. Hum, where was this study conducted at? It provides ranges of casualty levels, rather than specific estimates. They tried to provide actual numbers but the lucky eight ball kept telling them to ask again later and then next thing they knew it was press time. It says that as few as 11,000 Iraqis may have been killed in the war, or as many as 15,000 - the 13,000 being the mid-point between the two figures. According to the PDA, approximately 30% of the victims were "non-combatants" - defined as civilians who did not take up arms. These are "working" figures, which could change as The report says the Iraqi War fatalities point to the "paradox of the New Warfare. One premise of the ’new warfare’ hypothesis is that precision technologies and new warfighting techniques now allow the United States to wage war while incurring dramatically fewer casualties - especially civilian casualties. "We were totally amazed at the implicatiopns of these numbers that we found wedged in our recti." "Although Operation Iraqi Freedom was supposed to exemplify the new warfare, it provides no unambiguous support for the hypothesis regarding civilian casualties," the author writes. However, the report adds, "the power and promise of the new warfare is evident in having achieved so much more in the 2003 war than in the 1991 war, while incurring a comparable or lower cost in lives". The PDA is a think tank based in Cambridge, Massachusetts - Obviously, Al Franken had a side project going between fake letters to John Ashcroft. This summer Super Hose asked a retired army lt colonel, for his estimate on how many Iraqi soldiers the coalition killed. He estimated a whole bunch. He estimated that we would have killed fewer civilians if the Iraqi miltary had chosen to continue wearing uniforms and refrained from using schools as ammo dumps. The barracks in the hoptital was not helpful either. PDA doesn’t seem to have factored this data in their study. The Hose is now round filing his copy of their results. I’ll stick with the estimate of "a whole bunch." |
| Posted by:Super Hose |