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| 11/23 |
| 2004/11/9 [Politics/Foreign/MiddleEast/Iraq] UID:34778 Activity:insanely high |
11/9 What's the difference between Sadam killing thousands of uncooperative
Iraqis because they don't accept his ruling, and Bush killing
thousands of ethnic Iraqis because they don't accept democracy?
\_ We are killing in the name of democracy which is a more noble goal.
\_ KILLING IN THE NAME OF/KILLING IN THE NAME OF/DUH DUH DUMMMM DUH
DUHDUDHDUH SWERREEEEAAAAACHH RAWAAAARRRR </rage against the
machine>
\_ someone has been playing too muh GTA:SA
\_ Is RATM on the soundtrack? -no ps2
\_ yup
\_ Moral relativism. You = teh ghey.
\_ cuz the people we kill don't want other iraqis to be free
\_ Oxymorons for the day: military intelligence, smart weapon,
friendly fire, compassionate conservative.
\_ unbiased mainstream media, kerry electable, youth voter,
hollywood/heart of america, voted for it before....
\_ intelligent motd conservative attempting variation on
theme to drive home stupid point but falling flat
\_ There are no difference, period.
\_ Are you Chinese? Do you understand the effect the opium trade
had on China?
\_ Why do you hate China?
\_ Are you Yiddish? Do you understand the effect the holocaust
had on Yehudah?
\_ Why do you hate Yehudah?
\_ A foreigner can see this with less bias than you do.
\_ I bet BUD DAY has no bias at all!
\_ BUD DAY vs. Ditka? (No Bears' bus)
\_ ?? Care to elaborate?
\_ Ummm... one opresses all other Iraqis for a self-centered
ideology, and the other makes all Iraqis equal?
\_ oppresses via kidnappings, head chopping, car bombs in busy
markets, suicide bombers, etc. You know, the people that he'd
be howling to see put down like rabid dogs in the street if they
made an appearance in HIS neighborhood.
\_ According to Economist, number of Iraqis killed since invasion
is not 15000 as per US's figures, but 40000 or more.
http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3352814
\_ You've obviously never served.
\_ What does that comment have to do with The Economist article
cited?
\_ Why doesn't the Economist just sign Form 180 and get it
over with?
\_ I'll sign form 180!
\_ No, I'll sign form 180! --spartacus
\_ Whatever the number, it is still going to be lower over the long
term than what Saddam was doing to his own people on a daily
basis. It is a horrible and terrible thing that innocent people
die during war but they were also during under Saddam. His
killing was a permanent situation. The war is a temporary
condition required to remove his bloody paws from the people.
\_ How long did Saddam ruled Iraq and how many people died
as a result of his misrule?
\_ Americans love to kill people in the name of freedom
and democracy. They killed 4 million Vietnamese to
save the Vietnamese. That's comparable to the number
of Jews incinerated by the Germans.
\_ You're an idiot. 4 million is an estimate of Vietnamese
civilians killed, 1955-1973. Add to that ca. 1 million
combatants. A majority of those were done in by other
Vietnamese, including North & Viet Cong. -John
\_ http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat2.htm#Vietnam
\_ Exactly. And aside from a fair number of RVN
civilians done in by US napalm, most of it points
to casualties from NVA/VC. Point? -John
\_ why do you say most of the civilian casualties
are due to NVA/VC?
\_ Because they're a bunch of murdering fucking
commies, and they're coming for you AND your
dog, that's why. -John
\_ Didn't you know? The US Military has
declared a Free Fire Zone in your bathroom.
If you have any business there, you'd better
do it quick.
\_ nah, majority killed by Americans and their corrupt
S. Vietnam lackeys.
\_ One is a murdering turd and the other murders Kurds?
\_ Where is the evidence? The Constitution demands an actual head
count for the purposes of the census, but the "100,000 dead Iraqis"
figure is tossed willy-nilly without a list of names. Besides,
we don't target Iraqi citizens, and Saddam did.
\_ 100,000 people was a bogus figure generated by some guys who
came up with a range of ~8000 to just over 200,000 dead so they
split the difference. Once the lie started spreading, the
origin was lost and now this 100k number has become a pseudo-
factoid tossed around like reality.
\_ The 100K number is not bogus, but it has a high uncertainty.
They used the 'cluster' statistical methodology, which is
"THE STANDARD" in epidemiological studies, and gives very
good results if your sample size is large enough. Basically
you randomly pick a bunch of small neighborhoods spread out
over the whole country and interview every person in those
neighborhoods about their family members who died and what was
the cause of death. Then extrapolate those results to the
whole country. Because they got only 33 neighborhoods, their
estimate was 98K dead, but the margin of error was 8-190K
people dead. The best estimate is 98K, but there is 90%
certainty that over 40K have died. Also, they deliberately
threw out a neighborhood in Fallujah because the death rate
was much higher there and they didn't want to skew the sample.
The 8-200K dead figure is the 95% confidence interval, I think
\_ WHY DO YOU HATE AMERICA???
\_ The 100k number came from a survey using the same
methodology as used in kosovo and other conflicts,
and has been generally accepted in the past. But,
as Firesign Theatre would say, everything you know
is wrong.
\_ Nobody knows how many Iraqis are dying because frankly,
nobody cares. The only thing that is important is
to reduce American casualties to a minimum.
\_ You dickwad, I hope a terriorist hit you soon, motherfucker! |
| 11/23 |
|
| www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3352814 E-mail this The Iraqi war Counting the casualties Nov 4th 2004 From The Economist print edition AP AP A statistically based study claims that many more Iraqis have died in the conflict than previous estimates indicated THE American armed forces have long stated that they do not keep track of how many people have been killed in the current conflict in Iraq and, f urthermore, that determining such a number is impossible. Adding up the number of civilians reported killed in confirmed p ress accounts yields a figure of around 15,000. But even that is likely to be an underestimate, for not every death gets reported. A study published on October 29th in the Lancet, a British medical journa l, suggests the death toll is quite a lot higher than the newspaper repo rts suggest. The centre of its estimated range of death tollsthe most p robable number according to the data collected and the statistics usedi s almost 100,000. And even though the limits of that range are very wide , from 8,000 to 194,000, the study concludes with 90% certainty that mor e than 40,000 Iraqis have died. This is an extraordinary claim, and so requires extraordinary evidence. I s the methodology used by Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins University Sc hool of Public Health, in Baltimore, and his colleagues, sound enough fo r reliable conclusions to be drawn from it? The bedrock on which the study is founded is the same as that on which op inion polls are built: random sampling. Selecting even a small number of individuals randomly from a large population allows you to say things a bout the whole population. Think of a jar containing a million marbles, half of them red and half blue. Choose even 100 of these marbles at rand om and it is very, very unlikely that all of them would be red. In fact, the results would be very close to 50 of each colour. The best sort of random sampling is one that picks individuals out direct ly. This is not possible in Iraq because no reliable census data exist. For this reason, Dr Roberts used a technique called clustering, which ha s been employed extensively in other situations where census data are la cking, such as studying infectious disease in poor countries. Clustering works by picking out a number of neighbourhoods at random33 i n this caseand then surveying all the individuals in that neighbourhood . The neighbourhoods were picked by choosing towns in Iraq at random (th e chance that a town would be picked was proportional to its population) and then, in a given town, using GPSthe global positioning systemto s elect a neighbourhood at random within the town. Starting from the GPS-s elected grid reference, the researchers then visited the nearest 30 hous eholds. In each household, the interviewers (all Iraqis fluent in English as well as Arabic) asked about births and deaths that had occurred since Januar y 1st 2002 among people who had lived in the house for more than two mon ths. They also recorded the sexes and ages of people now living in the h ouse. If a death was reported, they recorded the date, cause and circums tances. Their deductions about the number of deaths caused by the war we re then made by comparing the aggregate death rates before and after Mar ch 18th 2003. They interviewed a total of 7,868 people in 988 households. But the relev ant sample size for many purposesfor instance, measuring the uncertaint y of the analysisis 33, the number of clusters. That is because the dat a from individuals within a given cluster are highly correlated. Statist ically, 33 is a relatively small sample (though it is the best that coul d be obtained by a small number of investigators in a country at war). T hat is the reason for the large range around the central value of 98,000 , and is one reason why that figure might be wrong. The farther one goes from 98 ,000, the less likely the figure is. The second reason the figure might be wrong is if there are mistakes in t he analysis, and the whole exercise is thus unreliable. Nan Laird, a pro fessor of biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health, who was not involved with the study, says that she believes both the analysis an d the data-gathering techniques used by Dr Roberts to be sound. She poin ts out the possibility of recall biaspeople may have reported more de aths more recently because they did not recall earlier ones. However, be cause most people do not forget about the death of a family member, she thinks that this effect, if present, would be small. Arthur Dempster, al so a professor of statistics at Harvard, though in a different departmen t from Dr Laird, agrees that the methodology in both design and analysis is at the standard professional level. However, he raises the concern t hat because violence can be very localised, a sample of 33 clusters real ly might be too small to be representative. This concern is highlighted by the case of one cluster which, as the luck of the draw had it, ended up being in the war-torn city of Fallujah. Th is cluster had many more deaths, and many more violent deaths, than any of the others. For this reason, the researchers omitted it from their an alysisthe estimate of 98,000 was made without including the Fallujah da ta. If it had been included, that estimate would have been significantly higher. The Fallujah data-point highlights how the variable distribution of death s in a war can make it difficult to make estimates. But Scott Zeger, the head of the department of biostatistics at Johns Hopkins, who performed the statistical analysis in the study, points out that clustered sampli ng is the rule rather than the exception in public-health studies, and t hat the patterns of deaths caused by epidemics are also very variable by location. The study can be both lauded and criticised for the fact that it takes in to account a general rise in deaths, and not just that directly caused b y violence. Of the increase in deaths (omitting Fallujah) reported by th e study, roughly 60% is due directly to violence, while the rest is due to a slight increase in accidents, disease and infant mortality. However , these numbers should be taken with a grain of salt because the more de tailed the dataon causes of death, for instance, rather than death as a wholethe less statistical significance can be ascribed to them. So the discrepancy between the Lancet estimate and the aggregated press r eports is not as large as it seems at first. The Lancet figure implies t hat 60,000 people have been killed by violence, including insurgents, wh ile the aggregated press reports give a figure of 15,000, counting only civilians. Nonetheless, Dr Roberts points out that press reports are a passive-surveillance system. Reporters do not actively go out to many r andom areas and see if anyone has been killed in a violent attack, but w ait for reports to come in. And, Dr Roberts says, passive-surveillance s ystems tend to undercount mortality. For instance, when he was head of h ealth policy for the International Rescue Committee in the Congo, in 200 1, he found that only 7% of meningitis deaths in an outbreak were record ed by the IRC's passive system. The way forwa rd is to duplicate the Lancet study independently, and at a larger scale . Josef Stalin once claimed that a single death is a tragedy, but a mill ion deaths a mere statistic. Such cynicism should not be allowed to prev ail, especially in a conflict in which many more lives are at stake. Ira q seems to be a case where more statistics are sorely needed. |
| users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat2.htm#Vietnam Support This Site Growing up in the South, I heard over and over again that nobody in the h istory of the world suffered as much as the Southern people during the A merican Civil War. The following events, however, all killed more people than the American Civil War, which cost approximately 620,000 lives. A lot of natives died from colonial brutality, but no one really knows how many. Roger Casement's original 1904 report estimated that as many as 3 million Congolese had died of disease, torture or shooting since 1888 (cited in Gilbert's History of the Twentieth Century; Peter Forbath (The River Congo (1977)): at least 5 million killed. John Gunther (Inside Africa (1953)): 5-8 million deaths. Adam Hochschild (Leopold's Ghost, (1998)): 10 million, or half the original population. Britannica, "Congo Free State": population declined from 20 or 30 million to 8 million. Fredric Wertham A Sign For Cain : A Exploration of Human Violence (1966): the population of the Congo dropped dropped from 30M to 85M, a loss of 215 million Rummel: # 2,150,000 democides, 19th Century (based on 10% of Wertham) # 25,000 democides, 1900-1910. Also, it took awhile for the atrocities to get up to speed, so the dying probably intensified as more time passed. Mexican Revolution (1910-20): 1 000 000 + The population explosion of the 20th Century is so pervasive that populations have continued to climb during most of the bad times listed on this page; however, the intensity of the Mexican Revolution is such that the counted population of Mexico actually declined from 15,160,369 in 1910 to 14,334,780 in 1921. Cumberland, Mexican Revolution: the constitutionalist years, 1972) "estimated at 1 million" (Crow, The Epic of Latin America) Encyclopedia Americana (2003), "Mexico": 1M lives "at least a million" (Wallechensky) "perhaps 2 million" (RJ Rummel, although he later tightens his estimate to 2,142,000) "as many as two million" (TR Fehrenbach, Fire and Blood, 1973) + War Deaths: Wallechensky: 200,000 Small & Singer: 250,000 Rummel: 200,000 battle deaths + 125,000 incidental civilian deaths Enrique Krauze, Mexico : Biography of Power (1997): 250,000 combat deaths; "Missing millions: the human cost of the Mexican Revolution" by Robert McCaa. In contrast, he mentions these previous estimates: Ordorica and Lezama: 14M Collver: 05M - 21M Loyo: 09M Greer: 06M Gamio: 055M Gonzalez Navarro: 03M Mier y Teran: 02M + AVERAGE: Of the 17 estimates here, the MEDIAN is 1,000,000, and the MEAN is 927,000. According to a report from the US Congress dated 17 Feb. Also, 92 Mexicans were killed inside the US because of the Revolution (That's the official total. Unofficially, it may be as high as 400 (Ronald Atkin, Revolution! Keep in mind that this report predates Pancho Villa's raid on Columbus, NM, where 18 Americans and possibly 50-100 Mexicans were killed. Additionally, 19 US Marines died seizing Veracruz, and 30 US soldiers died on Pershing's expedition. Wars: 600,000 died of starvation, disease and exhaustion # Steven Katz in Is the Holocaust Unique? Armenian claims: 2M @ probable: >1,300,000 during war and aftermath # Porter: 1,000,000 to 1,500,000 # Rummel: 1,404,000 domestic, 83,000 foreign # War Annual 8 (1997): 1,500,000 # The Turkish Government denies that the Armenians were massacred, and instead, accuses the Armenians of massacring some 23,100 Turks. Korean War (1950-53): 2 800 000 + Deaths: + I don't understand why all the sources I check are so sure of their numbers when they all give different numbers. Okay, some of the discrepancies come from disagreement over what to include -- do we count only the 33,741 Americans killed in battle, or do we add the 2,827 non-combat deaths as well? But some of the other disagreements are harder to reconcile: South Korea: # SKo Military @ 47,000 KIA (Encyclopedia Americana) @ 46,812 KIA + 66,436 MIA (Wallechinsky) @ 59,000 (Summers) @ 100,000 (Leckie) @ 212,500 KIA (Pentagon: "KWM") @ 225,784 (Nahm93) @ 281,000 (Rummel) @ 281,257 to 400,000 (Lewy - the latter citing the ROK Defense Ministry) @ 415,000 (S&S; org/year/2000/investigative-reporting/wor ks/ # No Gun Ri, 1950: US massacre of civilian refugees (ca. US News & World Report (22 May 2000) cast serious doubt on the reliability of many of the eye-witness accounts. But the South Korean government later put that toll at 129,000." Gilbert, History of the Twentieth Century: 26,000 South Korean civilians executed by North Koreans within their zone of conquest, 1950. Report: 7,000 civilians and 60 US POWs k in Taejon by NKor. say that the US started the fighting and committed atrocities on civilians at Sinchon, a claim for which there is little evidence, but one which is the subject of numerous gory paintings." alleged that earlier the southern government had murdered thousands of communist sympathizers around Taejon... The Center for the Advancement of North Korean Human Rights estimates that some 400,000 prisoners have died in labor camps since 1972. html Famine, 1995-98 # 13 March 1999, Agence France Presse: (citing N Korean defector) 3,500,000 deaths as of 12/98 # 19 Oct. estimates 220,000 famine-related deaths, 1995-98 @ US Congressional delegation: 2M @ South Korean intelligence estimates that the population of North Korea fell from 25M to 22M. To which should be added: # Killed in France by terrorism: 4,300 # Pro-French Muslims killed in Algeria in post-war reprisals: 30-150,000 + Britannica largely agrees: French: 10,000 Muslims: 250,000 + The Algerian government claims that one million were killed in the war. Dan Smith, Encarta, and Our Times seem to agree with this number, but in vague or confusing ways: # Encarta says "French casualties were about 100,000, Algerian more than 1 million". The textbook definition of "casualties" includes wounded, so if Encarta means it by the book, then it agrees with the French estimates that perhaps 275,000 were killed. The problem is that "casualties" is widely misused as a synonym for "killed", so if Encarta means it that way, then it agrees with the Algerians that around a million were killed. "Tutsi soon struck back, killing at least as many Hutu" @ 1963: 10,000 Tutsi k # Harff & Gurr: 5,000 - 14,000 (1963-64) # Eckhardt: 102,000 civ. Wars: 100,000 Hutu and 10,000 Tutsi # DSmith: 100,000 # Eckhardt: 80,000 civ. Wars: 850,000 in 1994 # 4 Apr 2004 Reuters: 937,000 according to new census by Rwandan govt. Second Indochina War (1960-75): 3 500 000 + Vietnam War: Most historians of the Second Indochina War concern themselves primarily with the American Phase of the conflict, 1965-73; however, many do not specify whether their estimated death tolls cover only this phase of the war or the whole thing. North Vietnamese military and Viet Cong # 444,000 (Ency. Americana) # 500,000 (S&S) # 660,000 (Olson) # 666,000 (Lewy, with the possibility that as many as 222,000 (1/3) of these were actually SVN civilians mistaken for VC) # 666,000 (Summers) # 700,000-1,000,000 (Wallechinsky*) # 900,000 (Britannica; South Vietnamese civilians # 250,000 (Olson) # 287,000 (Clodfelter = 247,600 war deaths + 38,954 assassinated by NLF) # 300,000 (Kutler; Summers) # 340,000 (Lewy's estimate, with the possibility that an additional 222,000 counted as VC (above) belong in this category) # 430,000 (The Sen. North Vietnamese civilians: 65,000 (Kutler, Lewy, Olson, Summers, Wallechinsky) by American bombing. USA # 47,378 KIA + 10,799 other = 58,177 (Official US DoD, 1964-73) # 58,159 (Kutler) # 58,153 (Wallechinsky*) # 58,000 (Britannica) # 47,244 KIA + 10,446 other = 57,690 (Olson; Americana) # 56,146 (Lewy: 46,498 KIA + 10,388 other + 719 MIA) # 56,000 (S&S) South Korea: 4,407 (Lewy, Olson, Summers); Atrocities: # Lewy: @ 36,725 civilians assassinated by VC/NVA, 1957-72 @ 2,800 civilians executed and 3,000 missing after Hue was captured by VC/NVA, 1968 @ 400 civilians massacred by USAns in the area of Son My village, incl. Lewy considers these to be (mostly) legitimate military targets. The unit reported 1000+ enemies killed, but it sounds like a lot of those weren't legit. From the article details, I'd guess they murdered a few hundred (300) civilians. AID=/20 031022/SRTI... |