Iraqi death tolls (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6040054.stm)An estimated 655,000 Iraqis have died since 2003 who might still be alive but for the US-led invasion, according to a survey by a John Hopkins university.

I read on YahooNews that the Bush Administration claims the toll is absurd and insists only 50k Iraqis are dead because of the US invasion.

I read on YahooNews that the Bush Administration claims the toll is absurd and insists only 50k Iraqis are dead because of the US invasion.

Most likely only 50k "confirmed" dead Iraqis. That, or they're full of shit trying to cut their losses.

- N

Most likely only 50k "confirmed" dead Iraqis. That, or they're full of shit trying to cut their losses.

- NWe do know Bush has killed more Iraqis than Saddam ever did. And he keeps on killing them. I want the Republican Party to pay for their ineptitude and immorality. Vote Republican in November and '08. Don't give them someone else to blame, again.

And let's not forget the victims of the UN sanctions before the invasion.

http://www.commondreams.org/views/102300-103.htm
UNICEF blames the sanctions for the deaths of more than 500,000 Iraqi children under 5 since 1991.

Irionically that is exactly what they want to intensify in North Korea. As if the regime of North Korea would care about civilian casualties resulting from sanctions. It will merely fuel the crisis.

And then we have the military and civilian casualties of the first gulf war.

Why is there such a big difference (600,000) between the John Hopkins survey and the Bush administration? How have the Bush Admin actually counted the dead?

No, they don't count iraqi casualties. All figures are from alternative sources. They don't care.

They don't care.
Would they care if they were predominately Christians? Or White?

Probably not.

edit1:
The US has a history with meddling with Latin America. The population is predominantly christian, although catholic. I speculate here now and say that the american background (of those in power) stems from protestant background. There has always been a rift between protestants and catholics of course. i know all to well from my native holland.

In my opinion the US army has become more or less a mercenary army that abides the wishes of those in power in the US. It is not organized to defend the nation. It mostly has an agressive role. The absence of a draft changes usually the nature of an army. Moral checks disappear. The job needs to get done. Casualties on the other side are acceptable. Casualties that disrupt the own warmachine are not.

That's one reason why a nuclear North Korea is unacceptable. It has now the power to disrupt the American war machine. It can take more than a few thousand lives. It merely has to nuke the troop concentrations. This severly limites the imperial aspirations of the US. The freedom to go about business has disappeared in this area.

PS.No need to reply that this is merely my opinion. It is merely my opinion.

Edit2:
From nature newstory:
http://www.nature.com/news/2006/061009/full/061009-9.html

The data is actually backed up mostly by real death certificates apparently:

But Gilbert Burnham, co-director of the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland and a member of the team that helped design the study, says that neither criticism stands up to scrutiny. He says that pre-war mortality figures from other sources, such the US Central Intelligence Agency, are in line with his data.

Reports of deaths, adds Burnham, were backed up by a death certificate in 92% of the 629 cases they collected. "We recorded what people told us," he says. "We're not making up deaths."

As for political agenda:

He points out that Iraq has been in the news constantly over the past year, and so his team would have been accused of playing politics no matter when the paper was published.

1 dead out of every 40!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

:mad: :mad: :mad:

In addition to that death and horror, the bell also tolls for the death of a nation and still more deadly repercussions through the coming years (http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=17938).

"1 dead out of every 40!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Yet neocon supporters still can't face the reality of their Iraq disaster. Proportionally, that would equate to 7.5 million Americans killed under foreign invasion and occupation.

insists only 50k Iraqis are dead because of the US invasion.

ONLY 50k? I dunno about you, but I think 50,000 is a lot of dead people, a lot of widows, and a lot of families wanting revenge.

"1 dead out of every 40!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Yet neocon supporters still can't face the reality of their Iraq disaster. Proportionally, that would equate to 7.5 million Americans killed under foreign invasion and occupation.

The Neocon vision will plunge the entire region and World into war. There was no real strategy in Iraq, the people of Iraq deserved so much better. There is going to be a lot of fighting between the Sunnis and Shias in the region, there will be conflict between the Kurds and Turkey. Lets not forget the looming conflict with Iran.

What did the people of Iraq have to do with 9/11? What have they done to America?

We still get idiots in the West saying why? Why do they hate us!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

"1 dead out of every 40!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"


The U.S. hasn't seen this proportion of killing since their Civil War - where the toll was 1 in 45 of the non-slave population. Even that is somewhat stretching it - most of the Civil War deaths were due to sickness, not combat deaths, and the civilian death rate was extremely low.

Plus, the death toll being bandied about in Iraq is only since the invasion and ignores the Gulf War and the twelve years of sanctions and airstrikes that followed. What's the real death toll? There is no agreement, but I would settle for one million extra deaths since 1991 as a round number. This is more like 1 in 25. Throw in another million dead Iraqis in the war against Iran (1980-88) and you have 1 in 12 over the last 25 years. The U.S. has plenty of complicity in that war, too, so I can see why the average Iraqi is so pissed off at us.

The British army chief General Sir Richard Dannatt has called for a withdrawal of British troops from Iraq:


http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=15archive/&entry_id=9897

Assessing the quagmire of George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair's failed Iraq adventure, the general told the BBC and the Daily Mail he felt British troops should be pulled out of the war zone "sometime soon." Their presence in Iraq, he noted, is only "exacerbating" the violence there. He indicated that planning for the post-invasion period had been "poor." He said: "I am just saying, 'Come on, we can't be here forever at this level.' I have got an army to look after which is going to be successful in current operations, but I want an army in five, ten years time. Don't let's break it on this one." The British tabloid the Sun reports: "Ex-soldiers and military experts jumped to the decorated Northern Ireland veteran's defense. They hailed him [as] a hero for speaking his mind."
Predictably, Blair and his cronies are calling for the General's resignation:

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/tm_headline=barrage-of-calls-for-dannatt-to-resign-&method=full&objectid=17936980&siteid=66633-name_page.html

Which leads to the question: have politicians no shame whatsoever?

1 dead out of every 40!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

:mad: :mad: :mad:

"1 dead out of every 40!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Yet neocon supporters still can't face the reality of their Iraq disaster. Proportionally, that would equate to 7.5 million Americans killed under foreign invasion and occupation.

The only good Muslim is a dead Muslim.

Still in disagreement. Perhaps the Bush admin counted 600,000 "insurgents" killed. They are not "civilians" are they?

Civil strife baffles Iraq leadership
Country heads deeper into divide as government struggles for control
By Steven R. Hurst, Associated Press
Article Last Updated:10/16/2006 05:34:52 AM PDT


BAGHDAD, Iraq — The Sunni Arab and al-Qaida insurgency that first shoved Iraq toward chaos three years ago clearly had taken a back seat by Sunday to the sectarian bloodletting that is sending the country spiraling toward — if not deeper into — civil war.

Evidence continued to mount in the 44th month of U.S. involvement that Iraqi centers of power — politicians and the government, the police and military — were unable or unwilling to rein in violence in parts of the country where Sunni and Shiite Muslim or Kurdish populations rub up against one another.

The violence has forced at least 1.5 million Iraqis to flee their homeland, with hundreds of new passports being issued daily to those who can afford a plane ticket or taxi ride out of the country, according to the Migration Ministry. The ministry said 300,000 people had also left their homes for elsewhere in Iraq.

The Shiite Majority in parliament, over complaints of dirty tricks from rival Sunni and even some Shiite legislators, adopted a measure that would allow the effective partition of the country after an 18-month waiting period — something widely opposed in polls of Iraqis.

"The starting point is to recognize that Iraq is not going tobe a democratic, unified country that serves as a model for the region. The violence and the Sunni-Shiite division have already ruled that out," Dennis Ross, a Mideast peace negotiator and policy maker for Presidents Clinton and George H.W. Bush, wrote in an op-ed column for the Washington Post on Sunday.

A partition would leave Iraq with a weak central government and largely independent states run by Kurds in the north, Shiites in the south and Sunnis in the center and west.

Iraq's so-called national unity government announced that next Saturday's much-anticipated national reconciliation conference was indefinitely postponed for unspecified "emergency reasons." A week before the planned opening of the conference, Iraq's deeply divided politicians had not managed even to agree on a venue for the meeting. :rolleyes:

http://www.insidebayarea.com/argus/news/ci_4499622

About the Lancet study:

http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_4499101

The most striking thing in the study, in terms of credibility, is that the pre-war death rate in Iraq for the period January 2002-March 2003, as calculated from their evidence, was 5.5 per thousand per year. That is virtually identical to the U.S. government estimate of the death rate in Iraq for the same period. Then, from the same evidence, they calculate that the death rate since the invasion has been 13.3 per thousand per year. The difference between the pre-war and post-war death rates over a period of 40 months is 665,000 deaths.

More precisely, the deaths reported by the 12,801 people surveyed, when extrapolated to the entire country, indicates a range of between 426,369 and 793,663 excess deaths - but the sample is big enough that the estimate of about 665,000 has a 95 percent certainty. What the Johns Hopkins team has done in Iraq is a more rigorous version of the technique that is used to calculate deaths in southern Sudan and the eastern Congo. To reject it, you must either reject the whole discipline of statistics, or you must question the professional integrity of those doing the survey.

The study, which was largely financed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for International Studies, has been reviewed by four independent experts. One of them, Paul Bolton of Boston University, called the methodology "excellent" and said it was standard procedure in a wide range of studies he has worked on: "You can't be sure of the exact number, but you can be quite sure that you are in the right ballpark."

Johns Hopkins University, Boston University and MIT are not fly-by-night institutions, and people who work there have academic reputations to protect. The Lancet, founded 182 years ago, is one of the oldest and most respected medical journals in the world.

Still in disagreement. Perhaps the Bush admin counted 600,000 "insurgents" killed. They are not "civilians" are they?


What rubbish!!! A lot if not most of the lives lost since the invasion have been at the hands of the insurgent suicides and roadside bombs.(many still loyal to Husseins Ba'ath party) Not US or British troops being trigger happy!

Oh, so they didnt count 600,000 "insurgents" killed. back to square one: why the discrepency?

Oh, so they didnt count 600,000 "insurgents" killed. back to square one: why the discrepency?

you said it not me!

Did I say you said it?

How are the Bush admin classifying the dead? Who is civilian and who isnt?

Did I say you said it?

How are the Bush admin classifying the dead? Who is civilian and who isnt?

I'm an unaware of the method or classification undertaken by the bush team but I'm sure it's a very messy job!;)

The war has been going on for 1308 days, simple division show that to achieve this number of deaths you would have to have 500.76 deaths per day average, and that is a flat average, and we all know that the total goes up and down so some of those daily kill totals must have been horrendous...........