More than 600,000 Iraqi's have perished in the "war on terror"

limerickman

Since the USA invaded Iraq in March 2003, more than 600,000 Iraqi's have died in the conflict in the past 3 years, six months, as a result of the invasion according to a report issued today.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/...iraq-dead_x.htm

The report can be read here :

http://www.usatoday.com/news/news/n...l%20oct%209.pdf

__________________
.."But finally the last thing I’ll say to the people who don’t believe in cycling, the cynics and the sceptics. I'm sorry for you. I’m sorry that you can’t dream big. [I]I'm sorry you don't believe in miracles. You should believe in these athletes, and you should believe in these people. I'll be a fan of the Tour de France for as long as I live. And there are no secrets" - this is a hard sporting event and hard work wins it - Armstrong 2005 TDF
morelike hypocrisy.

thebluetrain

Those are quite some differences in the numbers. How do you go from 60k to 600k?

limerickman

Who mentioned 60,000?

The survey of Iraqi dead Mar 2003 - Sept 2004 = 100,000 dead.

The survey of Oraqi dead Mar 2003 - Sept 2006 = 655,000 dead.

__________________
.."But finally the last thing I’ll say to the people who don’t believe in cycling, the cynics and the sceptics. I'm sorry for you. I’m sorry that you can’t dream big. [I]I'm sorry you don't believe in miracles. You should believe in these athletes, and you should believe in these people. I'll be a fan of the Tour de France for as long as I live. And there are no secrets" - this is a hard sporting event and hard work wins it - Armstrong 2005 TDF
morelike hypocrisy.

thebluetrain

Is it coinsidence that this article comes out about 3 weeks before election day?
Hardly a reliable way of counting?
"The study used two medically qualified teams, each consisting of two male and two female interviewers. They surveyed 1,849 households in 47 randomly selected sites across Iraq between May and July this year, asking about births, deaths and migration in and out of the area. A death certificate was available to confirm 92 per cent of the 629 reported deaths."

Huh?? Not very reliable once again. What ever happened to good old fashioned counting the hard way to get it right?
"Our total estimate is much higher than other mortality estimates because we used a population-based, active method for collecting mortality information rather than passive methods that depend on counting bodies or tabulated media reports of violent deaths," said Dr Burnham."

The widely quoted Iraq Body Count, an independent estimate, gives a death toll since the invasion of about 50,000. No other mortality study anywhere near as comprehensive as the Lancet survey has been published, largely because of the difficulties of gathering accurate information in a country beset with armed groups and fearful of outsiders.
The researchers acknowledged that security concerns had affected the gathering of data and said the survey teams were allowed to choose alternative sites if they judged that the original, randomly selected ones were too -dangerous.

However, the Lancet paper did not explain in detail how the researchers could have visited 47 sites around the country during three months when sectarian violence was at its height. During the survey period Iraqis curtailed travel to many areas for fear of impromptu checkpoints run by militias or insurgents, at which anyone from the wrong sect, or from outside the neighbourhood, risked immediate execution or abduction for ransom.

The paper does not say how armed groups in areas in question reacted to visits by outsiders gathering data.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/4e7813ca-59...00779e2340.html

limerickman

Dr. Robert Horton : The British Medical Journal, The Lancet, writes 12th October 2006 :


This terrible misadventure has killed one in 40 Iraqis

The government will do all it can to discredit the latest estimate of civilian casualties since the invasion: 650,000

Many people refused to believe the Lancet report in 2004 from a group of American and Iraqi public-health scientists who surveyed homes across the country and found that about 100,000 additional Iraqi deaths had taken place since the coalition invasion in March 2003. Several government ministers were deployed to destroy the credibility of the findings and, in large part, they succeeded. But now their denials have come back to haunt them, for the figures from Iraq have been confirmed by a further study.

The same team from Johns Hopkins University worked with Iraqi doctors to visit over 1,800 homes in Iraq, selected randomly to make sure that no bias could creep in to their calculations.

They identified more than 12,000 family members and tracked those who had died over an interval that spanned both pre- and post-invasion periods. The Iraqi interviewers spoke fluent English as well as Arabic, and they were well trained to collect the information they were seeking. They asked permission from every family to use the data they wanted. And they chased down death certificates in over four out of five cases to make sure that they had a double check on the numbers and causes of death given to them by family members.

All of these checks and balances mean that the 650,000 additional Iraqi casualties they report since the invasion is the most reliable estimate we have of civilian deaths. Most of these deaths have been of men aged 15 to 44.

Not only do we have a better understanding of the toll our invasion has had on the country; we also understand better just how those deaths have come about. Before the invasion only a tiny proportion of deaths were due to violence. But since the invasion over half of all deaths have been due to violent causes. It is our occupation and our continued presence in Iraq that is fuelling this violence. Claims that the terrorist threat was always there are simply disproved by these findings.

The nature of these causes has changed too. Early on in the post-invasion period deaths were made worse by aerial bombing. But now gunshot wounds and car bombs are having a far greater effect. Far from our presence in Iraq stabilising the chaos or alleviating the rate at which casualties are mounting, we seem to be making the situation worse. In each year since the invasion, the mortality rates due to violence have increased.

The total figure of 650,000 is truly staggering. It represents 2.5% of the entire Iraqi population. In 2004 The Lancet was criticised for publishing a number that seemed to have a high degree of uncertainty. The best estimate then was 98,000 deaths. But the uncertainty meant that it could have been as low as 8,000 or as high as 194,000.

In the latest study there is also a large degree of uncertainty, but even the lowest possible figure it gives for the number of deaths - 400,000 - makes clear just how terrible our intervention in Iraq has been. The highest possible figure is more than 900,000. Looking at these numbers, we have to concede that we have created a humanitarian disaster of unprecedented proportions for a foreign policy that was supposed to protect civilian populations, not subject them to ever-greater harm.

Why is this Lancet estimate so much higher than the figures put out by President Bush or the Iraq Body Count website?
They put the number of casualties in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of thousands.
To be fair, Iraq Body Count does not claim to publish accurate absolute numbers of deaths. Instead, their figures are valuable for measuring trends. But the reason for the discrepancy between these lower estimates and the new figure of 650,000 deaths lies in the way the number is sought. Passive surveillance, the most common method used to estimate numbers of civilian deaths, will always underestimate the total number of casualties. We know this from past wars and conflict zones, where the estimates have been too low by a factor of 10 or even 20.

Only when you go out and knock on the doors of families, actively looking for deaths, do you begin to get close to the right number. This method is now tried and tested. It has been the basis for mortality estimates in war zones such as Darfur and the Congo. Interestingly, when we report figures from these countries politicians do not challenge them. They frown, nod their heads and agree that the situation is grave and intolerable. The international community must act, they say. When it comes to Iraq the story is different. Expect the current government to mobilise all its efforts to undermine the work done by this American and Iraqi team. Expect the government to criticise the Lancet for being too political. Expect the government to do all it can to dismiss this story and wash its hands of its responsibility to take these latest findings seriously.

But if we were talking about the risk of smoking to the population, and published research demonstrating the effect of tobacco on mortality, few would dispute the message or the importance of scientists and medical journals in being actively engaged in a public debate. For Iraq, violence is the public-health priority right now. It is a proper subject for science and it is a proper subject for a medical journal to comment on.

So what is the right conclusion from this work? How should this latest research inform public policy? First, Iraq is an unequivocal humanitarian emergency. Civilians are being harmed by our presence in Iraq, not helped. That should force us to pause and ask what we are doing and why. There is no shame in saying that we have got the policy wrong. Moreover, we have a legal obligation under the Geneva conventions to do all we can to protect civilian populations. These findings show not only that are we not adhering to this legal obligation, but also that we are progressively subverting it year on year.

And finally, we can truthfully say that our foreign policy - based as it is on 19th-century notions of the nation-state - is long past its sell-by date. We need a new set of principles to govern our diplomacy and military strategy - principles that are based on the idea of human security and not national security, health and wellbeing and not economic self-interest and territorial ambition.

The best hope we can have from our terrible misadventure in Iraq is that a new political and social movement will grow to overturn this politics of humiliation. We are one human family. Let's act like it.

__________________
.."But finally the last thing I’ll say to the people who don’t believe in cycling, the cynics and the sceptics. I'm sorry for you. I’m sorry that you can’t dream big. [I]I'm sorry you don't believe in miracles. You should believe in these athletes, and you should believe in these people. I'll be a fan of the Tour de France for as long as I live. And there are no secrets" - this is a hard sporting event and hard work wins it - Armstrong 2005 TDF
morelike hypocrisy.

Wurm

Not only these atrocious casualty figures, but also today Britain's top Army Chief, General Sir Richard Dannatt, said Britain should "get out some time soon" from Iraq. He said being in Iraq has made matters worse there and for Britain around the world.

I would say that applies equally to the US involvement as well.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6046332.stm

It doesn't get any more crystal clear than that.

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The aim of big corporations is to separate fools from their money all of the time and ordinary folks from their money most of the time. The rest of us must fend for ourselves.

stevebaby

So what you are suggesting is that the Johns Hopkins figures are unreliable because the researchers may have avoided the most dangerous areas?
Surely,collecting statistics only from the relatively safe areas would mean that the real numbers are in fact higher than the study suggests.
If you keep shooting yourself in the foot...very soon you won't have any feet.Then you will have to find another way to get about...kinda like a slug.
Fitting really.



P.S. "Iraqi"...not "Oraqi"."Coincidence"...not "coinsidence".
No need to thank me.

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thebluetrain

Dont worry I won't. Your boy Lim can, he posted it.

The Grammar Police, Barney and Goober, come through once again.
Hey Barney, if you keep shooting yourself in the foot, very soon you wont have any feet. Thats why you only get one bullet. LMFAO. Classic.

stevebaby

"I" and "O" are next to each other...that's a typo.
"s" and "c" are not next to each other...that's a spelling mistake.

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Drink!Feck!Arrse!Girls!
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stevebaby

Try to be original.It will be difficult for you,but ultimately worth it.

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thebluetrain

I'm mocking you, not copying you. LOL. You'll get it one day, it will be difficult for you, but ultimately worth it. LMFAO.

stevebaby

Monkey see...monkey do.

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I'm Rooting for Chiara!
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bastard

MountainPro

Okay, you have the Lancet, an internationally respected publication. The worlds foremost medical journal is a better description.

that against the Bush admin. The most corrupt govt in American history who's interest it is in to lie to the public about fatalities.

I know who i would choose to keep me informed on the real cost of war.

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HARD
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stevebaby

You had to edit for spelling,didn't you?
Mmwaahahahaha

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I'm Rooting for Chiara!
Drink!Feck!Arrse!Girls!
bastard