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Oops, I mean 665,000 Iraqis have died in a war, almost all civilians. After the first five thousand, we forget to count. Let’s just add them to the millions of forgotten civilians in WWII from Poland, China and Russia.
France trying to create a law to ensure the history of other nations, while conveniently forgetting their own.
Tango just realize that the figure is around 4-5 times as high as the next highest estimate.
Yes, I followed the news and all the detractors. That doesn’t make the claim here any less wrong. You should also not forget that Iraqis believe that the 665,000 figure is too LOW, that many civilians said that the number is at least 1 million. Why should we listen to the civilians more than the Generals? I dunno, but I don’t see why we should listen to the Generals either.
But, if you want to say that “only” 150,000 civilians died, fine.
don’t forget the 400,000 plus that have died in Darfur
The method seems statistically solid, the numbers just don’t make sense. At first, at least. But having done some number crunching, maybe they’re not so out-of-line. According to Wikipedia, 2-4 million civilians died in Vietnam, or 34.36 to 68.72 civilian deaths per American soldier. In Iraq, 2,985 coalition soldiers have been killed. Applying the Vietnam ratio, we’d expect 102,565 to 205,129 civilian deaths. Much more than any reported figure, but still a lot less than what the study says. But wait! In Iraq, a large part of the deaths have been due to terrorism and the such, things we did not have to contend with in Vietnam. Only 31% of the deaths, according to the study have been due to coalition soldiers. If we divide our answer by .31, we get and expectation of 330,854 deaths to 661,707 deaths. The study’s answer of 601,000 falls into that range.
Is this fuzzy math? As fuzzy as it gets. Don’t even bother critiquing it. In Vietnam, we didn’t have terrorism, but many civilian deaths were caused by the Viet Cong, a much larger proportion than the number of people killed by Saddam’s army. And anyways, Iraq isn’t Vietnam. The numbers for one don’t really apply to the other. All this is meant to show is that the results are within the range of possibility, and not too different from what we have experienced in prior wars.
They’re just hard to wrap your head around is all.
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The Holy Writers strike again!
That exaggerated death count is the obvious work of the American liberal academia. That’s what Fox News told me, at least.