100,000 Civilians Dead in Iraq

asldihf writes "New Scientist is reporting that 100,000 civilians in Iraq are now dead due to America's war in Iraq. Make sure you vote next week."

Comments

The skeptic's opinion: Number hard to calculate

[MobyDisk]

It would be nice to have a link to the real article, rather than an oversimplistic summary. This number is _extremely_ difficult to calculate. Some estimates say tens of thousands. Some say hundreds of thousands. With wild variations like that no one should believe any of these numbers at all. When they are within a factor of 2 then we have a reasonable range. But it will be 10 years before we really have a good idea. The same thing happened with WWI, WWII, Hiroshima, etc.
For this report, the sample numbers were EXTREMELY EXTREMELY low: 988 housholds. The potential for error here is astounding.

Confirmation was sought to ensure that a large fraction of the reported deaths were not fabrications...but only in two cases for each cluster of [30] houses.

So they had confirmation of 6%.

But the team believes that lying about deaths is unlikely

That's silly. The death count is constantly overreported. Every article about military firefights ends with a quote from some official saying how the Americans attacked mostly women, children, and the elderly. It's the standard line and it gets old and less believable each time. I would really like to see statistics on who was killed and how the deaths occurred. Firefights with US troops? Bombings? Deaths during reconstruction? Who is called a "civilian?"

Re: do you mean that a war actually kills people?

[Black Parrot]

> I could swear the president's right hand man said that they would minimize civilian casualties?

Here's another good one:

We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.
- Paul Wolfowitz, testifying before Congress

The neocons are trying to sell imperialism by portraying it as cheap and painless. Reality hasn't conformed to the plan yet.

Re:different stats

[nes11]

"Different sites have different stats, but one civilian death is one too many."

This is from a relatively unbiased group that studies human rights atrocities throughout the world:
"Along with other human rights organizations, The Documental Centre for Human Rights in Iraq has compiled documentation on over 600,000 civilian executions in Iraq. Human Rights Watch reports that in one operation alone, the Anfal, Saddam killed 100,000 Kurdish Iraqis. Another 500,000 are estimated to have died in Saddam's needless war with Iran. Coldly taken as a daily average for the 24 years of Saddam's reign, these numbers give us a horrifying picture of between 70 and 125 civilian deaths per day for every one of Saddam's 8,000-odd days in power."

Here's the full article where it's quoted:
http://www.gbn.com/ArticleDisplayServlet.srv?aid=2 400&msp=1242

nobody likes to see people die, but you have to honestly include the alternatives as well.

Pre-war estimate

[dtfinch]

In planning the war, it was estimated that the civilian casualties would be only about 10,000 if the US invaded Iraq. This estimate went into the decision of whether or not we should go forward with the invasion.