Shouldn’t that be a negative number
Unknown News, a wonderful site for monitoring abuses of civil liberties but with whom I disagree about Iraq, has an estimate of total people killed in Afghanistan and Iraq:
ESTIMATED TOTAL KILLED: 40,183
ESTIMATED TOTAL SERIOUSLY INJURED: 92,766
I imagine if we deduct from those numbers the bodies in mass graves in Iraq allocated over time and the number of women not being shot in the heads in soccer stadiums with AK47s in Afghanistan, the results would be negative.
Of course, the Iraqometer isn’t running in reverse either.
December 3rd, 2003 at 2:39 pm
I imagine if we deduct from those numbers the bodies in mass graves in Iraq allocated over time and the number of women not being shot in the heads in soccer stadiums with AK47s in Afghanistan, the results would be negative.
Got any figures to back that up? I haven’t really seen anything in the way of statistics concerning mass graves, etc., so I have no idea whether such a statement is valid.
December 3rd, 2003 at 2:44 pm
I said i imagine.
I recall the article about the 300K bodies in mass graves but i’ll have to some research. And stats from Human Rights Watch:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/news/20030404-1.html
“Human Rights Watch estimates that Saddam’s 1987-1988 campaign of terror against the Kurds killed at least 50,000 and possibly as many as 100,000 Kurds. o The Iraqi regime used chemical agents to include mustard gas and nerve agents in attacks against at least 40 Kurdish villages between 1987-1988. The largest was the attack on Halabja which resulted in approximately 5,000 deaths. o 2,000 Kurdish villages were destroyed during the campaign of terror.”
“According to Human Rights Watch, “senior Arab diplomats told the London-based Arabic daily newspaper al-Hayat in October [1991] that Iraqi leaders were privately acknowledging that 250,000 people were killed during the uprisings, with most of the casualties in the south.” Refugees International reports that the “Oppressive government policies have led to the internal displacement of 900,000 Iraqis, primarily Kurds who have fled to the north to escape Saddam Hussein’s Arabization campaigns (which involve forcing Kurds to renounce their Kurdish identity or lose their property) and Marsh Arabs, who fled the government’s campaign to dry up the southern marshes for agricultural use. More than 200,000 Iraqis continue to live as refugees in Iran.”
These are not hard numbers, but I don’t know how to begin the research. The point though is that yes the war is killing people but so was the peace.
December 4th, 2003 at 1:21 am
The point though is that yes the war is killing people but so was the peace.
I understand that, of course. And if Hussein was keeping up anything close to his 1987-1988 pace (when we were funding him, by the way), then action against him was probably justified on that basis. But then, on the same basis, action against Nigeria and countless other Middle Eastern and African countries would be similarly justified — probably more so — and we’re not chomping at the bit to go fix that injustice.
The bottom line is, the whole “we stopped mass graves” line of reasoning may make us feel a little better about the course of action we’ve taken in Iraq, and about the “collateral damage” casualties we’ve caused, but it really had nothing at all to do with why we really went in there. (Which is still, to me, a moving target, bloated UN resolutions aside.)
December 4th, 2003 at 1:24 pm
And, of course, you need to include in the Iraqometer all of the people who are continuing to die – such as the victims of Uzbekistan – because they joined the coalition of the willing, and so are now exempt form criticism or intervention by the current Administration. You also need to look at the the number of people killed by ordinary street crime and failures of infrastrucutre – which are the responsibility of the controlling power.
The point is that if you are going to look at Iraq in terms of hummanitarian goals, then you need to look at the whole picture, and almost no one does that. The reason that intervening for humannitarian reasons has always had a jaded history ios just that equation: in war, very, very bad things happen, and things get out of control. Short of actual genocide and actual warfare, its hard to say when intervention is going to be better than the situation on the ground.