Posted on 11/24/2004 7:17:15 PM PST by freedom4me
I need input on where to get ACCURATE stats on the number of civilian casualties since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Also, is there any way to distinguish between the deaths that were "collateral damage" as a result of US action and the deaths caused by the actions of the insurgents?
BTTT
BTTT
There's very little chance to get accurate stats. One man's civilian is another man's terrorist. The other problem is that there aren't any dispassionate observers of the bombing campaigns.
I guess you could go over to DU; their numbers would range from 50,000,000 to 5,000,000,000 I am sure. I do not think there is a site that has accurate numbers because the Coalition does not do head counts.
BTTT
I said it before the war and I'll say it again (like a gun crazy redneck) we should nuke the lot of 'em
This is an antiwar site, but their numbers are probably in the ballpark. They distance themselves from the idiotic Lancet Study, FWIW.
http://www.iraqbodycount.net/database/
There are no accurate stats. They run anywhere from 10,000 to over 100,000 depending on the source.
The 100,000 number being thrown around is junk research.(no bodies)The best estimate appears to be 14-15000.
100,000 people would be 200 per day for 500 days.Doesn't pass a third grade math test.
The 100,000 number came from a Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health .
The Hopkins researchers did not see a single dead Iraqi. Instead, they interviewed 30 Iraqi households in 33 “clusters” in Iraq and asked about deaths in each household before and after the Iraq War. They then estimated a pre and post Iraq War death rate based on the answers, be they true or false, that they were given. The difference in the death rates, the Hopkins researchers claimed, was the number of so-called “excess deaths caused by the Iraq War”.
Two-thirds of all the violent deaths reported in the study took place in a single cluster: the Fallujah cluster that was the hotbed of Baathist Party. Yet, every so-called “excess death”, reported as caused by anything whatsoever from a lung cancer to getting struck by lightning , was automatically classified as an “excess death caused by the Iraq War” by the Hopkins researchers.
. Even worse, the “excess death” number was grossly inflated by using a falsely low pre-war death rate in the calculations. The pre 1991 Gulf War Iraqi death rate, according to the United Nations, was 6.8 per 1,000. The post 1991 Gulf War Iraqi death rate claimed by the Hopkins researchers was only 5.0 per 1,000. The same people who once claimed that one million Iraqis, including half a million children, were killed by U.N sanctions after the 1991 Gulf War now want us to believe that the death rate in Iraq actually DECREASED after the 1991 Gulf War in order to validate the Hopkins study numbers.
It’s a classic case of the GIGO (Garbage In – Garbage Out) Effect: “If invalid data is entered in a computer program, the resulting output will also be invalid.”
The most damning critique of the Hopkins study, however, is the study’s own “Confidence Interval” number. The Hopkins study stated, “We estimate there were 98,000 extra deaths (95% CI 8000-194 000) during the post-war period.” What does that mean in plain English? (95% CI 8000-194 000) means that the Hopkins researchers were 95% confident that their “excess deaths caused by the Iraq War” came out to anywhere from 8,000 deaths to 194,000 deaths.
What’s the average American household income? Well, there is a 95% chance that it is somewhere between $8,000 and $194,000.
As a Slate.com critic of the Hopkins study wrote, “This isn't an estimate. It's a dart board.”
A detailed critique of the flaws of the Hopkins study can be found at Democrat-friendly MSNBC Slate.com:
100,000 Dead—or 8,000 How many Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war?
I would be interested in knowing how many unarmed American civilians go work every day in Iraq, what they do, and why we almost never hear anything about them. In country MSM too frightened to travel with them?
...according to Kevin Sites, approxomately 1,000,000 ...if you count the one the Marine shot....
fyi
The pentagon does not keep these figures or at least publish them. You can find guesses on most news services and average them together. The most common ones I see all estimate between 10,000 to 18,000 Iraqi civilian deaths. What are numbers anyway, when every person who dies is missed by someone? I doubt that a parent of a dead child grieves any the less, because they are a Iraqi, then I would. That is why the military tries hard to reduce civilian deaths. If the United States fought like the Russians we would of just leveled the cities and the figures would be in the hundreds of thousands.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.