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To: mark502inf
Nobody knows for sure how many Iraqi civilians have been killed. The U.S. army does not keep track, or at least does not want the public to know. A recent report from Johns Hopkins published in Lancet estimates 100,000 civilian deaths caused by the war. Nevertheless, taking a cue from the politically manipulated and now discredited laughable "studies" claiming "more than 200,000 dead in Bosnia", "10,000 dead" or "900,000 displaced" in Kosovo, I might be willing to accept that the Hopkins study is probably not worth the paper it is written on.

Concerning the destroyed schools in Kosovo, why would the Serbian state destroy schools that it itself built by subsidies from Belgrade? In fact many of these schools were bombed by NATO, ostensibly because they might be used by Yugoslav forces, but in reality because NATO, being incompetent in locating tanks and other moving targets, was busy destroying the civilian infrastructure not only in Kosovo but throughout Serbia. This was, as you know, a war crime for which, if international law was taken seriously, the whole NATO leadership, starting with Wesley Clark and Bill Clinton, would now be in jail and billions of dollars would be paid to Serbia for compensation. Not to mention the more than 500 dead civilians in Serbia proper, another achievement of NATO's brave, 25,000-feet high flying bomber pilots.

15 posted on 01/19/2005 8:32:45 PM PST by pythagorean
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To: pythagorean
Nobody knows for sure how many Iraqi civilians have been killed.

Right at last. Which also directly undermines your previous assertions concerning the higher number of civilian casualties in Iraq versus Kosovo. You don't know. We can make some reasonable approximations, but as for the 100,000 Lancet figure that you eagerly trotted out and now "might be willing" to ignore, the margin of error in that study was 9,000 to 194,000, the author admitted he was opposed to the war and U.S. imperialism, and a "clarification" has since been issued which in essence debunks the study for invalid assumptions, cherry-picking data, and small sample size.

Another anti-war source, iraqbodycount.com which counts every single casualty of war, Iraq Army & insurgent & terrorist & policeman & civilian alike regardless of who inflicted the casualty, currently runs a range from 15,635 to 17,582 total casualties since the U.S. invasion. Even bin Laden has weighed in; in his pre-election video he said "over 15,000 of our people have been killed." So your choice of citing the Lancet's 100,000 casualties in Iraq (180 killed every day of the war--yeah, right) over-states what even bin Laden says by a factor of seven.

I can only surmise that you chose to cite the Lancet's 100,000 in an attempt to bolster your contention of moral equivalence between the operations of U.S. troops in Iraq with those of the Serb forces deliberately murdering thousands of noncombatants, looting houses, burning villages, blowing up mosques, and expelling well over a million Kosovars from their homes in Kosovo. What utter B.S. I've spent a career in the U.S. military and I know how we operate. I've also seen what the Serbs deliberately did in Kosovo. There's no comparison.

16 posted on 01/20/2005 5:01:45 AM PST by mark502inf
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