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To: kattracks

This is a bit old, but might be relevent:
http://www.neoperspectives.com/farenheight_911.htm


Some quick mathematics, using low end estimations, provides some perspective. According to most sources, it is estimated that there were between one and two million total casualties with at LEAST 300,000 killed in the Iran Iraq war of the 80's. (43) Sources indicate a reasonable low end estimate of Iraqi military deaths from the first gulf war is 15,000 and civilian deaths around 2,000 (44). Saddam personally initiated both these wars. It's claimed that as a result of sanctions and post war chaos many more died. According to a March 17 briefing at the State Department by Andrew Natsios, Administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development:

...took place in waves, over a 25-year period. Methodically, Saddam's forces destroyed villages, transferred women and children to detention camps and took away the men in trucks, some of them barefooted and naked, never to be seen again. Tens of thousands of people were taken far from their homes to distant camps in the deserts where they were killed, buried by bulldozers under tons of sand. (46)

This is not some random violence by out of control troops. This was systematic mass murder. The death tolls rival the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the killing fields of Cambodia under Pol Pot. (46)

How many died in these mass murders? Some say 300,000, some say 400,000. There are estimates of upwards of a million. We are helping the Iraqis as they begin the terrible task of counting. (46)


The lowest estimate available of these internal killings is 290,000 dead(137). When we add 290,000 internal deaths to 300,000 deaths from the Iraq-Iran war and 17,000 deaths from the first gulf war [ignoring the estimates for deaths due to sanctions] we get a grand total of 607,000 deaths over a 25 year period, which gives us 24,280 deaths a year. Remember, these are low end estimation averages and don't include wounded. Now, comparing this with the high end estimates of 13,000 Iraqi soldiers, 1,000 American soldiers and 4,300 civilians estimated killed during the major combat phase of most recent invasion (45), or even taking a higher estimate of 10,000 total civilian deaths up to present day (46), (48), we arrive at a high end number of 24,000 deaths in a period of 15 months or 19,200 a year. Ironically, at least some of the insurgents being counted as dead are foreign terrorists, including Al Qaeda operatives. We are also (most generously) absolving Saddam from all culpability for deaths in this war and blaming them all on the United States.

The most ardent skeptic must see that even if one agrees with these shaky premises and accepts only the lowest and highest end estimates respectively and even throws in a few more thousand Iraqi deaths for good measure, the situation in Iraq is no different than it was under Saddam! But of course it clearly is better. We may have already "saved" about 10,000 people from dying if we use more reasonable average estimates instead of high and low. And it appears, despite a growing resentment of the American military presence, the Iraqi people agree (49), (50), (51).


4 posted on 01/29/2005 2:02:37 PM PST by traviskicks (http://www.neoperspectives.com/blackconservatism.htm)
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To: lepton

bookmark bump


19 posted on 01/29/2005 2:49:55 PM PST by lepton ("It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into"--Jonathan Swift)
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To: traviskicks

Thanks for the link


28 posted on 01/29/2005 7:43:57 PM PST by Valin (Sometimes you're the bug, and sometimes you're the windshield)
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