Posted on 10/22/2010 3:43:13 PM PDT by Conservative Coulter Fan
In what is being described as the largest release of secret U.S. military documents ever, the whistle-blowing web site WikiLeaks has released a trove of classified reports about the war in Iraq, including a secret U.S. government tally that puts the Iraqi death toll between 109,000 and 285,000, according to news sources that received advanced copies of the documents.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
600k?
I've heard numbers as high as 3 million from those kooks.
How many of that 100K were killed by suicide bombers and other jihadi terrorists?
Oil for Food was implemented in 1995, a year before the Clinton administration was confronted with the reports of 500,000 estimated children dead and gave the infamous "price we're willing to pay" response.
And everyone knew what Hussein was doing, but nobody did anything about it.
The sanctions were being violated more than they were observed. We gave the go ahead to Jordan and Turkey to violate them.
Do you have any references on the impact of this help, because Clinton said during the same time that the sanctions were working.
Saddam killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis including gassing them. The Marsh Arabs had their region destroyed by Saddam.
Nobody is counting these dead among those killed by the sanctions.
Stop using this UN horsesh*t. This was part of the psychological warfare to lift the sanctions and it was almost successful.
The UN was using psychological warfare to lift the sanctions THEY were imposing, and FAILED?
As I said, this was a phony claim to convince the gullible to lift the sanctions. The Oil for Food program was the response. This 500,000 dead claim is pure, unsubstantiated BS.
Nobody is counting these dead among those killed by the sanctions.
No one was killed by the sanctions, but they were wholescale by Saddam. He was a monster who could care less about his own people. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died during the 8 year war against Iran, which Saddam initiated
The UN was using psychological warfare to lift the sanctions THEY were imposing, and FAILED?
LOL. No, Saddam and some of his French, Russian, and British friends were trying to get the sanctions lifted so they helped perpetuate this nonsense about dying children. It was pure propaganda.
Except that Oil for Food, Resolution 986, was adopted before the figures came out.
No one was killed by the sanctions
We'll have to agree to disagree on that.
but they were wholescale by Saddam. He was a monster who could care less about his own people. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died during the 8 year war against Iran, which Saddam initiated
Here's an Iranian Newspaper's take on that. It is an Op-Ed and I post it merely as FYI, not as proof of anything.
No, Saddam and some of his French, Russian, and British friends were trying to get the sanctions lifted so they helped perpetuate this nonsense about dying children.
What would be their motive, given that Oil for Food was already in place?
As early as 1991, the U.N. Security Council acknowledged that sanctions were causing the Iraqi people undeniable suffering and proposed an oil-for-food humanitarian program to alleviate malnutrition and disease. The plan allowed Iraq limited sales of oil with revenues to be placed in a U.N.-controlled account for the purchase of approved food and medical supplies. Saddam rejected this program as an infringement of his sovereignty. After years of negotiations, Baghdad finally agreed to the program in 1996 with the first deliveries of aid arriving in 1997. Each year since then the Security Council has increased the Oil-for-Food program, and according to Secretary General Kofi Annan, Iraq now has sufficient resources to alleviate life-threatening disease and hunger.
"Saddam Hussein claims the deaths are in excess of one and a half million. Recent reports in leading newspapers and research studies in medical journals now suggest those numbers may be exaggerated. Still, a heated debate continues over the impact of the sanctions and over whether the United Nations and in particular the United States are responsible or whether Saddam himself has blocked humanitarian aid to further his own propaganda war."
What would be their motive, given that Oil for Food was already in place?
To get the sanctions lifted altogether. If it had not been for 9/11, I firmly believe that the sanctions would have been lifted.
Iraq: Oil-For-Food Program, International Sanctions, and Illicit Trade
But they weren't killing anyone, is that your point?
From your link:
"In mid-1999, UNICEF released its first country wide survey of infant and maternal mortality in Iraq since 1991. The survey took a number of precautions to ensure that the survey results would not be altered or modified and UNICEF is confident that the survey information is accurate. It showed that infant mortality in the southern and central sections of Iraq (under the control of the Iraqi government) rose from 47.1 deaths per thousand live births during 1984-1989 to 107.9 deaths per thousand during 1994-1999. The under five-year-old mortality rate rose from 56 to 130.6 per thousand live births in the same time period. According to the report, this increase in mortality resulted in about 500,000 more deaths among children under five than would have been the case if child mortality trends noted prior to 1990 (imposition of sanctions) had continued. In northern Iraq, the mortality rate has declined over the same period: infant mortality dropped from 63.9 per thousand live births in 1984-1989 to 58.7 in 1994-1999 and under five-year-old mortality dropped from 80.2 per thousand live births to 71.8 per thousand.""
To get the sanctions lifted altogether. If it had not been for 9/11, I firmly believe that the sanctions would have been lifted.
Also from your link:
"The smart sanctions plan was intended to defuse criticism by several governments, including permanent members of the U.N. Security Council France, Russia, and China, that the United States was using international sanctions to CRS-10 promote the overthrow of the Iraqi government or to punish Iraq indefinitely for the invasion of Kuwait. These governments appeared to believe that no amount of Iraqi cooperation with the United Nations would be sufficient to persuade the United States to lift sanctions on Iraq, and they and other governments moved unilaterally to skirt or erode the sanctions regime."
I wonder if the docs show how many of the 109K were killed by AQ and intertribal fighting.
Not one run by Leon Panetta. But there is a tipping point in the covert world.
>>WikiLeaks: At Least 100,000 Iraqis Reportedly Killed During War<<
I must have been getting my news during the war from some time warp future source, because that is not news to me. I remember them talking about six figures of civilians. And I remember wondering, then how they knew they were really “civilians”.
Really?
100K only?
But Saddam’s murder of all anti-Saddam Iraqis was around 50 per day.
The status quo would be:
50 x 365 x 8 yrs (2003-2010) = 146,000 murders
Gosh, Bush technically has saved more than 46,000 lives and counting.
That’s all?
Really, I would bet that 75% of them were in Saddam's military. That isn't bad.
Another perspective - look at a medium-sized city like Cleveland, Ohio. There are some 2.5 million people in the greater Cleveland area, including all of Cuyahoga County. 100,000 out of 2,500,000 isn't all that many - 4%. And Iraq has a lot more than 2,500,000 people - some 30 million according to 2008 estimates.
Essentially yes. Your quoting of the bogus UNICEF study was just part of the propaganda. The UN was making a fortune on the Oil for Food program via their administrative fees. They had a vested interest in painting the bleakest picture possible to keep the program going. Claudia Rosett did a fantastic job of uncovering the scam and the UN's complicity. The rise in infant mortality rates, if true, can be laid at the feet of Saddam, not UN sanctions.
Realizing, though, that they were inflicting punishment on Mr. Hussein's people rather than the dictator himself, the member nations of the Security Council offered in Security Council Resolutions 706 and 712 (adopted in August and September of 1991 respectively) the regime a chance to sell limited amounts of its oil abroad for the purchase of critical supplies. Mr. Hussein, demanding instead that all sanctions be lifted from his country, refused both offers of aid and was content to allow his citizens to starve while blaming the international community for their abject living conditions.
"The smart sanctions plan was intended to defuse criticism by several governments, including permanent members of the U.N. Security Council France, Russia, and China, that the United States was using international sanctions to CRS-10 promote the overthrow of the Iraqi government or to punish Iraq indefinitely for the invasion of Kuwait. These governments appeared to believe that no amount of Iraqi cooperation with the United Nations would be sufficient to persuade the United States to lift sanctions on Iraq, and they and other governments moved unilaterally to skirt or erode the sanctions regime."
That is exactly what I have been saying. France, Russia, China, and others wanted to lift the sanctions.
Rosett: "But in 1996, with the aim of providing for the people of Iraq while still containing Saddam, the U.N. began running its Oil-for-Food relief program for Iraq. Under terms agreed to by the U.N., Saddam got to sell oil to buy such humanitarian supplies as food and medicine, to be rationed to the Iraqi population. But the terms were hugely in Saddam's favor. The U.N. let Saddam choose his own business partners, kept the details of his deals confidential, and while watching for weapons-related goods did not, as it turns out, exercise much serious financial oversight. Saddam turned this setup to his own advantage, fiddling prices on contracts with his hand-picked partners, and smuggling out oil pumped under U.N. supervision with U.N.-approved new equipment. Thus did we arrive at the recent General Accounting Office estimate that under Oil-for-Food, despite sanctions, Saddam managed to skim and smuggle for himself more than $10 billion out of oil sales meant for relief."
"Later in 1998, Saddam kicked out the weapons inspectors, and he would keep them out for the following four years. The U.N. in 1999 lifted the ceiling entirely on Saddam's oil exports and expanded the range of goods he could buy. It would keep his deals confidential to the end, and it let Saddam do business with scores of companies in such graft-friendly climes as Russia and Nigeria, as well as such terrorist-sponsoring places as Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Sudan, and such financial hideouts as Liechtenstein, Panama, Cyprus, and Switzerland.
"Much of Saddam's illicit Oil-for-Food money has yet to be traced. There are now at least eight official investigations into various aspects of Oil-for-Food, but none so far that combines adequate staffing and access with a focus on Oil-for-Food itself as the little black book of Saddam's possible terrorist links. The same kind of bureaucratic walls that once blocked our own intelligence community from nabbing al Qaeda are here compounded by the problem that Oil-for-Food was not a U.S. program, but on U.N. turf. And though the U.N. is the keeper of many of the records, Kofi Annan has displayed no interest in investigating the possibility that Oil-for-Food might have funded terrorists."
That is sort of my point. Pushed to a real threat, the agencies will do the right thing. I doubt this is a real threat.
“100,000 isn’t all that many.”
Clearly not enough to stop the war.
War is like the removal of a Bandaid from a hairy arm: get it over as quickly as possible.
By fighting PoliticallyCorrectWars, we are only causing more casualties...
BTW, wonder how many were actually killed by their fellow Iraqis?
There is a possibility CIA is using wikileaks to throw our military under the bus.
I’m sure some parties had ulterior motives for the actions they took, but none of that proves that a lot of people weren’t killed by our sanctions. Do you have anything that does?
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