this news just makes me sick http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aq9UQebGSlKM&refer=home Iraqi Death Toll Exceeds 600,000 Since Invasion, Report Says About 600,000 people have died violent deaths in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion of the country began in March 2003, researchers found in a new study by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. Gunshots were the most common cause of death, with males ages 15 to 44 accounting for 59 percent of the total as of July 2006, according to the report to be published in today's online edition of The Lancet, a scientific journal. The estimates were made after a nationwide survey of 1,849 Iraqi households between May and July 2006. ``Deaths are occurring in Iraq now at a rate more than three times that from before'' March 2003, said Gilbert Burnham, lead author of the study and co-director of the Bloomberg School's Center for Refugee and Disaster Response, in a statement. The total exceeds what other groups have found over a similar period, including the Iraq Body Count estimate that between 43,491 and 48,283 died up to Sept. 26. Authors of this latest study relied on a population-based method to collect information, asking members of each household for the number of births and deaths that occurred there over a specified time period. Almost half of those surveyed didn't know who killed their respective household member. Information on whether the deceased was involved armed combat, terrorism, or criminal activity wasn't collected. The same survey done in 2004 by Johns Hopkins and the Al Mustansiriya University estimated more 100,000 deaths from all causes, excluding Falluja households. Such survey methods were used to gauge mortality rates in the Congo, Kosovo, Sudanese conflicts. There have been 2,745 U.S. military deaths since the U.S.- led invasion in March 2003, the U.S. Defense Department said yesterday.
Genocide anyone?...Man they are going to be pissed....Some little kid is going to be growing up through all of this, and grow up and nuke the sh!it out of us.....Sigh....dumbass Americans/Bush
it is sad. but the sadder part is it's still counting, and that nobody will be held accountable for all of these at the end of the day.
is it 600,000 or 60,000? because those other numbers are nowhere close to 600k. either way it is far too many.
i hate to say it, but clearly things would be much better in iraq if saddam were still in charge and we had him contained as we did through the 90's. i think i need to read bob woodward's new book on the great iraq deception. i bet there will be over a million dead before we leave
i'd still like to see some confirmation from a secondary source. that number is massively different from anything else posted before. does anyone else feel this way? from the posts here it doesn't seem that way.
Glenn Greenwald writes well... here's a snippet... ___________ Whether entirely accurate or not, there is no question that there are tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians at the very least who have died as a direct result of our invasion and, in that regard, the study underscores a critically important point about the nature of our ongoing occupation. In most wars, the number of dead on the "other side" is a secondary consideration. If anything, the objective often is to inflict as much damage as possible on the enemy's population in order to force their government into submission. In many traditional wars, especially modern wars, a high death toll would be an indicator of success, not failure. But the opposite is true with the war we are waging in Iraq. Ever since the "threat" rationale for the war vanished (that Saddam had WMDs which would be used against us), the principal, if not exclusive, "justification" for the war was that it would improve the situation of the Iraqi people. Achieving that, so the argument goes, is both morally right and a significant boon to our own security, since improving public opinion of the U.S. in the Muslim world is critical to enhancing our influence and undermining Al Qaeda recruitment efforts. That rationale transforms Iraqi anger towards our war effort from what it would be in most normal wars (an irrelevancy, or even something to be desired) into the greatest impediment to "victory." In that regard, the fact that enormous numbers of Iraqi civilians are dying as a result of our war effort is -- regardless of the exact number -- one of the greatest indictments of the wisdom (let alone morality) of the entire endeavor. Similarly, recent polls conducted by our own State Department and independent polling groups all show that "a strong majority of Iraqis want U.S.-led military forces to immediately withdraw from the country, saying their swift departure would make Iraq more secure and decrease sectarian violence." Worse, "77 percent of those polled [said] the United States intends [to] keep permanent military bases in the country." If Iraqis want us gone and are completely distrustful of our motives for being there, what possible good could can anyone reasonably claim is being achieved? The fact that there were no weapons to eliminate made the war useless. The fact that we have created extreme, uncontrollable chaos -- which provides a vacuum which the Iranians and Al Qaeda are happily filling -- makes the war dangerous. And the fact that huge numbers of Iraqi civilians continue to die as a direct result of our ongoing occupation and want us to withdraw immediately makes the war completely counter-productive even when measured against the objectives which the administration currently claims are the ones which justify the war in the first place. We are not even close to leaving Iraq or even decreasing our troop levels by any meaningful amount. If anything, a Republican victory in three weeks would make it highly likely that the neoconservative dream of still more troops would be fulfilled. The trend of violence and death in Iraq is unquestionably worsening, and not only do we achieve nothing by staying, but the situation in Iraq worsens every day -- not just for Iraqis but for our own security. The invasion of Iraq is one of the greatest strategic disasters in our country's history, and this new survey, independent of morbid and inconsequential quibbles over its accuracy, underscores why that is the case. http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/
The study is far from precise. We can hope that it is overstating the deaths but we don't know for sure. Here is a snippet from a bbc article.
maybe that many have died, and the article is mistaken in attributing all those deaths to violent deaths. i don't know. maybe all the figures before have been dead wrong.
the new figure is an estimate based on surveys of people in various areas then makes an estimation based on that. It does not use any body counts or records of actual bodies.
How many will die in a Sunni/Shia Civil War? How many would have died under a Hussein Family reign under Udai and Qusai ? I don't really have a point with these hypotheticals other than to point out that with or without us , Iraq is pretty f*cked up. You can lead a horse to freedom but you can't make drink.
More from Greenwald... __________ The news item that is certain to (and ought to) dominate our political discussions for the next several days at least is the report that "a team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred." The findings are so extraordinary because of how radically they depart from other estimates: It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group. The report is being published in Lancet and was conducted "by Iraqi physicians and overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health." Nobody disputes that the survey used scientific methodology to reach its findings, although everyone recognizes there is inherent uncertainty in counting the number of civilian dead in a war zone, and even the researchers themselves acknowledge a huge margin of error. The same research team published a similar report in Lancet in 2004 claiming that 100,000 Iraqis had died, though this newest survey has a much larger and more representative sampling than the prior one. Independent of disputes over absolute numbers, what seems conclusively clear is that -- contrary to the endless claims from our government and its followers -- the trend in Iraq, after 3 1/2 years of our occupation, continues to worsen significantly, with violence steadily increasing in recent months. That appears to account for at least some of the disparity between this newest report and older claims by the Bush administration, since this current report includes: a steeper rise in the last year that appears to reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the news media and civilian groups. In the year ending in June, the team calculated Iraq's mortality rate to be roughly four times what it was the year before the war. Needless to say, Bush followers have become overnight expert statisticians and are able -- with certainty no less -- to declare these numbers to be wildly inflated and unreliable (some try to provide some reasoning, while some don't even bother). As always, facts which reflect poorly on the Leader and his wars are, for that reason alone, false and inherently "biased," and can be disregarded with the wave of a hand (which is, incidentally, as good an explanation as any as to how and why we are in the dreadful situation we find ourselves in Iraq). I have no idea whether the new Lancet study is accurate or how sound its methodology is. For what it's worth, statistics-loving Kevin Drum acknowledges the inherent uncertainty involved but seems convinced of the study's core methodological accuracy, and Juan Cole has some analysis as to why the findings seem convincing. That there are such wide disparities is unsurprising. Different sides in every conflict, and particularly in wars, typically look at things in self-serving ways and issue claims designed to bolster their view. ... Two of the overnight pro-Bush epidemiologists who are objecting to this study -- Mark Coffey of Decision08 and TheRealUglyAmerican -- have made appearances in the comment section to explain why this peer-reviewed study using standard scientific methods is, as Coffey pronounced, "ridiculous on the face of it." But it is clear that they do not actually understand what the study is examining. They (and other of the above-linked Bush followers) seem to be laboring under the misunderstanding that the 650,000 death toll is the number of Iraqis who have died violent deaths since our invasion. That is not what the study is purporting to measure. The study is comparing the mortality rate of Iraqis during the time of our occupation (including deaths by any cause, such as disease, famine, or anything else) to the mortality rate prior to the occupation, and based on the post-invasion increased mortality rate (13.1 deaths per 1,000 persons post-invasion versus the pre-war 5.5 figure), calculates that more than 650,000 Iraqis have died during the occupation than would have died during the same time frame in the absence of the invasion. While it is true that the study claims that roughly 600,000 of the "excess deaths" are due to violence, that includes not only violence from American troops but also random crimes, government violence, and sectarian conflicts. It is unfathomable that anyone would think that they can whimsically dismiss away that figure as "ridiculous on its face" based on anything other than a desire that it not be true (or at least that it not be known). http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/
That is the precise reason you wait until the horse leads itself to freedom, and then you help show them how to drink. The idea of grabbing a horse that didn't ask for something, and blowing up their chorral, and pasture land while killing all the rest of their herd and then leading it to water and hoping it will drink is a little silly.
