The sad part is that the kid will more than likely grow up to grab a gun and take out a couple of US soldiers, since our forces will be in Iraq for the next 20 years.
I seem to recall treeman making a bet (how sick is that?) about the number of civilian casualties being less than 3,000 and I guess he lost that bet. This is an excerpt from the liberal fringe extremists at PBS. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/jan-june03/iraq_06-19.html MARGARET WARNER: The last official Iraqi tally of nearly 1,200 civilians killed came on April 6, as U.S. troops were closing in on Baghdad. Since the war ended, several independent groups have conducted their own estimates: Among them, the Associated Press, which counted Iraqi deaths for one month between the start of the war, on March 20, and April 20. Their assessment: At least 3,240 Iraqi civilians were killed. MARGARET WARNER: For more on the issue of civilian casualties in this and other wars, we get three perspectives. Niko Price is correspondent at large for the associated press. He headed the AP reporting team that conducted the assessment of civilian deaths in Iraq. Alex Roland is a professor of military history and of the history of technology at Duke University. He served with the marine medical battalion in the Vietnam War. And retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner, military operations and planning, and is a long-time consultant to the Defense Department. Welcome to you all. Niko Price, tell us how the Associated Press arrived at this count of 3,240 civilian deaths in this one-month period. NIKO PRICE: Well, it's based largely on hospital records. But it... that number accounts for only the cases in which hospitals that we visited had good documentation on those deaths. The real number is certainly much higher than that, because some hospitals didn't have good documentation, and some of the dead weren't taken to hospitals. MARGARET WARNER: Tell us a little more about the documentation we required. I gather you did eliminate whole categories of people, what, if the hospital didn't know whether they were truly civilians? NIKO PRICE: Correct. For example, in Basra, Iraq's second largest city, the three main hospitals had a count of 431 dead. They said that 85 percent of those were civilians, but they couldn't prove on a case-by-case basis that they were. So we didn't include any numbers from Basra in our count. In general, hospitals would have ledgers recording names of people to which they issued death certificates, and we would go off of those ledgers. MARGARET WARNER: Now, you also only, I think, included about half the hospitals in Iraq. What kind of coverage did you get from those hospitals? In other words, how many did you think... well, just speculate, but just tell us about the coverage you got from that. NIKO PRICE: Sure. The hospitals that we covered included almost all of the large ones. The ones that we didn't visit were mostly in remote areas that were either dangerous or just too far to get to. MARGARET WARNER: Now, you also said that a lot of dead weren't taken to hospitals. Explain that. NIKO PRICE: Well, correct. Some families would bury their dead without going to the hospitals to get death certificates. In some cases, bodies were destroyed by the bombs that killed them. And in those cases, they wouldn't be brought to hospitals either. MARGARET WARNER: Now, there are, as we noted in the setup piece, other independent groups that have been doing their own assessment. There's one called Iraqbodycount.net out of Britain. And they, for instance, went and got eyewitness accounts. Why did the AP choose to just stick with hospital records, what was behind the methodology? NIKO PRICE: The difficulty in trying to combine hospital records, grave sites, witness accounts, is that it's almost impossible to determine that you're not counting the same person twice. You know, a witness could tell you about a certain death; that same person could be registered at a hospital and at a graveyard. So really, for the sake of consistency, we needed to just concentrate on one of those, and we felt that hospital records were the most accurate.
Do you mean intentionally by Saddam over the last 25 years or accidentally in the war to liberate the Iraqi people?
So, over 3,000 civilians were killed in Iraq. Does anyone know how many Iraqis were killed by Saddam Hussein or in wars (like with Iran) that were caused by Saddam Hussein? Thanks.
I think both sides killed too many, there is no other way to look at the situation (war) in my opinion.
under, I agree. My post was more a sarcastic one. It pisses me off to read stuff by people like glynch, No Worries, etc that paint this picture that the US is so evil because 3,000+ Iraqis were killed when (a) we were in a war and stuff like that happens in a war (b) and the man disposed in Iraq in Saddam was notoriously brutal to his own people whether it was by killing or torturing them (or both) or getting them into wars with other nations like Iran, for example.
These kinds of discussions unfortunatly go round and round though, because Saddam (put in power by the US) used weapons provided by the US to kill the majority of his citizens that he mass murdered. Yes without a doubt Saddam is an evil man, but where does the responsibility end? We wouldn't hand a convicted felon released on parole a loaded handgun as part of his release program.
From a 2000 report of the US Ambassador for War Crimes http://www.fas.org/news/iraq/2000/09/iraq-000918.htm Quick rundown: 1987 50-100,000 Kurds in Anfal 1988 5,000 in Halabja 1991 30-60,000 Sunis That's only 3 of his roughly 25 years of rule addtionally: an estimated 10,000 political opponents
but if we did make the mistake of handing him a gun...and he used it...you bet your ass we'd still arrest him. and if he tried to shoot his way out, we'd kill him. because we made a mistake arming this guy in the past doesn't mean you ignore all his human rights violations...
You don't give a felon control of a country either to do as he pleases for 25+ years. My point was a bit round about, but do you follow me a little better now? I just think the US has some responsibility in this whole mess -- start to finish.
