Collateral Damage?

[neonlyte]

Yesterday the BBC announced the following:

1st March 2003

99 Babies

2312 Children

2163 Women

20291 Men

24865 in total

Civilians

Killed

In Iraq

upto and including

30th June 2005

39 Civilians each and every day.


No judgement call here - just thought you might like to know.

 

[Guest]

Shit, that's bad, and very, very sad.

BUT (there's always a but), what are the figures for how many died under Saddam Hussein?

Of those figures stated above, how many were killed as a direct result of Allied bombing/fire?

How many are a result of insurgent violence? Suicide bombings?

Etc, etc...

The Iraqis deserve better, from everyone.

I still think "we" did the right thing, whatever the "lies" and reasons behind it all.

There ya go, I've stated my views. Now I shall be damned.

 

[neonlyte]

Shit, that's bad, and very, very sad.

BUT (there's always a but), what are the figures for how many died under Saddam Hussein?

Of those figures stated above, how many were killed as a direct result of Allied bombing/fire?

How many are a result of insurgent violence? Suicide bombings?

Etc, etc...

The Iraqis deserve better, from everyone.

I still think "we" did the right thing, whatever the "lies" and reasons behind it all.


There ya go, I've stated my views. Now I shall be damned.

I know Lou. It would be nice if there were a straight answer, but none is to be found because 'issues' cloud every aspect of this tradegy on both sides of the equation. You will remember Hussain has had the first charges brought against him - involvement in 143 deaths, I presume these are 'specimin charges', something they feel they can make stick, I'm left wondering how the hundreds of thousands of deaths reported over the years in Iraq are squared on the conscience.

 

[Guest]

Did it say how many of those were killed by car bombers? Did it count the 'civilians' that shot at our troops in the street? Did say how many of those were killed by coalition forces and how many were killed by Iraqi rebels?

You see this is the problem with the media. They are the very worst kind of liars. They are the kind of liars that tell you the truth. The just tell you a small part of it without giving you the facts that make that truth make sense.

EDIT: SOrry didn't mean to make accusations. I type slow and your original post wasn't specific about your stand on these figures.

 

[Guest]

Edited.

Neon: exactly so.

And, Dran, yep I completely agree.

 

[Guest]

EDIT: Resolved

 

[Colleen Thomas]

Not to throw gasoline on a fire, but that comes to about a quarter of the number most anti-war people are banding about. Did 75,000 get better?

Basically, every number I have seen turns out to be guesstemate. Based on highly subjective methods of gathering info, classifying civilian and attributing said deaths to a source the gathering body wishes.

 

[BlackShanglan]

Not to throw gasoline on a fire, but that comes to about a quarter of the number most anti-war people are banding about. Did 75,000 get better?

Basically, every number I have seen turns out to be guesstemate. Based on highly subjective methods of gathering info, classifying civilian and attributing said deaths to a source the gathering body wishes.

You know, I was thinking too that I had heard the figure of 100,000. I'm trying to think why it differs so much. I think, if my memory is not entirely fooling me, that other people were also counting deaths from lack of medical care, poor water supply, disruption of policing services, and other results of war.

And yes. No easy answer. At the bottom of it, there is no easy damned answer to any of it. So often that's the case with things that on the surface look simple. For instance, the SO and I were talking the other night about economic aid to Africa, and discussing how that could be done while respecting the cultural values and traditional lifestyles of the populace. Our conclusion was that we couldn't see that it could. That is, evils of empire aside - and that's a big burden to move aside, but let's imagine we have - if we set back the clock and returned the continent to its pristine pre-colonization status, we're looking at largely tribal nomadic hunter/gatherer lifestyles and pre-industrial agrarian societies. What we curently think of as "poverty" is the inherent condition of such lifestyles. The very nature of the economic and technological base precludes modern medical care, information technology, transportation, infrastructure, and food production, and leaves the populations open to Nature's full destructive force in the shape of famine, pestilence, and natural disasters. The only way we could see to create a stable, self-supporting "first world" society was to industrialize, and largely to destroy village-based hand-worked agrarian life. It happened in the West when we industrialized, and we couldn't see how it could go any other way in Africa. Yet who wants to be the one to go to people who have suffered so much already and tell them that the only way out lies through entirely surrendering life as they know it?

Hard questions. Hard questions indeed.

Shanglan

 

[neonlyte]

This is the link to the BBC story.

The numbers have a certain definition in the way they have been analysed, it may be a more accurate figure than others bandied about.

I'm left wondering - what has changed, Hussain has gone, the deaths continue. The forces there obviously cannot control the situation any more than we can stop suicide bombers on the underground.

Has it come to this? Do we live each day as a lottery?

 

[Colleen Thomas]

You know, I was thinking too that I had heard the figure of 100,000. I'm trying to think why it differs so much. I think, if my memory is not entirely fooling me, that other people were also counting deaths from lack of medical care, poor water supply, disruption of policing services, and other results of war.

And yes. No easy answer. At the bottom of it, there is no easy damned answer to any of it. So often that's the case with things that on the surface look simple. For instance, the SO and I were talking the other night about economic aid to Africa, and discussing how that could be done while respecting the cultural values and traditional lifestyles of the populace. Our conclusion was that we couldn't see that it could. That is, evils of empire aside - and that's a big burden to move aside, but let's imagine we have - if we set back the clock and returned the continent to its pristine pre-colonization status, we're looking at largely tribal nomadic hunter/gatherer lifestyles and pre-industrial agrarian societies. What we curently think of as "poverty" is the inherent condition of such lifestyles. The very nature of the economic and technological base precludes modern medical care, information technology, transportation, infrastructure, and food production, and leaves the populations open to Nature's full destructive force in the shape of famine, pestilence, and natural disasters. The only way we could see to create a stable, self-supporting "first world" society was to industrialize, and largely to destroy village-based hand-worked agrarian life. It happened in the West when we industrialized, and we couldn't see how it could go any other way in Africa. Yet who wants to be the one to go to people who have suffered so much already and tell them that the only way out lies through entirely surrendering life as they know it?

Hard questions. Hard questions indeed.

Shanglan

My grandfather was fond of the saying there are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics.

You can basically work the stats to show whatever you wish by manipulating sample size, the questions asked, or placing other limitations upon the information gathered. As an example, you could prove the vast majority of americans favored legalizing gay marriage, if you were very selective in where you took your samples. For example if you avoided rural areas and sampled heavily in more urban and sophisticated areas, weighted your sample by population so you could take large samples from New York and California and smaller ones from Kansas and Mississippi. You aren't technically being dishonest, but you have skewed the information avialable in your sample to produce the result you want.

Deciding who died from lack of water is hard, unless they dehydrated to death. even then, if they had Typoid or acute dysentarry, that's what they died of, but it isn't really the cause of death. It's even more subjective when you decide who died from lack of policing. Unless you have hyper accurate statistics of crime before hand and equally accurate stats for n ow and you are willing to reduce your numbers of deaths by crime by at least the factor of deaths by crimebefore hand.

In the end, the more subjective your methods, the less valid your conclusions. Since you cannot quantify what kind of deaths come from lack of services and rule out any other cause, what you are effectively doing is widening your sample to include as many deaths as you can conjure up.

I don't deny people are dying. I don't deny it's a tragedy. I do think people trying to do so carry in their own prejudice and it shows in the wade disparity in figures and the lack of information on sampleing methodology in most of these reports.

 

[Colleen Thomas]

This is the link to the BBC story.

The numbers have a certain definition in the way they have been analysed, it may be a more accurate figure than others bandied about.

I'm left wondering - what has changed, Hussain has gone, the deaths continue. The forces there obviously cannot control the situation any more than we can stop suicide bombers on the underground.

Has it come to this? Do we live each day as a lottery?

Thanks Neon.

I would say published media reports are vulnerable to attack as being nearly as subjective as you can get, in as much as there is a very strong feeling (at least here) that the media is heavily liberally biased.

Saddam ruled by terror. The insurgents wouldn't have had a chance while he was in power. He would have crushed them like bugs. On the other hand, they would have failed because average citizens would have been more afraid of Saddam's secret police than they were of the insurgents.

I have no idea if there is an answer. You are just as dead if you are killed by Saddam, and insurgent or a stray round from a coalition M-16. Islife better thate? For some the answer is probably yes. For others definelty no. For a lot, I think the jury is still out.

 

[rgraham666]

Shang, the problem with Africa is that we did try to industrialise them, bring them straight into the 20th Century without any of the intervening social development that happened in the West. And our transition was anything but smooth.

That's why the African countries are so hideously in debt. We lent them huge amounts of money to build a modern infrastructure. That failed, to my mind, partly due to endemic corruption and partially because of the tribal society of most of Africa. Now, since we in the West won't write off our bad debts, most African nations are beggaring themselves to pay off what they owe us.

And in the process of 'industrialising' we destroyed their agriculture which is why there are so many famines there. As well we introduced 20th Century weaponry to 12th Century conflicts.

You know, I suspect the world would be a better place if we Westerners weren't such overconfident know-it-alls who insist on making the world 'a better place'. And that applies to the original idea of tis thread.