PressCoverage

unbelievable...

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwash...hington_nation

“Car bombs and other explosive devices have killed thousands of Iraqis in the past three years, but the administration doesn’t include them in the casualty counts it has been citing as evidence that the surge of additional U.S. forces is beginning to defuse tensions between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.”

BelichickFan

What should be counted as a war death vs. just a straight homocide isn't that clear. I'm not sure I'd count them either. They may be due to the removal of Hussein but they aren't actual war deaths.

BTW, if you're counting deaths in the way you want you also need to subtract the innocent deaths that would have occured under Hussein's regime to get an accurate count of net deaths due to the war.

PressCoverage

yes of course... because we all know there were dozens of car bombings going off each day when Hussein was in power...

yes, let's minimize the number down as far as we can and pretend things aren't so bad in Iraq...

scout

Everyday I read about mass deaths due to suicide bombers in Iraq. Then our gifted President assures us that casualties are way down in Iraq. Of course, I believe him.

Patters

You need a consistent metric to have honest results. It sounds like this administration doesn't want to report the truth.

The problem here is we've always used anti-Saddam dissident groups as the basis for our information. Not only did they provide us with some of our faulty intelligence, there is evidence that much of their other info is fabricated. How would you go about estimating what innocent people Saddam really killed? Who would you trust?

Real World

Were any of you reading the article, or just the headline and first couple of lines?

It's amazing how many of you are hoping for bad news to come out of Iraq. Look, it sucks that we're there, but we are, and people should hope that this surge helps the situation because lives are at stake. Both American and Iraqi lives. So far, we're seeing that there is some progress, yet, some in here, and amazingly, in our government, are publically declaring we've lost. I'm still amazed that Harry Reid would ever say such a thing. Sorry, but that's dispicable.

Bush administration officials have pointed to a dramatic decline in one category of deaths - the bodies dumped daily in Baghdad streets, which officials call sectarian murders - as evidence that the security plan is working. Bush said this week that that number had declined by 50 percent, a number confirmed by statistics compiled by McClatchy Newspapers.

But the number of people killed in explosive attacks is rising, the same statistics show - up from 323 in March, the first full month of the security plan, to 365 through April 24.


Overall, statistics indicate that the number of violent deaths has declined significantly since December, when 1,391 people died in Baghdad, either executed and found dead on the street or killed by bomb blasts. That number was 796 in March and 691 through April 24.


................


According to the statistics, which McClatchy reporters in Baghdad compile daily from Iraqi police reports, 1,030 bodies were found in December. In January, that number declined 32 percent, to 699. It declined to 596 February and again to 473 in March.


Deaths from car bombings and improvised explosive devices, however, increased from 361 in December to a peak of 520 in February before dropping to 323 in March.

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"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him."
Leo Tolstoy, 1897

BelichickFan

I'm not saying there is a good number. But to take the total deaths in Iraq as the Net Death number is wrong unless there was no killing of innocents under Hussein - which I don't think anyone believes to be true.

Pujo

Ok, then let's count all the unnatural deaths and subtract from it the average annual murder rate under Saddam's regime. That would get us a more accurate picture than just not counting car bombs.

BelichickFan

That's fine.

Real World

How would we know what the murder rate was? Would that count the people who simply disappeared too?

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To view links or images in signatures your post count must be 10 or greater. You currently have 0 posts.

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"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him."
Leo Tolstoy, 1897