26 X World Champs said:
I stand corrected re Afghanistan. Lebanon? I missed that we liberated them? I believe in credit where credit is due. However, calling Lebanon liberated is like when Bush said that the war in Iraq was over....it's untrue...
So then this story from Reuters is wrong, but you're unknown website is right?
1. The "unknown" website is actually the first one that comes up when you search for Iraqi Body Count. It is the longest running, and most comprehensive site on the net.
2. Just because something comes over Reuters doesnt mean it's true. It just means it was reported as news.
3. The study you quote as the "absolute" truth is the highest of the MANY surveys done, and is heavily flawed. From the Washington post:
The analysis, an extrapolation based on a relatively small number of documented deaths, indicated that many of the excess deaths have occurred due to aerial attacks by coalition forces, with women and children being frequent victims, wrote the international team of public health researchers making the calculations.
Previous independent estimates of civilian deaths in Iraq were far lower, never exceeding 16,000.
Other experts immediately challenged the new estimate, saying the small number of documented deaths upon which it was based make the conclusions suspect.
"The methods that they used are certainly prone to inflation due to overcounting," said Marc E. Garlasco, senior military analyst for Human Rights Watch, which investigated the number of civilian deaths that occurred during the invasion. "These numbers seem to be inflated."
Based on the number of Iraqi fatalities recorded by the survey teams, the researchers calculated that the death rate since the invasion had increased from 5 percent annually to 7.9 percent. That works out to an excess of about 100,000 deaths since the war, the researchers reported in a paper released early by the Lancet, a British medical journal.
When the researchers examined the causes of the 73 violent deaths collected in the study, 84 percent were due to the actions of coalition forces, although the researchers stressed that none was the result of what would have been considered misconduct. Ninety-five percent were due to airstrikes by helicopter gunships, rockets or other types of aerial weaponry.
Basically, these researchers went out and asked people about people who had died. They found SEVENTY THREE DEATHS, and then extrapolated that to mean that 100,000 people have been killed by the US. Sound like good research to you?
Now, regarding Saddam's body count. You're right, I don't think its right that we've killed 100,000 civilians, but that's mostly because we didn't.
As to the 600,000 number? It's the most well documented and accepted number available. Here's a few places that cite it, just that I've found quickly:
http://www.gbn.com/ArticleDisplayServlet.srv?aid=2400&msp=1242
http://wais.stanford.edu/Iraq/iraq_deathsundersaddamhussein42503.html
Even anti-war sites are condceding that Saddam killed between 500,000 and 1 million Iraqis.
http://www.stinkzone.com/cgi-bin/archives/000184.html
Another group started by Iraqis who are trying to find what happened to their families during saddam's reign estimates 1.6 million deaths.
http://www.seacoastonline.com/2004news/07062004/world/25234.htm
You say that in 1998, the inspectors went in and disarmed Saddam, so somehow that means that he wasn't killing his own people? None but 5000 of Saddam's murders were done with weapons that would have been limited by the inspectors, even if the inspectors were effective. He was shooting people, starving them, and beheading them.
You can obscure the facts all you want, but the truth is, less people are dying now than were before the war.