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Politics : The Castle -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (2596)	2/3/2004 7:55:18 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7936

In a discussion between reasonable people, it is understood when someone says scores of people died, that they usually mean a number of people on average...... "scores of innocent people died with each bomb that was dropped" The above statement is not true either as a per bomb amount or per average. I don't have stats for the tonnage of bombs dropped on Iraq in the recent fighting but it was almost 90,000 in the first war. The bombing campaign was longer then so its actually likely to be less then the first war, it might be a lot less but I'll just guess 20,000, it could be more but I'll err on the side that supports your case. The most common size bomb we used is probably 500 lbs. But to increase the deaths per bomb figure and strengthen your case I'll says 1,000 lbs is the average bomb. That means something like 20k bombs where dropped (and its more likely to be more then that number then it is to be less). Assuming your earlier figures as accurate its 5000 to 10000 civilian deaths. Many of them might have been killed by Iraqis, at least some labled as civilians could be terrorists or bandits, and not all of the civilians killed by Americans were killed by bombs but to strengthen your argument I take the higher number of deaths and assume they were all innocent civilians killed by American bombs. So you get .5 average innocent civilian deaths per bomb dropped not scores. In reality its probably much less then .5 because every time I had to make an assumption I erred towards increasing the amount of innocent civilians per bomb dropped. Scores per bomb as an averages just isn't possible. It may even be less then .01 innocent civilians killed per bomb dropped. And, of course, nitpicking manages to cloud the real issue which is that over 10k Iraqis were killed with Shock and Awe. Now it changes from "5 to 10 K" to "over 10K" Like I said to Hodgkin, do you think that sentiment makes a difference to the dead or their families? I think it makes some difference to some of them. But it still is a vitally important distinction even if none of the Iraqi families cares at all about it. "3 - The number that would have been killed by the continuation of Saddam's rule and by the negative effects of sanctions is probably higher then the number killed by "Shock and Awe"." I doubt it. At least 10k were killed in a few months. Read the reports, in the years before the second war, Saddam had reduced his killing of people. The major killings with the mass graves were done right after the Gulf War when the Kurds and Shiites rose up in revolt......and we didn't come to their rescue as promised. Continued peace within Iraq and between Iraq and other countries was hardly a given. And even with relative peace estimates of the amount killed by the deprivation caused by the sanctions and by Saddam grabbing Iraq's resources for his personal use and that of his cronies and military range well above 10k. Also 10K is the high end of the estimate you posted not the low end the Kurds and Shiites rose up in revolt......and we didn't come to their rescue as promised. Yes our help came years too late. Tim