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Politics : Actual left/right wing discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (2748)	10/13/2006 5:48:07 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10087

Some other things to consider. Iraq's population has apparently increased over the last few years, not decreased. It's said to be 26M today in 2006, while in 2002 it was estimated at 24M. Returning exiles is a plausible reason why the population should have increased. Most of the violence in Iraq since the invasion has occurred in Baghdad and the Sunni provinces. There are 9 provinces out of 17 in which no coalition casulties have occurred. The two provinces of Baghdad (consisting of the capital city) and Anbar have between them produced a majority of the violence and a majority of coalition deaths. Baghdad's population is 5.6M today (it had been estimated at 4.8M in 2000 - again we see a population increase likely related to returning exiles. Anbar province has a population of about 1.2M. If Iraq had lost 655,000 people as a result of the invasion and the terrorism that followed, the bast majority of the deaths would have occurred in the two areas of Baghdad and Anbar province. And the percent of the population killed in these provinces would be far larger than 2.5%. In October 2004, a Lancet paper claimed 100,000 deaths due to the Iraq war. Not much came of that study - Bush was re-elected anyway. Now we approach another US election and again a Lancet paper is released claiming an absurd casulty number - 655,000. I suspect this study will fail to achieve its obvious political goal of turning over the US House and Senate to Democrats who will pull out of Iraq. So in October 2006, what number will be cited in the next Lancet study? 3.6M? 4M? A billion? Why not?

To: TimF who wrote (2748)	10/13/2006 6:11:41 PM
From: cirrus	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10087

Unfortunately, the US Government does not make any attempt to track Iraqi military or civilian casualties. However, lets assume that 2,500 US soldiers die in Iraq. It's well known that armor and medical care care have drastically reduced American deaths, perhaps to half of what they might have otherwise been. Iraqi medical care is marginal. It would be fair to say that given the immense firepower brought to bear on Iraqi military installations during the conflict at least 5 Iraqi soldiers die for every American. So, given the adjusted number of 5,000 American deaths, multiply that by 5 and you get 25,000 Iraqi military dead. A common rule of thumb in any conflict is that 10 civilians will die for every soldier. Take the 25,000 Iraqi soldiers killed, multiply it by 10 and we have 250,000 Iraqi civilians dead. This number is a another guess based on grim speculation, but for the US to dispute estimates without offering any analysis of it's own...