BPSCG's Thread: Death Arithmetic in Iraq

[Orsino]

Thread started at BPSCG's request, with my questions s/he didn't feel were appropriate elsewhere.

Quote:

American military might has caused the deaths of somewhere near one hundred thousand Iraqis, Americans, and "coalition" members (never mind quibbling over the exact number, which will be carefully hidden from us as long as possible, if anyone even knows). Would Saddam have killed as many in the same time, had he remained in charge? Would he have tortued as many?

If anyone here really thinks that this was an acceptable bargain, I'd have to ask him: did you sacrific or even risk your own life to make it happen, or were you content to let others do the killing and dying? Were you personally inconvenienced at all while your tax dollars financed all the carnage and destruction?

So what does BPSCG, or anyone else, think?

[Rob Lister]

Quote:

Originally posted by Orsino
Thread started at BPSCG's request, with my questions s/he didn't feel were appropriate elsewhere.



So what does BPSCG, or anyone else, think?

Regarding the first paragraph, what does the time-frame have to do with it? Was Saddam capable/willing to kill that many if it suited his purposes? Most certainly. Had he killed that many already? Most certainly. Was he apt to do it again if he thought he could get away with it? The evidence suggests yes. Was he the threat (to us) we thought he was? Nope. Was he a threat? Yep.

Regarding the second paragraph, what does personal participation have to do with it? (Even though I gladly participated in DS and knew, with certainty, we'd be back.) Personal participation has nothing to do with judging the rightness (or wrongness) of an act. A better question would be ' would you be willing to participate if necessary/possible?'. My answer would be yes. But still, it is meaningless to the morality of the act.

[Batman Jr.]

Quote:

Originally posted by Rob Lister
Was he a threat? Yep.

Is that meant as something to make the war meritable?

[BPSCG]

Quote:

Originally posted by Orsino
Thread started at BPSCG's request, with my questions s/he

Wait, let me check.

Okay. It's "he."

Quote:

didn't feel were appropriate elsewhere.

Quote:

Quote:

American military might has caused the deaths of somewhere near one hundred thousand Iraqis, Americans, and "coalition" members (never mind quibbling over the exact number, which will be carefully hidden from us as long as possible, if anyone even knows). Would Saddam have killed as many in the same time, had he remained in charge? Would he have tortued as many?

If anyone here really thinks that this was an acceptable bargain, I'd have to ask him: did you sacrific or even risk your own life to make it happen, or were you content to let others do the killing and dying? Were you personally inconvenienced at all while your tax dollars financed all the carnage and destruction?

So what does BPSCG, or anyone else, think?

Estimates of the number of Iraqis Saddam killed run from 300,000 to as much as a million. As is often the case with monsters like this, (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot), exact figures are very hard to pin down.

Link

And you have to add to that toll the number of people killed in the Iran-Iraq war, launched by Saddam.

Quote:

Because both Iran and Iraq used irregular military units, attacked civilian populations, and played down their own losses while playing up those of their opponents, reliable casualty figures do not exist. For example, Iran claimed to have lost 200,000 or fewer of its own citizens, while Iraq claimed to have killed 800,000 Iranians. Neutral estimates come closer to the Iranian claim but are uncertain. Because of different battlefield techniques, Iraq’s deaths were probably about half those suffered by Iran. The total number of people killed almost certainly exceeds 300,000. Wounded and captured soldiers push the casualty total over one million, and some estimates of total casualties exceed two million.

Link

So to answer your question about whether Saddam would have killed as many, I think we can safely say "yes - a hell of a lot more."

And Saddam wasn't done yet.

Would he have tortured as many? As many as whom? If you're suggesting that any excesses the U.S. has committed in Iraq remotely resembles the vicious sadism that was a regular feature in Saddam's abbatoir, all I can say is, don't be ridiculous.

[Batman Jr.]

The death toll may not as of yet be as high as SH's, but the death rate is slightly higher.

Quote:

Originally posted by BPSCG
Would he have tortured as many? As many as whom? If you're suggesting that any excesses the U.S. has committed in Iraq remotely resembles the vicious sadism that was a regular feature in Saddam's abbatoir, all I can say is, don't be ridiculous.

Abu Ghraib was pretty vicious.

[Orsino]

Quote:

Originally posted by BPSCG
Estimates of the number of Iraqis Saddam killed run from 300,000 to as much as a million.

Like an idiot, I omitted the key questionsfrom the other thread, the very reason for the title of this thread:

How many lives were/would be "worth it"? Is there a maximum number of deaths, injuries or cases of torture beyond which you would look back and regret the war?

I'll also have to repeat my questions from the beginning of the thread:

What sacrifices did you personally make to support this war, if you did support it?

[Rob Lister]

Quote:

Originally posted by Batman Jr.
The death toll may not as of yet be as high as SH's, but the death rate is slightly higher.

Abu Ghraib was pretty vicious.

I suggest you don't know the meaning of the word. The 'excesses' at abu ghraib were also prosecuted as crimes. Would you recommend less for Saddam's?

[Batman Jr.]

Quote:

Originally posted by Rob Lister
I suggest you don't know the meaning of the word. The 'excesses' at abu ghraib were also prosecuted as crimes. Would you recommend less for Saddam's?

Of course not. I was merely stating that Abu Ghraib was on many levels comparable to the acts of torture committed by SH.

[demon]

Orsino:
"Would Saddam have killed as many in the same time, had he remained in charge? Would he have tortued as many?"

And you could have also have asked if Saddam would have levelled whole cities like Fallujah? Imagine if Saddam had done that...people would be screaming that it was the war crime of the century!

I hope this isn`t derailing your thread too much but the question as to whether there was a credible, deliverable and morally supportable alternative to war in 2003 is a rather curious one anyway because it reverses an elementary point of both logic and morality. Namely, this:

We didn’t have to provide an alternative to war until the pro-war lobby provided a credible, deliverable and morally supportable reason for war in 2003.

This was never done. Iraq was clearly never a threat and if your answer is the suffering of Iraqis under Saddam Hussein then why was an invasion not proposed every year from 1991 onwards? More to the point, if the US and UK were so concerned about Iraqi suffering, why were they helpful in Saddam`s installation in the first place, why did they groom him from the fifties onwards, why did they provide him with a list of thousands of people to assassinate, why did they support him in the Iran-Iraq war, try and hide his culpability for Halabja, and arm him even more afterwards? And for the latter three components of that question, the application is directly to the current incumbents, many of whom served in the Reagan/Bush I administrations.

As a matter of fact, there were alternatives to the so-called war. If we follow the fraudulent WMD line, it was to keep inspectors in the country while cooperation increased and give them the extra few months they felt they needed. In fact, the US was terrified that inspections, which it had opposed because "Wolfowitz and his civilian colleagues in the Pentagon [felt] that new inspections -- or protracted negotiations over them -- could torpedo their plans for military action to remove Hussein from power." ( Washington Post April 15th 2002), were working.
Even if Saddam’s cooperation had been 100% immediately, as Blix pointed out “verification of it cannot be instant. Even with a proactive Iraqi attitude, induced by continued outside pressure, it would still take some time to verify sites and items, analyse documents, interview relevant persons, and draw conclusions. It would not take years, nor weeks, but months. Neither governments nor inspectors would want disarmament inspection to go on forever. However, it must be remembered that in accordance with the governing resolutions, a sustained inspection and monitoring system is to remain in place after verified disarmament to give confidence and to strike an alarm, if signs were seen of the revival of any proscribed weapons programmes.�
UNMOVIC sadly was never given this chance because disarmament was never the objective -only the cover.


If we follow the humanitarian argument then the obvious alternative was to lift the sanctions on the Iraqi people and keep only those in place that prevented Saddam from developing weapons, not to mention step up the monitoring. What was so urgent about the situation that we couldn’t have given the Iraqi people a few years of relief to decide their own fate?

Given the level of destruction we have wrought on that country, it would have taken Saddam longer to kill as many as we have at his then current rate, not to mention avoiding yet another round of DU contamination.

The US and the UK knew they simply had a need that had no moral justification and it concerned neither weapons nor liberation.

So no, invading Iraq was not an acceptable bargin, most emphatically not.

[a_unique_person]

Quote:

Originally posted by Rob Lister
I suggest you don't know the meaning of the word. The 'excesses' at abu ghraib were also prosecuted as crimes. Would you recommend less for Saddam's?

I can't believe there are still people who think that a few 'excesses' at Abu Grahib is the extent of the problem.

http://randi.org/vbulletin/showthrea...threadid=52731

Have you ever heard of Camp Cropper?

[SezMe]

Quote:

Originally posted by demon
why did they provide him with a list of thousands of people to assassinate, < snip >

At the risk of derailing your derail, can you provide some evidence for this?

Thanks.

[The Central Scrutinizer]

OK, I'll take a stab at it!

Quote:

Originally posted by Orsino
American military might has caused the deaths of somewhere near one hundred thousand Iraqis, Americans, and "coalition" members (never mind quibbling over the exact number, which will be carefully hidden from us as long as possible, if anyone even knows).

It's instructive that, first you post this - "...caused the deaths of somewhere near one hundred thousand...", followed almost immediatly by this - "...if anyone even knows...". So which is it?

Quote:

Originally posted by Orsino
Would Saddam have killed as many in the same time, had he remained in charge?

Perhaps

Quote:

Originally posted by Orsino
Would he have tortued as many?

Perhaps

Quote:

Originally posted by Orsino
If anyone here really thinks that this was an acceptable bargain, I'd have to ask him: did you sacrific or even risk your own life to make it happen, or were you content to let others do the killing and dying?

I'm not "content" to let others do the killing and dying, but I am 45 and 40 pounds overweight. The Army doesn't want me.

Quote:

Originally posted by Orsino
Were you personally inconvenienced at all while your tax dollars financed all the carnage and destruction?

No.

[a_unique_person]

Quote:

Originally posted by BPSCG


Link

And you have to add to that toll the number of people killed in the Iran-Iraq war, launched by Saddam.
Link

So to answer your question about whether Saddam would have killed as many, I think we can safely say "yes - a hell of a lot more."

And Saddam wasn't done yet.

Would he have tortured as many? As many as whom? If you're suggesting that any excesses the U.S. has committed in Iraq remotely resembles the vicious sadism that was a regular feature in Saddam's abbatoir, all I can say is, don't be ridiculous.

Given that Saddams armed forces were known to be largely rundown and decrepit, he was in no condition to start any new wars. The defeats and sanctions had effectively neutered him militarily.

Since you are so concerned about saving lives of people dying needlessly, how about a bit of concern for the Congo?

[Mycroft]

Quote:

Originally posted by BPSCG
Wait, let me check.

Okay. It's "he."

You’ve always come across as very masculine to me, but since the change of your avatar I must confess to sometimes becoming aroused when reading your posts. I know it’s irrational, but the woman pictured is attractive and her beauty combined with your intellect is a potent combination. I understand the choice of your new avatar had more to do with celebrating an important milestone in Iraqi liberation than any projection of self-image, but ones reactions are not always governed by reason.

Which reminds me; are you seeing anyone?

[Jocko]

Maybe you two could double with Fool and AUP sometime. That would make for an interesting dinner conversation.

[SezMe]

Quote:

Originally posted by Jocko
Maybe you two could double with Fool and AUP sometime. That would make for an interesting dinner conversation.

ROTFLMAO. Jocko, I think you outta chaperon. Imagine the material for your memoirs.

[Matabiri]

Quote:

Originally posted by The Central Scrutinizer
It's instructive that, first you post this - "...caused the deaths of somewhere near one hundred thousand...", followed almost immediatly by this - "...if anyone even knows...". So which is it?

The death toll has been estimated to be in the region of 100,000 (the Lancet study, much maligned but never knowingly falsified). The error bars for this estimate are very large - three standard deviations cover from about 8,000 to nearly 200,000 dead. So the best and most rigourous estimate - not a guess - is around 100,000, but "exact figures" are not available.

[BPSCG]

Quote:

Originally posted by Orsino
How many lives were/would be "worth it"?

This question gets asked a lot, and I beat up Kevin_Lowe about it in another thread.

It's an incomplete question. "Worth it" to whom?

To the women who were forced to watch as their husbands and fathers were fed feet first into the metal shredders, I would guess the number would be very high.

To the men who were forced to watch as their wives and mothers were raped by Saddam's thugs, I would guess the number would be very high.

To the wives and mothers of American soldiers killed there, I am sure the number would be very low. To some of them; you keep reading about the families of soldiers who have been killed, who say they are proud of their sons' sacrifices and still believe the war was worth fighting.

And so on.

So, worth it to whom?

Quote:

I'll also have to repeat my questions from the beginning of the thread:

What sacrifices did you personally make to support this war, if you did support it?

Realistically, very little (higher taxes is the biggest I can think of). Why is that relevant? If I didn't personally sacrifice, I get no say? Should the soldier who lost his legs get extra votes on election day?

[BPSCG]

Quote:

Originally posted by Mycroft
You’ve always come across as very masculine to me, but since the change of your avatar I must confess to sometimes becoming aroused when reading your posts.

Well, gee, Mycroft, I don't know what to say. I always thought I wrote reasonably well, but never thought my writing actually aroused anyone. I'm flattered.

I'm also utterly hetero. Hope this revelation hasn't caused you too much grief.

Quote:

I know it’s irrational, but the woman pictured is attractive and her beauty combined with your intellect is a potent combination.

Oh, my...

Quote:

I understand the choice of your new avatar had more to do with celebrating an important milestone in Iraqi liberation than any projection of self-image, but ones reactions are not always governed by reason.

My writing and avatar has clouded your reason?

Oh, my...

Yeah, I swiped her off one of your posts. It's one of those pictures that you'll remember for years after, like that incredible Chinese guy standing in front of the tanks at Tiannamen Square. She might have been flashing a V-for-Victory sign, but the whole picture was an effective flipping of the bird to Saddam and the "insurgents."

Was the war "worth the cost" to her, do you think?

BTW, she's only there until the end of the month. Ludwig van comes back after that. He's my oldest friend.

Quote:

Which reminds me; are you seeing anyone?

Um, yeah, the witty, charming, intelligent, talented, and delightful Mrs. BPSCG.

Sorry...

[BPSCG]

Quote:

Originally posted by Jocko
Maybe you two could double with Fool and AUP sometime. That would make for an interesting dinner conversation.

Oof...

Why am I getting a visual of the poker game scene in A Streetcar Named Desire when Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando in the movie) finds out his full house wasn't enough to win the pot, and he lunges over the table and punches the guy who won the hand, and a free-for-all breaks out, with Stanley eventually getting dragged into the shower to sober up?

[BPSCG]

Quote:

Originally posted by SezMe
ROTFLMAO. Jocko, I think you outta chaperon. Imagine the material for your memoirs.

You guys are a bunch of sick puppies.

[Silicon]

Quote:

Originally posted by BPSCG


It's an incomplete question. "Worth it" to whom?

To the women who were forced to watch as their husbands and fathers were fed feet first into the metal shredders, I would guess the number would be very high.
...

And so on.

Not to discount your point, but it seems as though you're evading the question.

Or rather, reframing it from one where numbers matter to one where you conjure the worlds worst mental image of the bad guy so that you can make an emotional appeal and beg yourself out of answering.


Orsino can just as easily counter with:

"Worth it? Ask the young American mother who's soldier husband just had his leg and penis blown up, and is now a mental vegetable that she has to care for for the rest of her life."... etc.


Such emotional appeals are not entirely out of the question, but you still must weigh it against the question.

It is still a valid question. Give us a number. YOUR number. Not the wife's number, or the mothers, or the one in Saddam's rape room or on the bad end of a broomhandle in an unnamed American prison camp.


Playing to emotion is fine, but you have to realize we're skeptics here. We can see the rhetorical gambit for what it is.

[BPSCG]

Quote:

Originally posted by Silicon
Not to discount your point, but it seems as though you're evading the question.

Or rather, reframing it from one where numbers matter to one where you conjure the worlds worst mental image of the bad guy so that you can make an emotional appeal and beg yourself out of answering.


Orsino can just as easily counter with:

"Worth it? Ask the young American mother who's soldier husband just had his leg and penis blown up, and is now a mental vegetable that she has to care for for the rest of her life."... etc.

If you look back at my post, you'll see I did make that point.

Quote:

It is still a valid question. Give us a number. YOUR number. Not the wife's number, or the mothers, or the one in Saddam's rape room or on the bad end of a broomhandle in an unnamed American prison camp.

Fine. Ten million. I'm not going to go into how I arrived at that figure, since it's highly speculative.

Now all that you know is what I consider it to be worth (and you're probably horrified at it, too). But what's the point of what I think is a good number? As Orsino points out, my ox isn't getting gored. When we decide whether to go to war with someone, are we supposed to calculate how evil he is and weigh it against how many lives it might cost? The latter is a fiendishly difficult undertaking, and the former is impossible (on a scale of a hundred, where do you rank Hitler? Stalin? Mao? How do you come up with that ranking?) And then, what, divide the projected number of dead innocents by the evil ranking to come up with some Cost of War Evaluation Ratio (COWER) to decide whether we go or not?

And how do you factor in things like the cost of property damage and its repair and weigh that against the benefit of having a free country in the middle east? When you factor in the cost of having the war, do you also factor out the cost of no longer having to maintain bases in Saudi Arabia and no longer having to have fighter jets patrolling the no-fly zone 24 x 7?

Now, since you seem to think it's a pertinent question (I don't, but what's sauce for the goose, etc.), I'll ask you: What do you think is the number of dead at which point the cost of overthrowing Saddam outweighs the benefit? Since I didn't justify my figure, I won't ask you to justify yours.

[Silicon]

I actually didn't make that calculation for myself.


I don't think we've hit that number of soldiers yet for me.

But in terms of other costs, we have, and we spent those costs unwisely in my accounting.

In terms of the costs in American credibility for the claims we make, we've passed the cost. That alone is something we spent poorly. Powell giving information he later admitted to being, in his words:

"inaccurate, wrong and in some cases, deliberately misleading." -Colin Powell on Meet the Press, May 16 2004


Right then is when a cost was exceeded for me, when the US Secretary of State admitted presenting deliberately misleading information to the world. I see the world as being full of very dangerous threats, and I don't like that we spent our political trust crying wolf over a paper tiger. A Paper tiger that Powell KNEW was paper, when he said a year before:

Quote:

We had a good discussion, the Foreign Minister and I and the President and I, had a good discussion about the nature of the sanctions -- the fact that the sanctions exist -- not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein's ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors.

Taking the focus off of Osama bin Ladin, is also a cost that I feel exceeds what we should have been doing.


The death toll in Soldiers has a natural check on it, and that check is recruitment numbers. I'll let the soldiers of now and the future decide what the appropriate cost in American lives is. When they stop volunteering for the service, I'll say we've hit the natural limit of the cost in lives.

[RussDill]

Quote:

Originally posted by Matabiri
The death toll has been estimated to be in the region of 100,000 (the Lancet study, much maligned but never knowingly falsified). The error bars for this estimate are very large - three standard deviations cover from about 8,000 to nearly 200,000 dead. So the best and most rigourous estimate - not a guess - is around 100,000, but "exact figures" are not available.

Even then, saying "caused by the US military" is very misleading. Suicide bomb attacks such as the one early in the conflict that killed 150, would be in this total. Hostages excecuted would be included in this total. Iraqi policemen pulled out of their bus and shot in the back of the head, would be included in this total. Civilians being used as human shields would be included in this total.

[BPSCG]

Quote:

Originally posted by Silicon
I actually didn't make that calculation for myself.

Even though in your earlier post, you wrote:

Quote:

It is still a valid question. Give us a number. YOUR number. Not the wife's number, or the mothers, or the one in Saddam's rape room or on the bad end of a broomhandle in an unnamed American prison camp.

Who's evading the question now?

So why don't you take a moment and make that calculation for yourself? You can take a while if you want; I have to go out for a few hours, but I'll look for it when I get back.

[Silicon]

Quote:

Originally posted by BPSCG
[b]If you look back at my post, you'll see I did make that point.
Fine. Ten million. I'm not going to go into how I arrived at that figure, since it's highly speculative.

Okay, half the population of Iraq. So one dead American for every two saved Iraqis.

Those seem like Gettysburgesque numbers. You sure about that?

[Matabiri]

Quote:

Originally posted by RussDill
Even then, saying "caused by the US military" is very misleading. Suicide bomb attacks such as the one early in the conflict that killed 150, would be in this total. Hostages excecuted would be included in this total. Iraqi policemen pulled out of their bus and shot in the back of the head, would be included in this total. Civilians being used as human shields would be included in this total.

All true. The estimate was originally intended to be deaths over and above what would have been expected at pre-invasion death rates, though, so the extrapolation that they would not have died had the invasion not occurred is valid, although the blame being apportioned purely to the US military might not be...

[SezMe]

Quote:

Originally posted by BPSCG
...snip...When you factor in the cost of having the war, do you also factor out the cost of no longer having to maintain bases in Saudi Arabia and no longer having to have fighter jets patrolling the no-fly zone 24 x 7? ...snip...

Its a (maybe minor) side issue, but I don't think those savings exist. My reading indicates we are building between 11-14 major permanent military bases in Iraq. I suggest that our cost of a continuing military presence in the Mideast has increased substantially, not decreased.

[Meadmaker]

I don';t think it makes sense to do "death arithmetic" . It sounds corny, but I really think you can't compare a life lived freely and a life lived under tyranny. And we are all going to die, someday. Why not die doing something good, like liberating someone else?

In my opinion, if the end result is a democracy in Iraq, then we won't look back and count deaths. If the end result is a religious dictatorship, one death was one too many.

I don't know what the outcome will be. I'm pessimistic about the future in Iraq, although the holding of a successful election holds some promise.

[Silicon]

If Iraq actually winds up peaceful free and stable, my limit won't matter.

If not, it's already been too many, just as Meadmaker said.


In terms of risk/reward, well the Coalition lost under 400 liberating Kuwait, a population of two million.


A similar calculation says the 20 million Iraqis liberated by US forces at a loss of 4000 would be a similar ratio.

Since I see the liberation of Kuwait a stunning success, I would be remis to set a number under 4000 for the liberation of Iraq, if that turns out to have a positive outcome.

I'll say 5k to 10k.


And yes, all of this seems a bit ghoulish. I want to state to everyone how much I DO absolutely appreciate and honor the sacrifice of our troops. Close family of mine participated in the liberation of Kuwait, and I don't forget the anguish I felt when my loved ones were in harm's way, nor will I forget the pride I felt in them when they came home having done their duty for peace in the world.

[BPSCG]

Quote:

Originally posted by Meadmaker
I don';t think it makes sense to do "death arithmetic" . It sounds corny, but I really think you can't compare a life lived freely and a life lived under tyranny. And we are all going to die, someday. Why not die doing something good, like liberating someone else?

Thanks Meadmaker. That makes a lot of sense.

But Mrs. BPSCG and I have just finished drinking a bottle and a half of wine, so almost anything might make sense at this point.

[BPSCG]

Quote:

Originally posted by Silicon
I'll say 5k to 10k.

Okay, thanks.

Now, if you are President of the United States Silicon, you've just told the Bad Guys how many of us they'd have to kill to get their way.

I guess John F. ("Pay Any Price, Bear Any Burden") Kennedy isn't one of your heroes.

[fishbob]

BPSCG:

Quote:

To the women who were forced to watch as their husbands and fathers were fed feet first into the metal shredders, I would guess the number would be very high.

We heard a lot about these shredders before the invasion, before any of our guys had any first hand look at those parts of Iraq. I have heard diddly squat about them since. I am inclined to think the shredder stories were pre-war Chalabi propaganda.

Real nice BS appeal to emotion there.

[Silicon]

Quote:

Originally posted by BPSCG
Okay, thanks.

Now, if you are President of the United States Silicon, you've just told the Bad Guys how many of us they'd have to kill to get their way.

I guess John F. ("Pay Any Price, Bear Any Burden") Kennedy isn't one of your heroes.

I'll have you note that Kennedy wasn't willing to pay ANY price to rid the world of Communism, as he didn't invade the USSR. So a cost/benefit analysis was in his head too.


Oh, and if I were president, there'd be a lot of different things in the world.

Starting with, I wouldn't be posting on the internet.

[demon]

fishbob:
"We heard a lot about these shredders before the invasion, before any of our guys had any first hand look at those parts of Iraq. I have heard diddly squat about them since. I am inclined to think the shredder stories were pre-war Chalabi propaganda."

Typical huns raping and killing nuns stuff. In the UK, we had it all from the useless Ann Clwyd "Special envoy on human rights in Iraq 2003 to the present" (who incidently, doesn`t like answering emails or addressing The Lancet Study), with not a shred of evidence.

quote:
Not a shred of evidence.

Forget the no-show of Saddam Hussein’s WMD. Even George Bush no longer believes that they are there. Ask instead what happened to Saddam’s ‘people shredder’, into which his son Qusay reportedly fed opponents of the Baathist regime. Ann Clwyd, Labour MP for Cynon Valley and chair of Indict, a group that has been campaigning since 1996 for the creation of an international criminal tribunal to try the Baathists, wrote of the shredder in the Times on 18 March — the day of the Iraq debate in the House of Commons and three days before the start of the war. Clwyd described an Iraqi’s claims that male prisoners were dropped into a machine ‘designed for shredding plastic’, before their minced remains were ‘placed in plastic bags’ so they could later be used as ‘fish food’. Sometimes the victims were dropped in feet first, reported Clwyd, so they could briefly behold their own mutilation before death.........

http://www.spectator.co.uk/newdesig...4-02-21&id=4302
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Also, let`s not forget Blair`s claims about mass graves found in Iraq which have so far turned out to be bogus...his claims have anyway. His press release on the capture of Saddam Hussein referred to:

"The remains of four hundred thousand human beings already found in mass graves."
(http://www.pm.gov.uk/output/page4995.asp)

Downing Street admitted in July that the true figure for bodies found was about 5,000.

Unless someone has found 395,000 corpses in the meantime - which I'm sure we would have heard about - it's clear Bliar was lying again.

quote:
Unrecorded victims
Tony Blair and others claim 300,000 bodies have been found in Iraqi mass graves. In fact, there have been no official exhumations - or count

Brendan O'Neill
Wednesday July 21, 2004
The Guardian

We now know that the public was misled over Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. But have we also been misled over the even more emotive issue of Iraq's mass graves.
There are without doubt many mass graves in Iraq, into which the bodies of thousands of Iraqis killed by the Ba'ath regime were dumped over the past 25 years. Coalition officials have claimed that they contain the bodies of 300,000 Iraqis. In November last year, Sandra Hodgkinson, then head of the coalition's mass graves action plan, told the press that 260 grave sites had been located, which contained the bodies of "at least 300,000".

In comments and speeches, Labour ministers and MPs have repeated this figure time and again. Tony Blair told the Today programme in April: "We have found the mass graves of 300,000 people already in Iraq. It doesn't get a great deal of publicity, but it's true." At the end of last year, Stephen Ladyman, Labour MP for South Thanet, declared: "We are rebuilding a nation where we found 300,000 bodies in mass graves so far." According to Denis MacShane, minister for Europe: "We've now uncovered 300,000 bodies in mass graves, there because of [Saddam Hussein's] torture and tyranny.".........

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Stor...1265742,00.html
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[demon]

meadmaker:
"I don';t think it makes sense to do "death arithmetic" ."

And yet .... the deaths of three thousand Americans was seen as such an atrocity that it became the watershed from which America drew the outrage to unilaterally declare war on any nation it wished, inflicting any casualites it saw as fit for its endless wars.
Why did we even go to war if all terrorism is capable of at its very best is to be able to kill a few thousand of us? I mean, Bin Laden impressively kept the casualties in under ten thousand and he is on record as having said that the casuality magnitude was a mistake.


Why are we there if our enemies are way more impressive with their casualty figures than we are with ours? Your argument leads one to the conclusion that a few thousand casualites is really not a moral issue worth pursuing - so why are we pursuing it at all?

[demon]

The Independent on Sunday's comment "We must not just remember them. We must count them" (12 December 2004) says that the apathy of Iraq's conquerors with regard to civilian casualties "seriously weakens the moral case for war - especially the humanitarian argument". At the end, it asks: "How on earth is the coalition to persuade the Iraqi people that it has their interests at heart when it appears to care so little about them that it makes no attempt to find out how many of them have died, and obstructs those who try to do so?"

This seems a rather odd way of putting it. If the Chinese army had invaded an oil-rich Third World country, killed an estimated 100,000 civilians, flattened a major city and targeted hospitals and radio stations - all to the tune of some pious rhetoric about "liberation" - I doubt that the Independent on Sunday would be quite so forgiving. Certainly, given the invaders' actions, the moral case for the Chinese invasion, particularly the humanitarian argument, would be either ignored or derided. Questions about how the Chinese government might persuade its victims of their altruistic intentions would not, I suspect, be prominent.

Interestingly, the 1100-word the report by Andrew Buncombe, Severin Carrell and Raymond Whitaker ("Last week the US lost its 1,000th soldier killed in combat. Why did no one notice?"), despite a subheading mentioning civilian casualties, expends 75% of its length on casualties among the forces of the Coalition of the Illegal. The final three paragraphs note the coalition's lack of interest in Iraqi civilian casualties, and mentions that "it is hard to escape the conclusion that Washington and London simply do not want to know the figures, to avoid the political fallout they could create." Nowhere in the article is the Lancet survey mentioned. Why are casualties among British and American military professionals worth such prominent coverage, while the much more numerous casualties among the non-beweaponed Iraqis are worth no more than a mention at the tail end of the piece?

Why does the Independent on Sunday and so many other individuals I hear regard the moral case for invading Iraq to have been merely damaged, and not irrevocably shattered, by the conduct of the occupying forces? Why is the coalition's utter lack of interest in the welfare of its victims considered as little more than bad management in the business of winning hearts and minds, and not as a war crime?

[RandFan]

Quote:

If anyone here really thinks that this was an acceptable bargain, I'd have to ask him: did you sacrific or even risk your own life to make it happen, or were you content to let others do the killing and dying? Were you personally inconvenienced at all while your tax dollars financed all the carnage and destruction?

I think that this is a fallacy. Just because someone does not want to risk their lives to be a fireman, police officer, soldier, etc. does not mean that one cannot support the efforts of those individuals who are fireman, police officer or soldier without being a hypocrite.

The final chapter has not been written. Watching the election I felt that this effort could be very historical. Considering Saddam and his two sons, the murders, the disfigurement, the false imprisonment, etc. I think this was a worthy effort. I concede that this is post hoc reasoning.

[crimresearch]

Quote:

Originally posted by fishbob
BPSCG: We heard a lot about these shredders before the invasion, before any of our guys had any first hand look at those parts of Iraq. I have heard diddly squat about them since. I am inclined to think the shredder stories were pre-war Chalabi propaganda.

Real nice BS appeal to emotion there.

Yeah, its not like Saddam ever forced anyone to pose nude or wear panties on their heads...you know, *real* torture.


"Pictures of dead Iraqis, with their necks slashed, their eyes gouged out and their genitals blackened, fill a bookshelf. "
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/i...ets-usat_x.htm


"The home movies of the family of Saddam Hussein, including grisly scenes of torture, are proving a best-seller on the streets of Baghdad.
Some of the images show the dictator in a paternal role, smiling fondly at his brood and dandling their offspring on his knee.
But the kitsch sequences are interspersed with dark recordings of torture sessions and executions. In one, Saddam's son Uday is seen lashing the soles of the feet of a soldier with a rubber pipe as his victim screams with pain and begs for mercy. Eventually he hands the whip to a senior officer to continue the punishment. There is little doubt of its authenticity."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main...4/ixworld.html

"The document listed Saddam's favoured methods of torture.
They included eye-gouging, piercing of hands with an electric drill, suspension from a ceiling, electric shock, rape and other forms of sexual abuse, beating of the soles of feet, mock executions, extinguishing cigarettes on the body and acid baths."
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/m...t.irq.dossier/

"The punishments include fingers being chopped or shot off, tips of tongues being cut off, wrists being broken by sharp blows from a wooden rod, lashes by whip or cane, a bound man being tossed off a building, a beheading involving a sword and a knife and a man being humiliated by riding a donkey backwards."
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0%2C293...1689%2C00.html

"Hussein torture victims are shown being flogged and having fingers chopped off. One detainee is filmed as he is thrown from a roof, another beheaded by a sword-weilding member of Saddam's elite Fedayeen unit.
According to the Post, video of the beheading shows a man placing the severed head on the victim's prone body. Another scene shows a man's tongue being cut out.
As NewsMax.com reported on Sunday, other gruesome images from the embargoed video include scenes of Kurdish detainees being castrated and babies being gassed to death."
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2...1/100312.shtml

"Human rights monitors for the United Nations have amply documented the savagery of Saddam Hussein. His eldest son and a possible successor, Uday, reportedly grew up watching his father punish political opponents as a way to control a large, diverse country. Uday, now 38, has earned his own reputation for violent behavior. In an Amnesty International report, Uday reportedly ordered that the hand of an Olympic committee security guard, accused of stealing sports equipment, be cut off. The missing equipment was later found. Similar incidents tied to Uday later became part of a United Nations report on human rights in Iraq."
http://espn.go.com/oly/s/2002/1220/1480103.html
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------


But hey, don't be upset foplks, rest assured that none of those things could have actually happened, they must all be fabricated Bush 'appeals to emotion' like the 'dead' Kurds and the 'invasion' of Kuwait.
And promoted through right wing puppets of the administration, like ESPN...