Go Democrats.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061011/ap_o...HNlYwMlJVRPUCUlArmy: Troops to stay in Iraq until 2010 By LOLITA C. BALDOR, Associated Press Writer 30 minutes ago WASHINGTON - The U.S. Army has plans to keep the current level of soldiers in Iraq through 2010, the top Army officer said Wednesday, a later date than any Bush administration or Pentagon officials have mentioned thus far. The Army chief of staff, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, cautioned against reading too much into the planning, saying it is easier to pull back forces than to prepare and deploy units at the last minute."This is not a prediction that things are going poorly or better," Schoomaker told reporters. "It's just that I have to have enough ammo in the magazine that I can continue to shoot as long as they want us to shoot."Currently there are 141,000 troops in Iraq, including 120,000 Army soldiers. Those soldiers are divided among 15 Army combat brigades plus other support units.Schoomaker's comments come less than four weeks before congressional elections, in which the unpopular war in Iraq and the Bush administration's policies there are a major campaign issue.Last month, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, Gen. John Abizaid, said the military would likely maintain or possibly even increase the current force levels through next spring.In recent months the Army has shown signs of strain, as Pentagon officials have had to extend the Iraq deployments of two brigades in order to bolster security in Baghdad and allow units heading into the country to have at least one year at home before redeploying.Schoomaker said he has received no new guidance from commanders in Iraq as to when the U.S. will be able to begin reducing the number of troops there. Last year officials had hoped to be down to about 100,000 by the end of this year, but escalating violence and sectarian tensions have prompted military leaders to increase forces.He also said the Army will have to rely on the National Guard and Reserves to maintain the current level of deployments. When asked about concerns that reserve units are struggling to get the training and equipment they need before going back to Iraq, Schoomaker said that no troops would be sent into war without needed resources.Schoomaker spoke as the U.S. military death toll in Iraq rose to at least 2,750 since the war's start in March 2003. On Wednesday, the U.S. command said three U.S. Marines and two soldiers were killed in fighting there.
meistromoco
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Just in the nick of time for the November election, a new study of the impact of the Iraq war has been released and it contains the terrible finding that the US is responsible for at least 4 billion Iraqi deaths. The study projected the previous sensational estimate of 655,000 deaths into the future by taking into account the children that the dead Iraqis would have had in generations to come.
Thank Allah - bitch.
Give me a break.
Here is a clip of Dr. Richard Horton, the editor of Lancet. Lancet conduccted the "study" that came up with the 655,000 figure (I guess that sounds more scientific than a round 650). Lancet also came up with the 100,000 figure last year right before the election. Im sure the study was objective and scientific, unlike some of the other scandals - I mean researcch - he's been involved with, so I'm sure thats why CNN.com felt it deserved to be on their front page all day.
Oh, that's right, you believe idiots who say things like this:
"Bush: I am, you know, amazed that this is a society which so wants to be free that they???re willing to ??? you know, that there???s a level of violence that they tolerate.[/b]"
"science" in futherance of politics. nothing new. a shame though.
An editor of a peer reviewed academic journal does not have the same role as the editor of The Nation or The National Review. So saying this guy is whatever is neither here nor there.
You need to cite the flaws in methodology other than your embarassing misunderstanding of how infant mortality rates are used in cluster sampling. Then again, I'm sure you would not be happy unless Dick Cheney hand counted (and tasted) each corpse.
Furthermore, why don't you cite another peer reviewed empirical study on the subject to counter this?
You can't. So you tell us that Dr. Horton jacks off while eating kittens.
Since you don't have any data to counter these findings, tell us what your gut feeling is? How many? Half? That's 325,000. A whole lot better huh? Or let's take it down to 100,000. Now, that's more like it.
You fucking bastard. ONE is too many.
http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/journals/lancet/s0140673606694919.pdf
Only one source (John Hopkins) has attemted to make an accurate count. It is not the # (655,000), that the right objects to, it is the very idea that dead Iraqs are worth counting.
My girl's sister was talking to her Iraqi friend who lives in Baghdad. She said they stopped going out a few months back because there are so many rotting bodies in the street that the dogs have begun to eat them.
Why do they have to live this way?
2) That study that said up to 650,000 Iraqis have died is just way, I mean WAY too high. The 30,000 number Bush has talked about is probably to low, but at least reasonable. From keeping track of casualties in Iraq, there is just no way that 650,000 people have died so far. Right now is the highest levels of death/killings in the country and that only took off in February 2006. I'm not home so I can't quote numbers, but you'd have to have a lot more die than current numbers each and every month since the invaison in March 2003 to reach 650,000.
Do you think more humans have been killed in Iraq on the receiving end of a weapon during the last 4 years or the 4 years preceding 9/!!???
Yeah, that struck me as an incredibly high number too. All I can say is, I hope that's not right.
"Prof Gilbert Burnham, co-director of the Centre for Refugee and Disaster Response at Johns Hopkins, said he and colleagues were confident their study was accurate because the results correlated with their estimate from two years ago and the majority of deaths were substantiated by death certificates.[/b]"
I believe the report said that 80% were verified by death certificates. Also, keep in mind that the majority of the deaths we've been hearing about in Iraq are tallied from the morgue in Baghdad, combined with reports of deaths that surface in the media. There are around 90 major cities/ towns in Iraq aside from Baghdad, and armed conflict in many of them. It's unsafe for journalists in much of Iraq, and it's not in the interest of either the Iraqi government or the US government to keep an accurate log of deaths so I wouldn't be surprised if there's massive underreporting for a variety of reasons.
Well, he's right.
I mean, Muslim extremism - obviously - exclusively led to our invasion of Iraq. That's why they forced us to invade them. And if those brown people simply didn't believe in a god and surrendered their homes and families and life whilst laying down nude in the mud and sticking their asses up in the air, and liked it, then this whole mess would be over by now and we could get on to more important things, like Bay-of-Pigsing North Korea and Iran at the same time. Those haters of freedom. Thankfully, we have the REAL god on our side.
Spin that.
2) That study that said up to 650,000 Iraqis have died is just way, I mean WAY too high. The 30,000 number Bush has talked about is probably to low, but at least reasonable. From keeping track of casualties in Iraq, there is just no way that 650,000 people have died so far. Right now is the highest levels of death/killings in the country and that only took off in February 2006. I'm not home so I can't quote numbers, but you'd have to have a lot more die than current numbers each and every month since the invaison in March 2003 to reach 650,000.
You are talking about war deaths, John Hopkins study is talking about all deaths. They are saying about 1/2 that number is directly war related. Still 10x Bush's number. They are using standard medical methodology.
1) They did a sample of just under 2,000 people, and from those people SURVEYED, they had death certificates. They then extrapoloated those numbers for the entire Iraqi population.
2) Currently there are four areas of conflict with daily death counts: 1) The largest cities of Southern Iraq like Basra and Najaf. Most of those killings are between rival Shiite factions which have completely broken ranks with each other and are fighting for power and $. 2) Anbar province, this is the homeland of the Sunni insurgency and centered around cities such as Fallujah. Most deaths there are Iraqi security forces, civilians, insurgents and U.S. soldiers. 3) Kirkuk and Mosul in the north. These are two cities which the Kurds are attempting to take over. There has been a steady rise in violence in both between Kurds, Sunni Arabs, insurgents and Turkoman. 4) The most deadly area currently is Baghdad and the surrounding areas. Deaths there are mostly from Shiite death squads, police units infiltrated by Shiite militias, Sadr's Mahdi Army, Sunni insurgents and neighborhood defense committees, and U.S. soldiers.
3) Here's the most up to date numbers I have for current deaths in Iraq:
The UN counted 14,388 deaths in the first six months of 2006. The U.N. numbers, while probably under counts seem to be the most thorough because they look at not only morgues, but also hospitals.
The Pentagon's quarterly report to Congress for August 2006 said that Iraqi civilian deaths were up 51% in the first half of 2006.
Bush has said around 30,000 Iraqi civilians have died since the U.S. invasion in March 2003. Think tank numbers have it around 40-45,000.
The U.S. military said there was a 52% drop in deaths in Baghdad when they first started their new security operation in Baghdad this summer, but it was later revealed they were cooking their numbers by not counting people killed in bombings and mortar attacks. July, when the new U.S. military operations started in the capitol was a record high, then they took a small dip in August, then went up to a new record high in September.
The latest U.N. report found 3,590 deaths in Baghdad in July, until then a record high, followed by a small dip in August to 3,009. The Iraqi Health Ministry is now reporting that September was a record high for deaths in the capitol, surpassing the July number.
Do I need to footnote this?
You are talking about war deaths, John Hopkins study is talking about all deaths. They are saying about 1/2 that number is directly war related. Still 10x Bush's number. They are using standard medical methodology.
They said something like 55% of the deaths in their study were caused by violence. If you take the U.N.'s number of around 14,000 dying in the first six months of 2006 from violence and doubled that for a yearly total of 28,000 from violence, then doubled that again for deaths not from violence you get 56,000. 2006 is THE most violent year in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. Even if you take the 56,000 number for 2006 and multiply it by 3 years you still end up with only 168,000 deaths. The 14,388 from the U.N. is most likely an undercount, but you'd still have to jack up those numbers A LOT to get 650,000.
More Iraqis are dying on a daily basis from violence in Iraq now, then during Saddam's time before the U.S. invasion I would guess. Saddam ran a totalitarian state, but I don't think he was carrying out mass executions each day that would match the numbers that have been happening since Feb. 2006 when violence turned from mostly insurgent activity to sectarian killings AND an insurgency as it is now.
The Iraqi people went from one bad situation with Saddam, to another with the aftermath of the U.S. invasion. One could actually argue that things are worse for many now then before the U.S. invasion, but in a different way. Not that they would want to return to Saddam's time (unless they were some Sunnis), but that now sections of the country are verging on anarchy.
I mean the daily accounts of violence you hear coming out of Iraq right now are breathtaking. The Mahdi Army set up a check point in the middle of Baghdad during the summer and killed every Sunni they stopped. 56 people in a short period of time in the middle of just one day. A police unit run by a Shiite militia, walked into a frozen food plant and grabbed 24 Sunnis, and shot 2 others. 7 were later found dead and the rest are MIA.
"The cycle of violence in July began with the bombing of a small Shi'ite mosque in the Jihad neighborhood of southwest Baghdad on July 8. The following morning, in what was widely interpreted as a reprisal attack, Shi'ite militiamen rampaged through the Sunni neighborhood of Jihad in Baghdad, indiscriminately executing those identified as Sunnis. According to witness accounts, the gunmen set up checkpoints along main commercial streets and demanded identification cards, forced Sunnis out of their homes, or off sidewalks,and executed them in brought daylight. The death toll from the shootings varied; while the American military reported fewer than a dozen killed, some news agencies put the figure at over 50. Only hours after the rampage, two car bombs exploded near a Shi'ite mosque in northern Baghdad, killing at least 17, and wounding 38 according to the Associated Press."
"On July 12, gunmen kidnapped a group of people at a parking lot of a bus station, and killed 22 of them in execution-style slayings. All of the victims were Shi'ites. And five days later, masked gunmen carrying rocket launchers and grenades killed at least 42 people in a predominately Shi'ite market in Mahmoudiya. While the details of the attacks were not clear, several witnesses said that the violence began when Sunni gunmen opened fire on a funeral for a member of the Mahdi army, killing nine mourners. The following day, at least 45 Iraqis were killed and 88 injured in a suicide bombing near a Shi'ite shrine in the southern city of Kufa."
All of this happened during a security crackdown by U.S. and Iraqi security forces remember.
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the estimate out of hand. There are a couple of things going on here, though, that have to be explained. First, my understaning is that the study didn't actually claim that 654,000 people have been "killed in the war" (despite what news outlets may be reporting). Instead, the study reported that 654,000 more people have died in Iraq since the invasion than would have died in a comparable period before. There's a substantial difference b/w those two claims, specifically, the former estimate would have applied strictly to deaths that were directly and verifiably caused by the war, while the latter is based on an estimate of the TOTAL number of deaths, regardless of cause.
Secondly, when you say "From keeping track of casualties in Iraq, there is just no way that 650,000 people have died so far..." I'd have to respond that this was precisely the premise under which the study was conducted (i.e. that it's impossible to keep accurate track of casualties in Iraq with the methods currently employed). The monthly death-toll reports we've been getting for the last few years have been based on direct figures culled from morgues, media counts, etc. without any sort of control for the vast number of deaths that have occurred outside of these sources. You could liken this method to a report on the total number of bands in the United States that came up with figures based solely on the number of bands tallied on myspace. Yeah, it's a great place to start, but hardly exhaustive, and hardly representative of the true number of bands that are out there. A much more accurate count could be achieved through surveys similar to those used by the national census (and the Johns Hopkins study), which use data compiled from large random samples (the national census surveys about 65,000 households) to make estimates about the entire population. Such figures are not only more accurate, but also more meaningful (e.g. they allow you to make better predictions about the future, calculate the test's percentage of error, etc.).
The Johns Hopkins researchers surveyed around 1800 households, which, compared to the total population of Iraq, is a pretty decent sample size. Assuming that the sample was indeed random, and that confounding variables were properly controlled for, I'd expect a study like this to yield fairly accurate results. Of course, making sure that your results are accurately interpreted by the general public is another matter entirely.
Isn't that saying that the leading cause of death was due to violence, mostly gunfire though?
And here's a critique by Robert Beldnon of the Harvard Program on Public Opinion and Health and Social Policy from the New York Times.
They said something like 55% of the deaths in their study were caused by violence. If you take the U.N.'s number of around 14,000 dying in the first six months of 2006 from violence and doubled that for a yearly total of 28,000 from violence, then doubled that again for deaths not from violence you get 56,000. 2006 is THE most violent year in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. Even if you take the 56,000 number for 2006 and multiply it by 3 years you still end up with only 168,000 deaths. The 14,388 from the U.N. is most likely an undercount, but you'd still have to jack up those numbers A LOT to get 650,000.
This math doesn't work, because the UN's figure of 14,000 is the number of deaths verified by hospitals, morgues, etc. For the sake of this argument, we need a count of the true number of deaths, so the total needs to be multiplied by some sort of extrapolating coefficient. That a large proportion of those surveyed produced death certificates (implying that that the morgue/hospital totals were accurate) is only minorly consequential, because the proportion was only calculated (to my knowledge) for those who 'died in the war', which is a fuzzy distinction at best, but unquestionably representative of only a subset of 'violent deaths'.
The vast majority of deaths was due to violence, no question, but it's not clear what 'most common' means exactly. Gunfire could account for less than 30% of violent deaths and still constitute the most common form. It'd be interesting to see exactly what the break down was (e.g. gunfire, stabbings, beatings, explosions, car wrecks(?)...I have no idea how inclusive a term this is).
Hmmmm, I'm not sure I understand exactly how is argument works. I mean, if you have a sufficiently large sample, you should be able to generalize your findings about any variable within that sample to the rest of the population. It should work both for rare events and common events alike. I was also under the impression that, aspopulation predictions go, 600,000 is not actually that big. I'll have to think this one over more carefully tomorrow.
dammit.
my alma mata. sorry, that's a peeve.
Agreed. I think the methodology should be debated...
But for what?
To prove that there are manipulative academics with political axes to grind? I'd rather debate whether or not the sky is blue.
Or...
To prove that only 30,000 Iraqis have died [sic] because we invaded their country based on an untested political science theory wrapped in a pack of lies and executed with the greatest level of incompetence (on the part of civilian leadership) in US history?
Great. If that's the case, we should all feel better. I know I do.
Yeah, cuz 30,000 dead men, women and children is hardly any dead people at all...right....?