Iraq War Logs - 400,000 document leak

That was a little different. As I understand it, we'd basically made an agreement under the table with various rebels to knock over Saddam's regime when Gulf War I ended, but then abandoned them at the last second, standing by unmoved while Saddam slaughtered them mercilessly in the months after the war. This was made even worse when it emerged that American ambassadors prior to the war had basically given Saddam carte blanche to invade Kuwait, then immediately double-crossed him when he actually did it. All of this contributed quite a bit to most potential allies in the Gulf War II occupation being really angry with us now.

Basically, Bush Sr. was… Not a very nice man either.

Okay, I knew about the aftermath of the failed coup - but the stuff leading up to the invasion? That's a big pill to swallow.

EDIT: Wow, I can dig up anything on the net. Like this.

Pretty deep reading.

edited 27th Oct '10 1:24:22 AM by pvtnum11

Then of course there's the sordid tale of the Ba'ath party and Saddam's installation at our hands. Most of the ill will Iraqis feel toward us and our allies at the moment is the reward for decades of dedicated hard work. Perhaps officially admitting culpability and apologizing for these crimes would diffuse some of the hatred even now.

edited 27th Oct '10 2:07:50 AM by EricDVH

Unfortunately, we've got a nontrivial number of folks in this country who believe any sort of humility or respectful reflection is "weakness" that "emboldens our enemies," or some other stupid macho posturing stuff like that.

—R.J.

Well, I personnally think that it's high time we start getting normalized relations with Cuba, just as an example.

Well we did win the outlasting game with Fidel, he's no longer in power. Raul runs Cuba more akin to the present day Peoples Republic of China than the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

This post was thumped by the Merciless Hammer of Doom

@pvtnum 11: While I would've agreed with that sentiment just a little while ago, the present situation with Raul seems to me like a good occasion to try and lever them into democratic reforms. I don't think fully normalizing relations or dropping trade embargoes would be a good idea (we need some leverage,) but certainly opening up travel and telecom could only be good for the development of democracy. Cuba is certainly much better than, say… Columbia or Haiti.

Aside from that, the insistent focus on privatizing Cuba over democratizing its politics needs to go, since at best that line of thought ends up with the country being stripmined on its way to democracy (like the USSR,) and at worst it ends up as undemocratic as ever but enthralled by transnational big business (like China.)

Well, the process of normalizing should be a gradual one. A sudden lifting of all sanctions would, as you said, remove any leverage we might be able to use. But maintaining the status quo as-is just doesn't seem fair. An improvement in relations is what I'd like to see.

Leverage for what? I'm not sure what you mean by outlasting Cuba. It's not like Cuba or USA was just going to up and disappear. At some point Fidel is going to die of something, and looks like illnesses related to old age. USA is basically the only country acting like a dick toward it and I'm not sure what that is supposed to accomplish except economic stagnation.

As for Iraq, it is basically a game of evil vs evil. The conflict in Iraq, due to increased crime, murder, rape and sectarian violence has caused an increase in death rate (from pre-war death rate) to have basically an extra 1 million deaths. That is the study the Lancet journal made and most importantly, all those deaths in the study have death certificates. Like any other war, 99% of the deaths are due to destabilisation of society from conflict, not from actual bullets flying.

In addition, the UN reports over 2 million internal Iraqi refugees and 2 million external refugees. Several months before the troop surge, sectarian violence had dropped and most studies pointed to the fact that basically so many people were already dead or displaced, there was no one left to kill.

And the current drop in violence was mostly due to those Awakening councils, which the Americans have now abandonned (likely due to lack of resources) and the Iraqi government has basically rebuffed. So violence is likely to erupt again very soon but since Obama is going to finish off the pullout in 2011, I guess it will no longer be an America public issue.

^ The Lancet Journal report was discredited by everybody from the CIA to the UN even Iraq itself.

It was criminally inaccurate because it attributed every death to the war regardless if it was or not. They went trolling for death certificates, tallied them up and presented that in such a way that almost blatantly accused the Bush administration of genocide. Then shit hit the fan for Lancet when Fox News Fact Check'd the report against everyone and the rest of the media couldn't hide it any longer.

Yeah woo Fox News told us it was debunked.

No they laid out very specifically what they did and this was the exact method used in the Kosovo war. All they said was that the war caused an increase in the mortality rate. They showed the pre-war mortality rate and they showed the post-invasion mortality rate. Both of which were accurately calculated. These are deaths due to anything with the presumption that without war, society would not have degraded if the invasion did not occur.

You can argue that "the mortality rate would have increased to that level without the war" if you want though.

@breadloaf: Leverage for Cuba's government relinquishing control to meaningfully democratic elections. It's good that Cuba is peaceful, economically healthy, and at least somewhat industrialized (another similar country in this regard is Vietnam, I think,) but if they were to adopt a modern constitution, they could basically become equivalent to somewhere like Brazil or Spain in one shot. I think that's worth hassling Cuba over at least a bit, even if our current stance IS way over the top.

@Major Tom: He's not saying Americans have run roughshod gunning down millions of Iraqis, just that the Mad Max conditions we've (accidentally or not) imposed on the country have resulted in that much more death and suffering.

Compared to the hundreds of thousands (over 250,000 at last time I saw the UN's numbers) of Iraqi Shia and Kurds who were systematically exterminated by Saddam and his Baath Party? That's a Mad Max scenario?

If death certificate counts alone is an indicator of war or whatever the point Lancet tried (and failed) to make, then the US, Russia, China and India are in perpetual civil war given how many of those are issued in each country.

So, given the amount of casualties caused by our invasion, who caused the greater amount of civilian deaths per unit time, Saddam or us?

It comes out to about 15,600 per year for him vs about 9400 a year for us, so it looks like we come off better, but then we have to ask whether the extermination of Kurds and Shia was still ongoing at a rate exceeded by the casualties we caused. And of course, we also have to factor in the effects of destroyed infrastructure.

Going by the Lancet study rather than the recent document leak, we were responsible for a lot more deaths than Saddam.

edited 28th Oct '10 8:20:56 PM by Desertopa

Okay, the Lancet journal works like this and I'm not sure how much you know about how statistics are collected.

The study was conducted in 40 clusters, for a total population of 12000 people surveyed. As a rough indication of how over the top many people that is, you survey around 2000-3000 in America for national polling and it is accurate plus or minus a few percent, 19 times out of 20. America's population is also an order of magnitude larger than Iraq.

The death rate during Saddam's reign, for years previous to the outbreak of war, is 5.5/1000. This is a reasonable number because it is on the high-end of Middle Eastern countries. It might sound low but that is because the population of Iraq is very young.

The death rate calculated by the Lancet journey via the survey was 13.3 on average. So you have a high excess death rate (13.3 - 5.5). This number was then used to determine the total number of excess deaths.

You get your 1.36 million excess deaths due to war up to 2010 with that figure. The study itself indicated 654,965 excess deaths by 2006.

The methodology is sound, the study is sound. You just don't like the results. I don't know what you can "debunk" about this study.

edited 28th Oct '10 11:03:22 PM by breadloaf

If the methodology was sound why did everyone of credibility from the CIA to Iraq to even the UN itself dispute it?

Sources for both please, Tom and Breadloaf please.

Altered because of what Desert wrote.

edited 29th Oct '10 8:19:15 AM by JosefBugman

The credibility of the CIA, Iraq, and the UN are all variable depending on the issue in question. Rather than speculating on what motives they might have had to dispute it, I'd rather see the content of the arguments they put forward.

Okay well here are the usual list of criticism and counter-criticism for the lancet study.

Methodology did not include a large enough sample size

"Mr. Moore did not question our methodology, but rather the number of clusters we used to develop a representative sample. Our study used 47 randomly selected clusters of 40 households each. In his critique, Mr. Moore did not note that our survey sample included 12,801 people living in 47 clusters, which is the equivalent to a survey of 3,700 randomly selected individuals. As a comparison, a 3,700-person survey is nearly 3 times larger than the average U.S. political survey that reports a margin of error of +/-3%."

Low pre-war mortality rate used

"Kaplan claims that the rate was really 10, according to U.N. figures. He wrote, '[I]f Iraq's pre-invasion rate really was 5.5 per 1,000, it was lower than almost every country in the Middle East, and many countries in Europe.' This is just wrong! If Kaplan had checked the U.N. death-rate figures, most Middle Eastern nations really do have lower death rates than most European countries, and in fact have lower death rates than 5.5. Jordan's death rate is 4.2, Iran's 5.3, and Syria's 3.5. The reason for the lower rate is simple: Most Middle Eastern nations have much younger populations compared to most Western nations."

Death certificate fraud

"In July [2006], for example, the Ministry of Health reported exactly zero violent deaths in Anbar Province, in spite of the contradictory evidence we saw on our televisions. Is that a surveillance network on which our understanding of what is going on in Iraq can depend?"

"Although there are benefits to registering with the government for a death certificate, there are also disadvantages. Many families who have had someone killed believe that the government or the Americans were involved, and will have wanted to avoid drawing further attention to themselves by filling out state forms and giving their address."

Main street bias

This would be bias in that you choose easier to access neighbourhoods which skew your results.

"But Prof Burnham said the researchers penetrated much further into residential areas than was clear from the Lancet paper. The notion 'that we avoided back alleys was totally untrue'. He added that 28% of households were in rural areas - which matches the population spread."

Comparison to other studies done

I looked for the UNDP study but it was only for 2004 so I don't think you can compare that to anything done below. I also am not sure what the CIA and UN criticism you cite is, so you'll have to cite it for me and then I will analyse.

Studies for all types of deaths:

Iraq Family Health Survey: 151,000 deaths (March 2003 to June 2006)

Lancet survey: 601,027 violent deaths out of 654,965 excess deaths (March 2003 to June 2006)

Opinion Research Business (aka. ORB) survey: 1,033,000 deaths as a result of the conflict (March 2003 to Aug 2007)

Deaths only due to combat:

Associated Press: 110,600 deaths (March 2003 to April 2009)

Iraq Body Count project: 98,170 — 107,152 civilian deaths as a result of the conflict. 150,726 civilian and combatant deaths (March 2003 to Oct 2010)

Wiki Leaks. Classified Iraq war logs: 109,032 deaths (Jan 2004 to Dec 2009)

edited 29th Oct '10 9:07:10 AM by breadloaf

Major Tom, can a Republican administration do no wrong? Their actions strongly but indirectly correlate with a greater mortality rate in that country (though maybe the birth rate also strongly diminished?). It's done. No one is going to be punished abou this, none of the involved's reputation can get any dirtier, so what's the big deal?

It's not just the Repubs, Raw, I think it's everybody that screws up. If you haven't yet, read this, just ignore the stupid banner on the top.

Their actions strongly but indirectly correlate with a greater mortality rate in that country (though maybe the birth rate also strongly diminished?)

Lowering the birth rate wouldn't increase the death rate at all, it would simply lower the replacement rate.

^ No, it would, ever so slightly: teh death rate is Deaths/Living_Beings. If less people are born one year AND more people die AND this repeats next year, there will be less living_people to divide the Deaths.

That said, I know the Democrats can and do screw up. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence, I was just asking MT to stop going out of his way to justify everythig the reps ever did no matter how blatantly stupid and hating on anything the democrats ever did no matter what period.

Hmmm, reversed stupidity would be... Drawing a blank here. Unstupid?

Honestly, can't think of a time in our nations past that didn't have some sort of stupid political problem or another. I was going to say the fifties, but no, we had the Red Scare and fear-mongering, and who can forget fallout shelters?