[lbo-talk] Re: Iraq excess death study up

[boddi satva]

Michael Pugliese makes a very important point here about the
pre-invasion death rate number. Those statistics should be looked upon
as equally suspect. He also makes a reasonable point about combatants.
75 or 80 thousand combatants killed seems reasonable and seems to
correspond with the high number of captured, especially given the U.S.
military's use of brutal, "long-standoff" tactics such as artillery,
helicopter and drone-fired rockets and bomb runs to hit relatively
small numbers of hostiles. With so many guns available, it would make
sense that local men and boys are caught up in the fervor, want to
defend their homes, or want to appear supportive when insurgents are
fighting in their area and they get killed along with the hard-core
combatants. The anectodal evidence seems to indicate a lot of casual
participation in hostilities of all kinds.

But even if the pre-war mortality rate was something like 7 deaths per
thousand, it's still a doubling. And what we can say CONCLUSIVELY is
that Iraq is another Darfur - because the same methods used to
estimate deaths in Darfur have been used in this study.

Finally, journalists and would-be journalists should take note: people
who want to poke holes in this study (or confirm it) have a clear
avenue of inquiry - death certificates. If almost 90% of the
respondents citing deaths produced death certificates. Their claim
that their sample is representative should mean that at least a
half-million death certificates should have been issued during the
period in question. Producers of death certificates are probably many,
but not so many as to be unsampleable.

The point, however, that is undeniable is that we should think of Iraq
like Darfur. The comparable evidence indicates that they are
commensurate human tragedies.

Boddi

On 10/13/06, Carl Remick <carlremick at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >From: "Michael Pugliese" <michael.098762001 at gmail.com>
> >
> >   If Dennis and you didn't engage in such invective I might be able
> >to read , for example, the Dquared CIF entry and the critics and come
> >to some conclusion w/o all this typical, extremely vicious invective.
>
> Really now.  This is the age of multitasking.  Surely you should be able to
> read DD's CIF entry *and* endure martyrdom simultaneously.
>
> Carl
>
>
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