Is the U.S. Responsible for a Million Iraqi Deaths?
Patrick McElwee and Robert Naiman, Just Foreign Policy, via ZNetIn October 2006 researchers from Johns Hopkins University published a peer-reviewed article in The Lancet, one of Europe's most important and respected medical journals, estimating that 650,000 Iraqis had been killed due to the U.S.-led invasion of their country, 601,000 violently. The report was quickly marginalized in public debate in the United States. The researchers' methods were not to blame. They used the method accepted around the world to measure demographics such as birth and death rates in the wake of natural and man-made disasters: a cluster survey. No one found substantive flaws in the way they conducted their research. Instead, their findings were dismissed because they asked the politically charged question of how many Iraqis have died, and the answer they found was unacceptably high. Since the Lancet estimate was based on a survey completed in July 2006 and no new demographic studies have been conducted since, Just Foreign Policy has created an update of the Lancet estimate to account for the violent deaths that have occurred since, in an effort to put the question of the overall death toll back on the table...
....Petraeus summarized by saying: "I have recommended a drawdown of the surge forces from Iraq," starting end of this month. The interesting part is that I am not a politician, not a military man, not a professional political analyst but I was still able to interpret all this happening back in January. Read this post. Have you noticed the political trick Bush played on the Americans yet? He sent more than 20,000 more troops to Iraq earlier this year and is going to withdraw them by next July. Then we will be left with the original number of American troops in Iraq after all. So what did he do? Where is the withdrawal that most Americans are asking for? This was the most awaited report from and on Iraq. What did it add to what we already know or heard about? And what happens after July 2008? "It would be premature to make recommendations on the pace of such reductions at this time," Petraeus said. Good for you. "Mission accomplished." Or should I say: trick accomplished?...
...Taking control of Iraq’s capital city was at the center of Bush’s surge strategy in January. At least half the U.S. troop surge is taking place here and surrounding suburbs, where the U.S. focused on establishing so-called joint security outposts in Iraqi neighborhoods to be closer to areas where sectarian violence was claiming dozens of lives each day. The military threw up concrete walls across the capital to foil car bombs and stop Shiite militia members or Sunni insurgents from entering targeted neighborhoods. One military official said U.S. troops were erecting walls as "fast as they could build them." Most "hardened" neighborhoods, encircled with towering gray walls and with single entrances and exits, are Sunni enclaves, military officials said. The result is a city now sharply divided into sectarian boroughs where the battle lines have only hardened. Most "hardened" neighborhoods, encircled with towering gray walls and with single entrances and exits, are Sunni enclaves, military officials said. The result is a city now sharply divided into sectarian boroughs where the battle lines have only hardened. Some Baghdad residents say they feel somewhat safer in their neighborhoods, but they fear traveling anywhere else in the capital. Falah Amin, 52, a Sunni from Adhamiyah, called her neighborhood in northeast Baghdad a prison. "We’ve been separated from the rest of our city as if we have the plague," Amin said. The neighborhood, Amin said, is virtually empty. Those left don’t have the money or connections to leave, she said....
of US optimism
By the time General Petraeus had finished speaking yesterday the slaughter in Iraq for the previous 24 hours could be tallied. It was not an exceptionally violent day by the standards of Iraq: seven US soldiers lay dead and 11 injured in the capital; other instances of sectarian violence included a suicide bomb which had killed 10 and wounded scores near Mosul while 10 bodies were found in Baghdad. Three policemen were killed in clashes in Mosul, and a car bomb outside a hospital in the capital had exploded, killing two and wounding six. In Baghdad, on the surface the overt violence appears to have diminished. There are fewer loud explosions. But, the city is now being partitioned by sectarian hatred and fear; by concrete walls and barbed wire. Claims that the US military strategy is paving the way for a stable society bear little resemblance to the reality on the ground. The US is accused of manipulating figures relating to violence to fit their case...
posted by Kangaroo Brisbane Australia at 3:29 PM
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