Published on June 29th, 2010 | by Ali Gharib
31Goldberg vs. Greenwald
Corporal Jeffery Goldberg is pissed.
See, on his Salon blog, Glenn Greenwald wrote a scathing critique of Goldberg through the lens of the Dave Weigel-Washington Post affair. The post, on how Goldberg’s rush to judge Weigel is emblematic of flaws throughout his writing, got a lot of coverage (as catalogued by Mondoweiss).
So Goldberg took to his Atlantic blog defending his reporting by citing his most notorious achievement: the Iraq War.
While Greenwald makes many excellent points about peculiar brand of journalism practiced by Goldberg (the Mideast reporter who, despite being an IDF veteran, decries everyone else as “partisans”), he does return to the Iraq War. Curiously, Goldberg, recounting a recent e-mail exchange with an Iraqi pol, runs through justifications for the 2003 invasion — though he insistently refers to it as his “early support for the Iraq war” [my emphasis]. He extends an invite from his e-mail buddy, Iraqi Kurdistan PM Barham Salih, to visit and talk to everyone in Iraq who supported the U.S. invasion:
If [Greenwald] were to meet with representatives of the Kurds — who make up 20 percent of the population of Iraq and who were the most oppressed group in Iraq during the period of Saddam’s rule (experiencing not only a genocide but widespread chemical gassing) — I think it might be possible for him to understand why some people — even some Iraqis — supported the overthrow of Saddam. [...] I could also arrange a visit to Najaf or the equivalent, where Greenwald could meet with representatives of the Shi’a, who also took it on the chin from Saddam.
Yes, Corporal Goldberg, Glenn Greenwald could very well travel to Iraq with you and meet all types of people there who supported the war. But there are at least 600,000 Iraqis who, I imagine, are not too thrilled about the way it all turned out and with whom Greenwald will never get a meeting.
One could also dredge up some Iranians — from within and without Iran and, yes, of all political stripes, classes, ethnic groups, and religious affiliations — who might support a U.S. invasion of the Islamic Republic. Does that mean that Goldberg is also ready to lend “early support” to that war?
About the Author
Ali Gharib is a New York-based journalist on U.S. foreign policy with a focus on the Middle East and Central Asia. His work has appeared at Inter Press Service, where he was the Deputy Washington Bureau Chief; the Buffalo Beast; Huffington Post; Mondoweiss; Right Web; and Alternet. He holds a Master's degree in Philosophy and Public Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science. A proud Iranian-American and fluent Farsi speaker, Ali was born in California and raised in D.C.
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I felt for the Kurds and the Shia when Bush I abandoned them in 1990, but that’s not the issue here. Goldberg is telling us that 4,000-plus American deaths, several thousand maimings, and over $1 trillion wasted were acceptable costs for the removal of Saddam. That’s crazy. Saddam was a monster, true. But he was no threat to the American people, or at least not a threat of such magnitude as to require our going to war. We should fight wars for our interests, not those of foreigners, among whom I include Mr. Goldberg, despite his American birth.
I don’t agree with Jon Harrison. It was the US in the first place who brought Saddam to power in Iraq, so it is their responsibility to oust him from power.
Abe, that always was the most cogent argument for the war in my opinion. Yet, they never, EVER lit upon that one!
It was (to me) such an obviously sophistic case for war they were making; what shocks me still was the way the media marched lock-step behind the war mongers. Earnest voices were marginalized–the Weapons inspectors, Blix and Baradei, Scott Ritter.
There were enough questions that an earnest person would have addressed them. The way the admin. dodged them showed their deceit. It was also uncanny the way Bush himself never lied; though he mislead mightily.
I don’t know if anyone else heard it, but I heard the weapons inspectors’ rebuttal to Powell’s testimony, which eviscerated his every claim.
Goldberg is proud of the Iraq War! But what is its legacy besides a few $Trillion of debt?
Goldberg can cry his little crocodile tears about the plight of the Kurds, which was genuinely bad, while ignoring the plight of the Palestinians, which is worse. Applying Goldberg’s logic, the US should have a policy of regime change in Israel.
In the end, Goldberg’s championing the Kurds mattered not one iota, because saving the Kurds was never one of the administration’s major, stated reasons for invading. WMDs were one pretense. Freedom, democracy and human rights were another. But the Kurds were used only for PR purposes, to garner popular support using the evocative, “Saddam gassed his own people.” And Goldberg was instrumental in demonizing Saddam for whatever unknown purpose the Bushies had in mind when they invaded.
To say that the U.S. “brought Saddam to power” . . . well, it’s a little more complicated than that. But in any case, I don’t know of any law of God or man that says we have to pay for our mistakes to the extent we have paid in Iraq. Or does karma explain the whole business?
By the way, is Mr. Gharib stating in this piece that 600,000 Iraqi civilians have died since the 2003 invasion? The 600,000 figure is totally unsupported by facts. Documented Iraqi civilian deaths amount to about 100,000. Granted, many civilian deaths in Iraq go unreported. One perhaps would be justified in doubling the figure to 200,000. A horrible, sickening total to be sure. But throwing around figures like 600,000 is straying very far from the known facts.
Jon Harrison,
I believe the 600,000 figure refers to a peer reviewed estimation published by The Lancet. It’s been disputed but it’s also not the highest estimation around.
From my reading of the figures the Iraq Body Count estimate of ~100,000 seems to leave out those who die from hunger or lack of infrastructure that the invasion and occupation of Iraq have caused, including only those casualties that occur directly as a result of bombings or gunfire. In that light, 600,000 casualties doesn’t seem unreasonable at all.
For that matter I am sure that Mr Goldberg and Mr. Greenwald could also be introduced to at least a few million Iraqis who support Hezbollah over Israel. Just because a few million Iraqis (I’d even say a majority of the Iraqis) feel that way, would Mr Goldberg champion that US policy be changed or influenced by those Iraqis?
@ Jon H. By “totally unsupported by facts,” you mean “based on scientific surveys published in peer-reviewed academic journals.”. Iraq’s own surveys found at least double the Iraq Body Count figures, and Iraqi health officials couldn’t get to the worst areas because of bad security. The more extensive work by public health scientists found hundreds of thousands had died. And in their more recent survey of Iraqi households, Opinion Research Business found that “the range is a minimum of 733,158 to a maximum of 1,446,063.”
US and British warmongers, with their allies in the corporate press, have sought to discredit and diminish the horrifying reality, with great effect. (In secrecy, the officials admit that the research methods producing these huge numbers are robust.) But it is not that hard to understand the “known facts.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/19/iraq
The ORB survey is a joke. Giving a range of 700,000 plus to 1.4 million plus reveals, ipso facto, poor methodology.
I hate to sit here debating how many thousands of people may have died in Iraq. Whatever the number, every one of them represents a flesh-and-blood human being, a human life cut short. I have written tens of thousands of words in opposition to U.S. policy in Iraq. The human cost of the war has always been in the forefront of my criticism.
That said, I will try to answer those who responded to me above. First we must establish what we mean by civilian deaths caused by the war. If a hospital closes due to armed conflict, and a person dies of some illness in that town, do we count that as a civilian death caused by the war? If we say yes, then I have to admit I have no idea how many “civilian casualties” the Iraq war has caused. If we mean civilians killed by violence either deliberately or as “collateral damage,” then the best evidence available would give a total of 100,000 to 200,000 killed. The latter figure would take into account the known fact that many civilian deaths in Iraq are never reported and therefore not counted. Admittedly, the number of unreported deaths can only be estimated; but there is no evidence to suggest that they exceed the number of known deaths by violence.
The very high numbers — 600,000, 700,000, a million and more — are without any factual basis (even though they may have been “peer reviewed”), assuming we are talking about deaths by violence. If instead the numbers are meant to reflect people dead from all causes who would otherwise be alive had the war not been fought — well, you can throw around any figure you want, because there’s no sound basis for determining the actual number. Numbers published will reflect the political predilections of those who put them out.
@ Jon. How many died in Rwanda? Or in the Haitian earthquake? No one actually counts them — yet somehow the figures for these death tolls are bandied about without attracting much opposition. Only when tallying deaths of US direct action do surveys and epidemiological research come under scrutiny.
You should quickly fire off a statistical rebuttal of the ORB methodology to an academic journal — as soon as you get it published, you’ll have a leg to stand on.
Your main argument seems to be: the numbers are very high, therefore they can’t be right. Never mind that the people actually doing the research, of course with large margins of error, come up with numbers in the hundreds of thousands. “Hundreds of thousands” is what Greenwald wrote; Gharib wrote 600,000. These numbers were attacked by the warmongers; privately we now know that “the chief scientific adviser to the Ministry of Defence described the methods used by the second survey as “close to best practice” and added that the “study design is robust”. So what does Jon know that the British government scientists do not?
As for responsible: The US, as the occupying power, is of course responsible for the deaths, devastation, refugees etc. unleashed by bombing, invading, occupying. Basic international law.
BTW: what are the “political predilections” of Johns Hopkins public health researchers and ORB — that’s quite a conspiracy you’re uncovering…
You fail to address the distinction I made between those killed by violence and those whose deaths are supposedly somehow tied to the war — vide my example of a person who dies of illness in a community where the hospital has been closed or destroyed by the war. If such deaths are to be included in the total, then I admit the numbers could swell considerably. My own view is that deaths by violence is the only statistic we can get some kind of a handle on. The best evidence is that deaths by violence in Iraq from 2003 to the present total 100-200,000.
I don’t feel any need to rebut the ORB methodology. I’m commenting on a blog, not compiling a dissertation. My opinion is based on some knowledge of how such information is gathered; I assert no more than that. You’re entitled to believe I’m full of crap. That’s a matter of indifference to me.
I did not say or, I think, imply that “the numbers are very high, therefore they can’t be right.” There’s no sound evidentiary basis for 600,000 civilian deaths, IF we are referring only to those killed by violence.
The idea that public health researchers from a prestigious organization are, ipso facto, without political or other bias is naive in the extreme. Nor does the historical record reveal that qualified professionals are always competent. We see evidence of this every day, in the news and in our own lives. Mind you, I’m not saying that these particular people from Johns Hopkins were biased or incompetent. One would have to look much deeper to reach a conclusion. My point was a general one and did not refer to any particular study or group.
The best evidence we have is that Iraqi civilian deaths directly caused by violence number somewhere in the region of 100-200,000. There is no good evidence for a figure approaching 600,000. Please note again that I refer to deaths directly attributable to violence.
The examples you cite (Rwanda, Haiti) have no relevance to the circumstances of Iraq. Your sarcasm and ideological huffing and puffing add nothing to your argument either.
You are entitled to your opinion, but not to your own facts. “The best evidence” is surely … evidence, by which we mean the systematic collection of facts by researchers. And different researchers, at different times, with different agencies, concluded that, indeed, “hundreds of thousands” died as a result of the US occupation. As the Johns Hopkins researchers noted, when they did surveys to find out how many died in Rwanda, no one objected. Only when they counted victims of US aggression were their conclusions challenged. And sorry, Jon, just coz you say the numbers must be wrong hardly is an argument. Nor does it imply blind faith in experts to take “evidence” seriously, especially when privately the warmongers admit they’re right. And even if Jon says they’re not.
“Evidence” would look like this: here is a survey using established methods that reached different conclusions; here is a study using real science that reached different conclusions. Evidence is NOT “I don’t believe these numbers.”
i’m sure 600k dead is a reasonable guess, but put that completely aside, how about the 4M (my best memory of the documented number, it’s a ballpark, not trying to be exact) who fled iraq to jordan, syria etc. I have not heard any recent follow-up on how many of those have been able to return, but surely that’s not even close to the numbers who lost their homes and family members on both sides of the sunni-shia ethnic cleansing.
the kurds are the big winners by far. citing the happiness of the kurds for a claim the US did good is way beyond stupid. Making this argument proves how morally bankrupt Goldberg is. This is his way of taking responsibility for cheerleading for slaughter. The man is a monster, true sociopath.
Once again you overlooked the distinction between deaths by violence and the more amorphous “died as a result of the US occupation.” I’m very comfortable with my views, and with your rejection of them as well. The bottom line is that there is no evidence to support the figure of 600,000 or more violent deaths in the period 2003-2010. That is the only fact I am asserting. Oh, and one other: that ideological pedilections will color many people’s beliefs. You’ve demonstrated that superbly.
Many have looked at The Lancent’s published studies on the number of Iraqi dead and said the methodology is solid and the best we have. There were likely more than 600,000 Iraqis killed as a direct and indirect result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
That was far more Iraqis that were ever killed by the Saddam regime. Multiples more.
And that says nothing of the millions that are now refugees in other countries and those now left to live in much more disease, poverty and squander because of the war.
1.0 million Iraqis killed is the equivalent of 10 million Americans had died.
Jon, we’re closer, although (unlike you) I haven’t made assumptions about how your brain works, simply because we disagree.
To wit: Greenwald mentioned, in passing, that “hundreds of thousands” had died as a result of the US invasion, and, as you originally wrote, “Gharib [stated] In This Piece That 600,000 Iraqi Civilians Have Died Since The 2003 Invasion?”
Well you have now added a caveat: deaths by direct violence, which must of course be lower, as the set of those directly killed is smaller than the set of those directly and indirectly killed.
But that’s not what Greenwald/Gharib were talking about. Like most rational people, they calculate the damage of a war not simply by how many got a bullet to the head, but how many died because of the war. If you starve, or die of a preventable disease, or die of thirst, or contaminated water, after your country is bombed/invaded/occupied, it is from the war. That’s why it is an epidemiological question: how does the death rate after the invasion compare to that before? And when we ask that, we get figures in the hundreds of thousands.
We can look on Wiki and ask — how many Russians died in WWII? How many Vietnamese died after the US invaded? We’ll get numbers in the millions and tens of millions. Not because every Russian got a German bullet, or every Vietnamese got a bomb dropped on their village, but because the casualties of war are mostly civilian, and mostly indirect. Controversial? Not a bit.
This is completely analogous to Haiti: the number who died instantly, when their building collapsed on them or the bridge fell, is much smaller than those who died in the days and weeks later, due to starvation, lack of water, infection, etc. Did the latter die because of the earthquake? Of course.
Originally you objected to the idea that 600 K civilians had died since 2003; now you say what you meant is died from direct violence. All of the surveys, if we take the time to actually read them, get into these distinctions. But your original claim, that the 600K number is ” Totally Unsupported By Facts” is clearly wrong, as all of the studies (by the Iraq Health folks, but two different sets of western public health researchers, and by ORB) have found. It is actually the number caused by direct violence that is harder to estimate, because of the occupiers’ direct interest in hiding the evidence. GIs may dig their bullets out of women they’ve murdered, but only because that is easier than re-hydrating dead children after we have bombed the water system.
I’m not sure what is the political rationale for dismissing as ludicrous high numbers of civilian deaths as a result of aggressive war. The numbers are real, based on the best research methods available, as the warmongers privately admit. To minimize civilian deaths caused by our own government’s criminal violence seems, at best, confused.
OK, let me take one more very brief stab at this to see if I can clear up any misunderstanding.
When Gharib wrote the figure 600,000, I took him to mean deaths by violence — in combat, in bombings, terrorist acts, friendly fire, accidental shootings, etc. I made that assumption because there’s no way to accurately determine how many Iraqis have “died as a result of the US occupation.” The very fact that the ORB survey came up with a number between 700,000 and 1.4 million says as much: if one can’t pin the numbers down any better than that (for the study is saying that it might this many deaths, but then again it might be DOUBLE that number), then clearly the data you’re working with is of poor quality to say the least.
Now the question of refugees has been entered into the equation. I certainly am not denying that Iraq had been largely wrecked by the war, and the lives of millions of Iraqis severely disrupted. That’s obvious. The only point I am trying to make is that the best evidence we have shows that deaths by violence since 2003 are in the 100-200,000 range. How many more people have died “as a result of the US ocupation” can only be estimated in very rough terms, and the totals arrived at will depend in large part on how one defines those terms. And how one defines terms is at least to an extent influenced by one’s world view, prejudices, etc. Even the most competent, “objective” observers will bring these to the table. The highly controversial nature of the war only exacerbates this problem. Combine this with the wretched state of affairs on the ground, which makes obtaining good data on something as amorphous as “deaths caused by the US occupation” extremely difficult, and you wind doing little more than playing a guessing game.
Your argument seems completely disconnected with the actual facts of the situation. From WIKI:
Participants of the ORB survey were asked the following question:
“How many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003 (ie as a result of violence rather than a natural death such as old age)? Please note that I mean those who were actually living under your roof.”
From the poll margin of error of +/-2.5% ORB calculated a range of 733,158 to 1,446,063 deaths. =
On 28 January 2008, ORB published an update based on additional work carried out in rural areas of Iraq. Some 600 additional interviews were undertaken September 20 to 24, 2007. As a result of this the death estimate was revised to 1,033,000 with a given range of 946,000 to 1,120,000.”
So according to the largest ongoing poll of Iraqis, the number of civilians who died violently since the US invaded is about a million, give or take. According to Iraqis and those who actually investigated the situation.
Greenwald and Gharib undercounted; and you objected, based on nothing more than the ASSERTION, without evidence, that the number is smaller. You are entitled to your opinion, but not your own set of facts. You wrote: “The Bottom Line Is That There Is No Evidence To Support The Figure Of 600,000 Or More Violent Deaths In The Period 2003-2010. That Is The Only Fact I Am Asserting.” In plain language, you are wrong: such numbers are based on the best understanding of the situation. If we take “evidence” to mean something like — factual data collected in a systematic way. In fact, all of the factual data collected in systematic ways directly contradicts your assertion. I wonder: what evidence do you bring to the table for your number? What evidence would you look for to check if your number was wrong?
As for the question about “Deaths Caused By The US Occupation”: I cannot tell from your answer that you understand the concept of epidemiology, which asks EXACTLY those questions. How many people have died worldwide from AIDS? How many died in the Tsunami? No one counts dead bodies and arrives at a number: people do surveys, and work the data. Perforce the answers include large ranges and margins of errors. But that is quite different from making a “guess”. Or, as in your case, fixating on on number that is made up whole cloth, and ignoring the substantial evidence that reality is an order of magnitude worse.
Jon, how would you account for bombings of infrastructure that would violate Nuremburg standards? I know workers in these countries who love to slur the Arab for the general disrepair of their industry. I’ve yet to see one admit that we caused a bit of it.
I don’t know what the facts are, but I am fairly sure that the embargoes (acts of war) might have some effect on the way they’ve maintained their sewage systems.
Despite this, Iraqis had electricity working for 23hrs plus in Bagdad. I know this not based on reports but the people there. The very choice on the timing of the War was mendacious. No sensible person in Texas would take out the electricity in cities in Summer, (I’m VERY reluctant to even plant a tree with full irrigation!) Heat Kills! We destroyed the electricity and water service for the equivalent of Mexico City, Rome, London, New York through a Texas Summer. Here our low might be 80. It’s 90 at midnight and just a 100 during the day. That is Murder under Nuremburg–how do we count those Jon?
I’m suggesting Bagdad is equivalent to one of those cities, not all of them together.
I really don’t know, Summer is a time where I would never go camping around here, though I do it in the other 3 seasons. I hear up North this is actually a great time to picnic and play outside. Here only kids and those of us who work outside do that. I don’t do any voluntary outdoor activities–though Winter is awesome, maybe 2 days of snow, less than a week of days below 32. Went to Big Bend and camped on the mountains over New Years. But, Summer ain’t nothing to play with.
Jon, you can try and minimize the number all you want, but the simple truth is that the U.S. government was directly responsible for the death of 100,000s and the destroying of an entire country for absolutely no reason. It was frankly criminal. The rest of the world knows this and the U.S. will never be looked at in the same way again. We are no longer the beacon of good we once were, if we ever were. The U.S. will never recover from this.
The U.S. committed far more crimes and was responsible for far more death than Saddam ever was, putting aside the Iran-Iraq war. So the excuse that the U.S. did good by getting rid of a dictator is bullshit. Not much has changed in Iraq. The country is now a sudo dictatorship and there would be far less deaths in Iraq if Saddam was left in power.
What the U.S. did to Iraq is one of the worst travesty in modern history. And for what?
The cost both in terms of for the Iraqi people and for the U.S. was not worth the zero gain.
The worst foreign policy blunder ever and a very big criminal act.
I will agree that ranges and margins of error are, generally speaking, not the same as guesses. However, if one reports a range of 700,000 to 1.4 million (double the lower estimate) then one is operating in a fluid manner to say the least. My own view would be that the data is bad to begin with. You can disagree, that’s okay with me.
I frankly doubt that the ORB survey was conducted properly; furthermore, I don’t believe that many of the respondents necessarily answered truthfully. Can I prove that? No. Can you prove that I’m wrong? No. You want to believe high figures, in my opinion, because of your ideological slant. Your use of terms like “warmongers” is a dead giveaway.
I don’t assert categorically that the higher figures are wrong. What I’m saying is there is no really good evidence to support those figures. You and Gharib could be 100% right that at least 600,000 have died. I prefer to suspend judgement on the totals, because I don’t find the data you cite convincing. Again, it really doesn’t matter to me whether you can accept my view or not. I am ready to change my mind, when and if I see convincing evidence. That’s as far as I’ll go.
On the deaths by violence issue, I’m not denying that “nonviolent” deaths are a byproduct of the devastation wrought by war. However, it’s very hard to determine whether so-and-so would have dropped dead of a heart attack in a peaceful Iraq, or whether he died from war-related stress. There are more clear-cut cases than that, I admit, but then we return to the question of the reliability of the data.
Whether you like it or not, I wanted to discuss the question of how many deaths by violence — casualties in the strictest sense — have occurred since 2003. In a sense this entire contretemps arose because I (mis)interpreted Gharib’s figure to mean this category of fatalities. Apparently (though he hasn’t been heard from) he meant deaths in the broader sense. Which brings me full circle again: I don’t trust the data on non-combat fatalities. You can call me an ignoramus from now till doomsday; I don’t care and I’m not going to change my view. If I ever see anything that convinces me you’re right, I’ll be the first to admit as much. But the data that’s out there doesn’t convince me.
As regards the bombing of infrastructure, etc., mentioned this morning, let me repeat first of all that I am not a supporter of the Iraq war. Having said that, if we were at war I would certainly bomb and attempt to destroy the enemy’s power grid, even in summer in a hot country. If that’s illegal, I wonder why no U.S. commander or airman has been tried and convicted for it by an international tribunal. We’ve certainly bombed such targets many times. And if you the think the destruction, deliberate or not, of a sewage system by bombing is going to put somebody in the dock, you’re mistaken.
Now, if a sewage system is knocked out by bombing and cholera breaks out, and people die, would I consider those deaths as being caused by the war? I would, certainly. Again, I’m not saying that there haven’t been Iraqis killed as a byproduct, as it were, of the war. I’m saying that the numbers claimed are all over the place (Gharib: 600,000, ORB, maybe 1.4 million, others give other totals), and that indicates that no one has a good handle on the data. You lefties prefer high numbers because it fuels your righteous indignation; I prefer to wait and see if reliable data ever emerges.
@ Scott: The epidemiological studies will capture some of this, as they compare death rates before and after the invasion. Jon I’m sure is horrified, like most of us, by the US targeting such things as sewage plants, etc.
I’m beginning to hope that Jon, if he can take a breath and actually look at the evidence, will come around. The ORB work is extensive, rigorous, and not disputed. It deals explicitly with VIOLENT DEATHS, based on interviews with hundreds of Iraqis.
Interesting: the first survey produced a wide range for the number killed violently: 733K-1,446K. The follow-up survey, which added 600 rural households, did not increase the number, but did narrow the range considerably: 946K to 1,120K. The mostly likely figure released by ORB (1033K) sits right in the middle of both ranges.
I’ll provide the text Jon is looking for:
“Gosh folks, I was completely wrong. The estimates of hundreds of thousands of violent deaths have all the evidence to support them. I ridiculed the high numbers, but now that I’ve been shown the extensive evidence, I concede I was uninformed.”
To be fair to Jon, the scientific and survey research showing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dying violently has received almost NO coverage in the west. This is quite predictable from a propaganda model for the corporate press, if its job is to parrot the framing of those in power. But a reasonably accurate telling of the story of US aggression should include the simple fact that the hundreds of thousands died violently under the US invasion/occupation.
I did some checking on the Lancet study you found so compelling. Turns out that Gilbert Burnham, the guy who headed it up, was questioned by the American Association for Public Opinion Research about his methodology. He gave “only partial responses” and was eventually censured by the Association for “violating basic research standards.” The guy was later sanctioned by Johns Hopkins.
I’m pissed at myself for wasting so much time trying to make it plain to you jokers just what I was trying to say. I should have just taken a minute to refresh my memory instead. The fact is, you guys were and are just blowing smoke out of your asses.
I’m spending too much time with leftists these days. One tries to get them to think instead preening themselves and spouting their cockamamie ideology. But why bother? It’s like trying to teach a donkey to talk.
Michael Connor writes:
“You should quickly fire off a statistical rebuttal of the ORB methodology to an academic journal — as soon as you get it published, you’ll have a leg to stand on.”
Someone has already done that:
http://w4.ub.uni-konstanz.de/srm/article/viewArticle/2373
“The ORB work is extensive, rigorous, and not disputed. It deals explicitly with VIOLENT DEATHS, based on interviews with hundreds of Iraqis.”
As can be seen in the article above, nothing could be further from the truth. It is not really rigorous, it is less extensive than other studies that have given much lower numbers (see section 7), and it is highly disputed (read: completely discredited). Also, as discussed in the article, the claim that ORB’s numbers are exclusively for violent deaths is not supportable either (see section 5). But that’s probably one of the least of its problems.
At the link below there’s a pretty good summary of this paper and another paper by one of the same authors about the notorious “Lancet study” that claimed 600,000 killed back in 2006. In short, that paper finds that the Lancet study data was fabricated.
http://www.straightstatistics.org/article/how-many-have-died-iraq
Well, rather than arguing how many angels can balance on the head of a pin, we’re arguing about how many scores of thousands died.
Love thy neighbor as thyself eh? You can fill the catacombs under the Vatican with apologies for it, but you’ll never be able to justify it.
@ Howard,
So three different studies (one published in the Lancet, another carried out by Johns Hopkins, a third (and a half) carried out by ORB) arrived independently at figures for violent deaths in the hundreds of thousands. All of them are deeply flawed, as pointed out by … allies and partners of the rival Iraq Body Count, which publishes a lower number. I’m convinced, how about you?
The records at Auschwitz recorded something like 70K deaths. The estimates of ten times that number have never been proved, and are doubtless exaggerations. Don’t call us Holocaust Deniers — just say that we mobilize to attack anything the casts the motherland in an uncomfortable bad light. The US would NEVER do anything to result in hundreds of thousands dying — just ask the Vietnamese. All THREE MILLION who died after we attacked.
@Michael:
Yes, I’m convinced because i looked at the arguments made, rather than just the identity of the persons making the argument. That is a logical fallacy called the “ad hominem”. Look it up.
And you have your facts wrong again. There aren’t “three different studies”. The Lancet and the Hopkins one are the same thing from the same people. The authors were from JHU and they published the report in the Lancet journal. (Unless you mean the Lancet one from 2004, but that only gave a figure of 100,000, of which only about 50-60% was attributed directly to violence, and gives a far lower number than the second one which did claim “hundreds of thousands”, specifically 600,000 killed in violence.
You are also wrong that the problems with these have only been pointed out by “allies and partners of the rival Iraq Body Count” (which again is just the ad-hom fallacy to begin with). If you actually read the pieces i cited, rather than reading just the author lines and using an ad-hominem to run back to your prior misinformed prejudices, you’d see they cite many other people and groups who have questioned the Lancet claims, such as the WHO, AAPOR, and many others. And while attempting to inflate the number of supposed independent studies that arrive at your desired conclusions you conveniently omit two other larger studies by the WHO and the UNDP which came to much lower numbers (note also that the numbers from the Lancet 2004 one are actually much closer to those of these two studies, rather than those of Lancet 2006 or ORB).
Facts are facts. The article i cited above put the reports you’ve been citing quite clearly in the ‘bunk’ category. You can’t weasel out of this by asserting an ad-hom.
As to your other premise:
“The US would NEVER do anything to result in hundreds of thousands dying”
Well, that’s certainly not a case I’d make. Technically, your preferred phrase of “hundreds of thousands” means anything over 200,000. Something like that may very well be true. Like Jon H said above, the IBC has recorded over 100,000 civilian deaths from violence, and they state there will be unrecorded deaths, and this does not include combatant deaths either, so like Jon above, we could assume already that this might suggest a number over 200k. The other surveys like the WHO and UNDP, which do appear fairly credible, were between 1.7-3.1 times higher than the corresponding IBC numbers for the same period according to the paper i cited about the ORB poll, so if these are taken as reasonable, then it might suggest numbers somewhere around 2-300k today. This too would all not include any numbers of people we might think have died from non-violent but war-related causes.
So you should not assume that anyone who questions some specific high number (and for good reason, read the links i gave), is necessarily out to defend “the motherland” against any claim of there having been a lot of deaths. Of course there have. It’s just that some of the *highest* claims about this are total bunk.
Anyone killed by Insurgents or Al Qadia in Iraq is counted as killed by the US.
A dishonest way of counting.
Saddam killed many more Kurds than Israel killed Palestinians.
And US policy supported both actions, what is your point; that Israel is as lawless and pariah a nation as Saddam’s Iraq? No argument here.