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Topic: 1,ooo,ooo Iragi Deaths?
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| crimedog | Posted – 1/30/2008 6:04:04 PM | show profile By REUTERS Published: January 30, 2008 Filed at 1:55 p.m. ET Skip to next paragraph LONDON (Reuters) - More than one million Iraqis have died as a result of the conflict in their country since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, according to research conducted by one of Britain's leading polling groups. The survey, conducted by Opinion Research Business (ORB) with 2,414 adults in face-to-face interviews, found that 20 percent of people had had at least one death in their household as a result of the conflict, rather than natural causes. The last complete census in Iraq conducted in 1997 found 4.05 million households in the country, a figure ORB used to calculate that approximately 1.03 million people had died as a result of the war, the researchers found. The margin of error in the survey, conducted in August and September 2007, was 1.7 percent, giving a range of deaths of 946,258 to 1.12 million. ORB originally found that 1.2 million people had died, but decided to go back and conduct more research in rural areas to make the survey as comprehensive as possible and then came up with the revised figure. The research covered 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces. Those that not covered included two of Iraq's more volatile regions -- Kerbala and Anbar -- and the northern province of Arbil, where local authorities refused them a permit to work. |
| UGoGirl | Posted – 1/30/2008 11:11:57 PM | show profile I don't doubt it. Mission accomplished? This is why I can't imagine anyone wanting to be president. What a pile of crap to clean up. |
| crimedog | Posted – 1/31/2008 9:10:15 AM | show profile Suicides among active-duty soldiers in 2007 reached their highest level since the Army began keeping such records in 1980, according to a draft internal study obtained by The Washington Post. Last year, 121 soldiers took their own lives, nearly 20 percent more than in 2006. At the same time, the number of attempted suicides or self-inflicted injuries in the Army has jumped sixfold since the Iraq war began. Last year, about 2,100 soldiers injured themselves or attempted suicide, compared with about 350 in 2002, according to the U.S. Army Medical Command Suicide Prevention Action Plan. The Army was unprepared for the high number of suicides and cases of post-traumatic stress disorder among its troops, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have continued far longer than anticipated. Many Army posts still do not offer enough individual counseling and some soldiers suffering psychological problems complain that they are stigmatized by commanders. Over the past year, four high-level commissions have recommended reforms and Congress has given the military hundreds of millions of dollars to improve its mental health care Washington Post |
| chucho | Posted – 1/31/2008 10:16:10 AM | show profile I am as appalled as any decent human being would be by the murder of Iraqis in order to "bring free-dim" (and profit-sharing agreements) to the people there, but I am skeptical off these polling techniques, which were basically developed for monitoring heath-related deaths in under-developed countries with crappy or non-0existent government data. (The Lancet study has been found to be full of holes.) If some representatives of a Western polling group goes door to door in a Middle East combat zone asking 2,500 people if the war has resulted in death of relatives, you're gonna get a lot interpretations of what the question means. And, since the concept of family in the Middle East is so much different than it is in the West, the question asked is going to be interpreted way differently by the interviewee than the reader of the poll results. It's not uncommon in that part of the world for distant cousins (or even people that aren't blood relatives at all, if they share a milk mother) to be siblings in every conceivable way. The result is that even in different neighborhoods you'll meet people who consider so-and-so a brother or a sister. If a person died by having a miscarriage in the back of an ambulance on the way to the hospital that was stuck in traffic because of a checkpoint, that person would not only be considered a combat-related casualty to a lot of people (who are angry at the occupation and blame all death on the war), but a considerable already number of people will claim full kinship to that person. And the pollster isn't going to know that the interviewee perceives combat-related casualties differently. (The interviewer is thinking how many people in the family have been shot; the interviewee is thinking about who among the dozens and dozens and dozens of direct relatives have died for any reason since the war began.) In this environment, I wouldn't trust the polls. Right now I consider the number somewhere between the 85,000 of Iraq Body Count and the 171,000 of the WHO's own research (whose methodology I trust more than a private polling firm's). We may find the number higher, but keep in mind that when we start going over the one million mark, we're getting into the territory of Pol Pot (1.5 million) and I just feel like if we're going to talk about numbers that high, I want to see bodies, not polls. |
| Her Satanic Majesties Request | Posted – 1/31/2008 5:21:41 PM | show profile Doesn't that make George Bush and his cronies indirect murderers? |
| crimedog | Posted – 1/31/2008 6:00:01 PM | show profile Yep! |
