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Originally Posted by LetsTalk
My last post in this topic
70% of the US public believes that this war was wrong, it is obvious that the great majority of people posting on the Iraq War forum belong to that 30%, and that there is not much I can say, that you are willing to consider or think about.
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1. A public opinion poll is not authoritative (and your numbers are wrong, with the the support numbers bumping a few percentage points and the opposition decreasing a few percentages, and these are the lowest numbers in a year across almost every poll). Here is a potential respondent to your opinion poll:
If you think I am stretching things, not so much.
A study conducted two years ago determined that only 37% of Americans aged 18-24 could locate Iraq on a map.
Now, I grant you that I've only covered a single demographic. So, while my next data point is anecdotal, it comes from someone whose very life has been possessed by Iraq, and yet, this person can't even get the
geography right.
2. You claim that those who disagree with you are close minded, yet, you state this:
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But in no way can you convince me
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I suggest taking a look in the mirror before you wish to lump everyone in opposition to your opinion into a single bucket of "closed-mindedness".
3. Your logic still fails from your earlier post.
4. To the day/week/month five years ago, there were more dying five years ago. Of course, I don't think you were trying to compare now with the ground/major combat operations phase of OIF, but actually prior. I've already covered this to a degree back in post #48 - the death tolls are skewed low during the years just prior to OIF as Saddam was trying to put on a less menacing face while simultaneous bribing his way out of sanctions. In 2002, he was also mending fences to try and limit internal uprisings in the event of an American invasion. If you want to look at the flawed Roberts et al studies, you'll see that they suffer from the same time framing bias (and their pre-invasion numbers don't benchmark against prior figures well, either).
Also, you're claim of being a news junkie that would have caught the reports of deaths (because Saddam allowed freedom of the press, don't you know?) runs into trouble when you read the
news as well. Even those news agencies that were allowed in country (while under constant watch by minders - if you'd like to read more on this, check out this book,
Amazon.com: Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War: Anthony Shadid: Books) censored their reports of atrocities when they did know about them.