Debunking the Lancet Report

[gunnut]

Why, because I believe the invasion should not had happened, I have no right to wish that our administration had executed it correctly. That it had made sure that our soldiers had the right equipment.

The problem is what do you mean by "correctly?"

I hear that a lot. We didn't plan the invasion correctly. Our troops didn't have the right equipment. We didn't know what we're getting into... blah blah blah....

Give me one example, just one, of a well planned invasion in the history of mankind.

[brokensickle]

Why, because I believe the invasion should not had happened, I have no right to wish that our administration had executed it correctly. That it had made sure that our soldiers had the right equipment.

Are you saying our soldiers were not equipped? The only thing they lacked in their equipment were attaboys from the media and the go get-ums from weany spined politicians.

The equipment they surely didn't need were the standard issue embedded reporters, Code Stink, liberal lawyers suing for the enemy and all the rent a mob peace-niks. This kind of equipment just emboldens the enemy.

Do you get the warm fuzzies when the war is in favor of the enemy? You watch to much CNN dude.




Master Ivan

[Shek]

Are you saying our soldiers were not equipped? The only thing they lacked in their equipment were attaboys from the media and the go get-ums from weany spined politicians.

The equipment they surely didn't need were the standard issue embedded reporters, Code Stink, liberal lawyers suing for the enemy and all the rent a mob peace-niks. This kind of equipment just emboldens the enemy.

Do you get the warm fuzzies when the war is in favor of the enemy? You watch to much CNN dude.

Master Ivan

What the heck are you talking about?!? What we need is more embedded reporters. Embedded reporters by and large have done an absolutely tremendous job, and the lack of coverage (notice that I state lack and not slant - coverage overall has been pretty darn good with a handful of prominent exceptions, with the MSM being just about the only show in town anymore) is due to not enough embeds, some of which has been the fault of the Army.

[LetsTalk]

Your logic does not follow. If the study is wrong (which the Roberts et al study was), then your basis for claiming too many deaths can fail because you must look at the counterfactual, which then includes a continued sanctions regime and Saddam the benevolent deciding which potential regime enemies should he kill. Ergo, you cannot claim your conclusion to be a simple fact.

You must look at both what is seen and what was unseen.

Was Saddam a terrible dictator that had several of his people killed: YES
Did he burned down Kurdish villages: YES
Did he deserve to die for his crimes: YES

But in no way can you convince me that as many people where dying (in this decade), I am a news junkie and have been for 20+ years I do not remember reading or hearing about daily violence that claimed several lives a day. You very well know that there are more people dying in Iraq in a daily basis than there were 5 years ago.

[LetsTalk]

Remind me again: how friggin' long did it take to apprehend Ted Kaszynski? And who was it that finally turned him in?

We'd have gotten ObL FO' SHO', if only we'd had the mysterious and unknowable 'right number' of troops. What a crock of crap.

You're not eqipped to pronounce on what it would've taken to get him. But you sure THINK you do.

Get in touch with this, chief: you're talking out your ass.

You are comparing Ted Kaszynski to Osama, do you actually think that the two are of equal importance?

You are telling me that they had and have the equipment they needed, and I have friends and have read more than enough new reports of US soldiers buying their own vests, equipment, using material from junk yards....

Your last statement, and prior post indicate your intelligence and ability to have a conversation with someone who disagrees with your opinion.

[LetsTalk]

The problem is what do you mean by "correctly?"

I hear that a lot. We didn't plan the invasion correctly. Our troops didn't have the right equipment. We didn't know what we're getting into... blah blah blah....

Give me one example, just one, of a well planned invasion in the history of mankind.

Example of a perfect invasion, I am not sure if one exists but a much better executed invasion was Desert Storm. I am confident that you can also come up with many more examples of better executed invasions, wars...

"In February, 2003, the U.S. Army's top general, Eric Shinseki, told the
Senate Armed Services Committee that it would take "several hundred
thousand soldiers" to secure Iraq.[96] Two days later, Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld said the post-war troop commitment would be less than the
number of troops required to win the war and, "the idea that it would take
several hundred thousand U.S. forces is far from the mark." Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said Shineski's estimate was "way off the mark,"
because other countries would take part in an occupying force.[97]"

He was just one of many critics, and experts that warned the administration, just like most posters on this Topic, the administration failed to truly listen and understand people with a different views.

Iraq War - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Parihaka]

Was Saddam a terrible dictator that had several of his people killed: YES
Did he burned down Kurdish villages: YES
Did he deserve to die for his crimes: YES

But in no way can you convince me that as many people where dying (in this decade), I am a news junkie and have been for 20+ years I do not remember reading or hearing about daily violence that claimed several lives a day. You very well know that there are more people dying in Iraq in a daily basis than there were 5 years ago.

AFP: Saddam-era torture tools in mobile museum of horror

# Iraq, Saddam Hussein (1979-2003): 300 000

* Human Rights Watch: "twenty-five years of Ba`th Party rule ... murdered or 'disappeared' some quarter of a million Iraqis" [http://www.hrw.org/wr2k4/3.htm]
* 8/9 Dec. 2003 AP: Total murders
o New survey estimates 61,000 residents of Baghdad executed by Saddam.
o US Government estimates a total of 300,000 murders
+ 180,000 Kurds k. in Anfal
+ 60,000 Shiites in 1991
+ 50,000 misc. others executed
o "Human rights officials" est.: 500,000
o Iraqi politicians: over a million
* [These don't include the million or so dead in the Iran-Iraq War.]

A photo essay of Iraq's mass graves

In truth we will never know, but what we do know is that some mass graves at the time of the invasion were no more than a few months old. So how many would Saddam have killed between 2003 and now, and how many died without counting the death toll of the Iran/Iraq war?

[T_igger_cs_30]

AFP: Saddam-era torture tools in mobile museum of horror

A photo essay of Iraq's mass graves

In truth we will never know, but what we do know is that some mass graves at the time of the invasion were no more than a few months old. So how many would Saddam have killed between 2003 and now, and how many died without counting the death toll of the Iran/Iraq war?

And how many would have been saved had we finished the job in '91

[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.

[Herodotus]

And how many would have been saved had we finished the job in '91

Supposition. We cannot speculate what would have happened if the US drove to Baghdad in '91. Would Saddam use chem/bio weapons, would or could he mobilize his population for total war, would Iran seize an opportunity to invade, would fractional fighting break out, would the US population (still not far removed from Vietnam) continue to support military operations, etc.

[Parihaka]

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.

Poll: 70% believe Saddam, 9-11 link
WASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly seven in 10 Americans believe it is likely that ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, says a poll out almost two years after the terrorists' strike against this country.

Yet if you go here you'll see that only 12% of our members believe there was a connection. What does that tell you about the ability of our members to "consider or think"

[Herodotus]

AFP: Saddam-era torture tools in mobile museum of horror

A photo essay of Iraq's mass graves

In truth we will never know, but what we do know is that some mass graves at the time of the invasion were no more than a few months old. So how many would Saddam have killed between 2003 and now, and how many died without counting the death toll of the Iran/Iraq war?

The pre-war mortaility rate that Roberts gave us was 5.5 per 1,000 population in 2002

The Iraqi Family Study was 5.3 per 1,000 population in 2002.

The CIA World Fact Book has pre-war mortality at:

6.02 per 1,000---2002

6.21 per 1,000---2001

6.4 per 1,000---2000

6.56 per 1,000---1999

even ranking Iraq at 144th in the world in 1999

Death rate per 1,000 population - Flags, Maps, Economy, Geography, Climate, Natural Resources, Current Issues, International Agreements, Population, Social Statistics, Political System

However how much credence should be given to the World Fact Book since they list Iraqi mortailtiy at: 5.66 per 1,000 in 2004, 5.49 per 1,000 in 2005, and 5.26 per 1,000 in 2007? That gives Iraq a better mortality rate than Australia, Denmark, Norway, Japan, the US, or any other industrailized state in the world. So what are all these people complaining about.

The UN estimated the mortality rate at 10 per 1,000 from 1995-2000, and 10.7 from 2000-2005. So clearly something is amiss when estimating Iraqi deaths from before the war. Stating that Iraq under Saddam was an evil place to live and lots of people died does not really give us an accurate picture of what the pre-2003 death rate should or could be. Obviously Saddam had lost some capacity to make war or otherwise terrorize Iraqis since 1991, but just how much we cannot say. So if the invasion had not occurred would the Iraqi mortality rate have gone down, stayed constant, or increased? We cannot predict.

But the World Fact Book numbers aside (one can dispute if the authors are accurate in predicting post-war Iraqi mortality rate), it seems likely that the subsequent violence after the invasion has led to a (slight) increase in the mortality rate; and that is all we can say at the moment.

[Shek]

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.

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:

But in no way can you convince me

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.

[Shek]

You are comparing Ted Kaszynski to Osama, do you actually think that the two are of equal importance?

You missed the boat on this one. If we can't find someone on our home turf living in plain daylight (I had a soldier who used to snowmobile on the Unabomber's property), then it's certainly much harder to find someone when they have the homecourt advantage on some of the most rugged terrain in the world with tried and true paths from decades of conflict and bunkers engineered by modern engineering equipment and plans.

You are telling me that they had and have the equipment they needed, and I have friends and have read more than enough new reports of US soldiers buying their own vests, equipment, using material from junk yards....

Other than the first seven months of the war, the Army has provided the best vests that money can buy (and the reality is that months prior to December 2003 the soldiers that really needed the armor would have already had it). Subsequent tests of shown body armor solutions such as Dragonskin to be snakeoil to an extent. As new requirements have arisen, the Army has adapted and fielded the equipment as necessary. In fact, because of the political hot potato that body armor had become, officers were pressured to make soldiers wear too much armor, making them less effective (see the second slide in this brilliant operational plan - as a news junkie, I'm sure that you'll immediately know what city this is the operational plan for).

While there has been some criticism of the pace of fielding, the Dragonskin non-controversary has vindicated the Army and Marine Corps in their decision to not wholesale forego the necessary rigorous testing to make sure that it doesn't field equipment because Congressperson X or Senator Y wants to make a splash in the headlines about how they care about the troops (but made sure that the Army paid the peace dividend and therefore the Army didn't have the R&D and/or procurement dollars to have already fielded some of this equipment prior to 9/11).

However, as I stated earlier, equipment is a red herring when it comes to speaking to the major mistakes of OIF. As much as I found SecDef Rumsfeld to be a detriment to OIF, he was right about going to war with the Army and equipment that you have. Unfortunately, we went to war with the doctrine that we had (and more importantly didn't have), and that is where the crux of the matter lays.

[T_igger_cs_30]

Supposition.

I agree, however you know exactly what I mean, as for all your other points, IMO we could have and should have finished the job then.