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blog roll
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public service announcement...,
2005-10-26 11:14:23
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all news fake enough to broadcast...,
2005-10-26 12:09:30
marks on the wall:
you had me at 1.
As far as "the best guesstimate in town" Anthony Cordesman simply can't deny with the usual hand waving gestulation civillian casualties ennumerated by press accounts. The idea that the press has recorded, in a country where journalists are virtually trapped in their hotels, even half of all such incidents is absurd. If you arbitrarily guesstimated that the press (and press reporting has undoubtably decreased in comprehensiveness as time has gone on) has reported one third of all incidents then IBC's numbers would be in line with the Lancet study, which of course is now a year old, meaning the Lancet study represents, at this stage, a significant underestimate. At the same time it ought to be noted that IBC counts only direct casualties while Lancet-like demographic studies measure both direct and indirect war-related deaths - nobody in the press seems to be capable of grasping that distinction.
The thing though, is that if anybody was really interested it would be a small thing to issue forth further survey groups to collect more statistics in persuit of accruing an accurate measure of the civillian costs, direct and indirect, of the conflict. Instead we can now rely on the US military to issue forth statements about 75 insurgents killed in action, while the eyewitness accounts record morgues and hospitals flooded with women and children.
Either way, be it thirty thousand or two hundred, everybody thought our mission would be a great humanitarian mercy inflicted upon a suffering people. Instead we have martyred them to a fate greater than death itself: irrelevance.
update: Diane has more.
:: posted by buermann @ 2005-10-26 11:33:23 CST |
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