(2007-09-10) — Agreeing with Democrats that the most important issue in Iraq is determining the exact monthly casualty count, Gen. David H. Petraeus will buckle under Congressional pressure this week and announce the immediate deployment of a brigade of civilian accountants to Baghdad to provide more reliable data.
Democrats have accused the Bush administration of bolstering its case for maintaining the troop surge by lying about exactly how many Iraqi civilians have been killed and injured.
“Nothing is more important in the war on Islamic terror than having an accurate body count to the second decimal place,” Gen. Petraeus will testify on Capitol Hill. “If we can’t get the numbers right over there, how can we expect Democrats in Congress to trust our figures when the bodies start falling again over here?”
18 responses so far ↓
1 seneuba // Sep 10, 2007 at 8:04 am
Good morning all!
2 conserve-a-tips // Sep 10, 2007 at 8:08 am
God Bless America!
3 conserve-a-tips // Sep 10, 2007 at 8:12 am
Hmmm. Maybe I’m not the first because my post isn’t posting and so somebody else’s might not be either, which means that somebody else might have already asked for God’s blessing and it didn’t come up just like mine didn’t come up when I did the same thing.
I saw that the General is having one abacus per Congresscritter ordered. The main difficulty is going to be, however, surmounting the Congresscritters’ inability to count. We know that they can’t because they keep telling us that their earmarks don’t have large dollar figures.
4 conserve-a-tips // Sep 10, 2007 at 8:13 am
Oh. There it is. Elusive little rascal.
5 camojack // Sep 10, 2007 at 8:36 am
Oh, no…bean counters!!!
6 gafisher // Sep 10, 2007 at 8:43 am
This will require creative accountants who can start with Dem-defined final figures and work up whatever tabular “evidence” is needed to support those numbers. Getting to the Dem numbers for dead civilians since 2003, for example, will necessitate the adaptation of cemetery records going back well into the nineties, and probably beyond Iraq’s borders.
And that poses a problem for Dems: can they really afford to let accountants like that take time off from campaign work?
7 boberinyetagain // Sep 10, 2007 at 8:45 am
Now that they are nearly done partitioning themselves over there (a few more years should complete the effort) into 3 groups (and even those groups can’t manage to agree with each other) things are actually beginning to take shape.
Of course, there is the very real possibility that they will “freely choose” to align with Iran but then we knew that, didn’t we?
So, once more…what is the “best case” scenario here? The effort now underway does seem the most productive to date (why it took 4 years to figure out something that’s kinda working is another matter) but still I wonder, to what end will this bring us.
The Saudis still seem quite free to do as they choose and, the last time they chose to do anything 3000+ of us were killed in one day.
8 Ms RightWing, Ink // Sep 10, 2007 at 8:45 am
camojack
Did someone say caves
Are there caves in Iraq and does Petraeus live in one?
More coffee please
9 Maggie // Sep 10, 2007 at 9:22 am
Good Morning Ms RightWing, Camojack,boberin ,gafisher and CAT.
Do bears live in caves?
10 Maggie // Sep 10, 2007 at 9:24 am
Sorry,Seneuba….and a very good morning to you too.
11 Maggie // Sep 10, 2007 at 9:25 am
eleventh
12 JamesonLewis3rd // Sep 10, 2007 at 9:45 am
“…..to the second decimal place…..” —-
Hilarious.
13 JamesonLewis3rd // Sep 10, 2007 at 9:47 am
RE: #3~~
conserve-a-tips~~
Step away from the coffee pot…..
14 Fred Sinclair // Sep 10, 2007 at 10:16 am
I’m curious as to what, exactly (or who) is specifically determined to be a civilian? Is it that female wearing a burka, who is busily dropping mortar rounds into that mortar tube in front of her?
Perhaps it’s that grocer fellow with the big grin who sold you a pack of cigarettes yesterday but today (with thesame grin) is coming toward you with an AK-47 firing on full auto?
Maybe it’s the 11 year old boy running toward a group of American soldiers, with a backpack filled with explosives, or wearing a suicide bomber’s explosive vest?
Or, could it be the driver of the ice-cream truck (yes, they have ice-cream trucks in Iraq) who, instead of ice cream, today has his truck filled with enough explosives to raze an entire city block?
Just what qualifies an Iraqi to be counted as one of the civilians killed or injured in these figures the liberals are tossing around?
Unfortunately the “good guy” Iraqi civilians (on our side) are somewhat against to the idea of wearing armbands for identification (because the “bad guys” would soon be wearing them too.
Body counts of civilians was maimly guesswork in WWII no one knows how many “innocent” German civilians were killed in the bombing of Dresden, Homburg, Zweibrucken or Bremerhoven.
The day before we dropped the A-bomb in Japan the estimate was that the day before, Tokyo was firebombed and their city of bamboo houses all but disappeared, the loss of Japaneese civilians was in excess of one million. (Approximately a quarter of a million more than died the next day in Hiroshima!)
So let the bean counters count - in 50 more years it will be nothing more than boring figures in High School History Class.
Heirborn Ranger
15 Hawkeye // Sep 10, 2007 at 12:23 pm
Something worth thinking about in this article from October 2006.
A few comments about the estimates of 600-655,000 dead in Iraq…
And other groups that track deaths in Iraq dispute the findings. Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, which tracks statistics in its Iraq Index, said: “I do not believe the new numbers. I think they’re way off.” The Brooking Index, relying on the UN (which gets figures from the Iraqi health ministry) and the Iraq Body Count (IBC), estimates the civilian death toll at about 62,000.
The Iraqi Body Count response is as follows. Its says the Lancet report implies that:
* On average a thousand Iraqis have been violently killed every day in the first half of 2006, with “less than a tenth being noticed by any public surveillance mechanism.”
*Of 800,000 wounded people in the past two years, “less than a tenth received any kind of hospital treatment.”
*Over 7% of the male population has been killed; 10% in central region.
*Half a million death certificates were issued to families but not officially recorded.
*The Coalition has killed far more people in the last year than in the invasion and Falluja type-operations of earlier years.
The IBC says that such assertions suggested incompetence/fraud on a massive scale by hospitals and ministries, self-destructive behaviour by the wounded, an utter failure by agencies to notice decimation of the male population and an abject media failure to observe the scale of events.
The IBC concludes: “In the light of such extreme and improbable implications, a rational alternative conclusion to be considered is that the authors have drawn conclusions from unrepresentative data. In addition, totals of the magnitude generated by this study are unnecessary to brand the invasion and occupation of Iraq a human and strategic tragedy.”
One issue that arises is why, to speak crudely, the numbers of bodies being discovered do not match the Lancet figures.
The problem of course is the methodology used to estimate these figures…
The report says that there were 82 deaths pre-invasion and 547 post-invasion. It then multiplied these figures up in relation to the Iraqi population of 27,139,584, and came up with an estimated 654,956 “excess” deaths, 2.5 % of the population.
So, on the basis of a “poll” in which people (most probably living in Baghdad) said they knew of 547 deaths, they come up with estimates of 655,000 nation-wide. Good work boys…
16 camojack // Sep 10, 2007 at 9:06 pm
camojack
Did someone say caves
Are there caves in Iraq and does Petraeus live in one?
Comment by Ms RightWing, Ink — September 10, 2007 @ 8:45 am
Yes…and no.
Good Morning Ms RightWing, Camojack,boberin ,gafisher and CAT.
Do bears live in caves?
Comment by Maggie — September 10, 2007 @ 9:22 am
Sometimes…
17 Ms RightWing, Ink // Sep 11, 2007 at 1:17 pm
zippy
18 INJUSTICE PREVAILS // Sep 13, 2007 at 10:15 am
IBC - UPDATE - 2007
2007 Total IBC -100,000,0000,00000
=====================
Funding for the 2006 Lancet Report was in cooperation with Moveon.org and the Daily Kos
All (IBC) stats are publish in part under the following authority :
Section four subpart (e) of the administrative anti government manual perspective in association with Moveon.org and the New York Times who provide monetary funding for each subsidiary in exchange for full page advertisements
CONCLUSION:
They could have ask the local undertakers
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