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Grignard wrote:Fair enough. The Lancet is certainly a medical journal of the first rate. My only question would be the rationale in including deaths from privation, crime, etc. in that figure, at least as far as criticizing the war goes. Not all of that is our fault, and I honestly believe both the United States and our allies try to minimize or alleviate this sort of thing. And as far as enemy combatant casualties are concerned....well, is that not part of the goal??

Well it depends how you look at things. Sure, when you decide to invade a country, you go there knowing you'll be shooting the other country's soldiers. And if people form criminal gangs or armed resistance groups after invasion, then you're supposed to shoot them too. And yeah, the break down in law and order has seen increased violence, again not the immediate result of allied forces.

But I think there is a more important level of consideration, when countries start talking about the need to invade other countries, I think we need to be honest about how many people are going to die as a result of invasion. In the case of Iraq, it looks like the whole thing has gotten about a million people killed. That's the toll of the decision to invade.

Incidenatlly I also did not realize you were refering to total casualties, at first, in Iraq, I thought you were talking about us.

Oh, okay. That explains it.

Grignard wrote:
But where are you getting the figure about one million deaths. What I'm saying is that Vietnam is regarded as a national trauma, and there was a fraction of the deaths that you're claiming that have occured in Iraq, at least as far as U.S. soldiers are concerned.

Vietnam is regarded as a national trauma for the fact that the doctrine of 'containment' did not require that we win the war. Only that we suitably strain the relationship between Moscow, and Beijing. Throw in the manufactured Gulf of Tonkin incident and you've got quite the case for fearing you're friendly neighborhood Machiavellian state. Whenever I become frustrated with the anti-Government impulse of the Boomer generation I try to think about Vietnam, it helps me understand why they are who they are.

sebster wrote:
The Lancet performed door to door interviews, asking people about about deaths before invasion and after, and required death certificates. They were looking to total all deaths during the occupation and deduct the rate of death before occupation, to get a net casualties figure. This means they included both civilian and military casualties, and include non-violent deaths as a result of, say, disease, declining medical services, failing infrastructure. The Lancet method had been used in multiple conflicts around the world and was accepted as a means of capturing total casualties. At this point the criticism of the Lancet method seems limited to 'that seems like a really high number

Ah, alright. My mistake. I'm so used to talking about military casualty counts that I tend to forget that there are other factors which must be accounted for. My Humanitarianism prof would not be happy with me.