[extropy-chat] Who thinks the Bush admin lied over Iraq? Onwhatbasis?

[Mike Lorrey]

--- Alfio Puglisi <puglisi at arcetri.astro.it> wrote:

> On Thu, 14 Jul 2005, Mike Lorrey wrote:
> >
> >I also believe the Lancet study overestimated because they did not
> come
> >to a determination of how big the average Iraqi meant when you used
> the
> >term "family". Being a tribal culture, the Iraqi idea of "family" is
> a
> >whole lot larger than the nuclear family concept of the west. This
> >could easily have introduced a magnitude of error into the study.
> 
> I can too come up with many plausible reasons that could give a
> higher or
> lower result, depending on my current mood. Let's not throw things at
> random. The standard deviation of the study was high enough that
> there's already a couple of orders of magnitude of uncertainity (sp?)
> 
> Still, it's the *only*, as far as I know, real study on the matter.
> Apart from counts like iraqbodycounts.com that just look at the
> press and then can be taken as a lower bound estimate. There are no
> other numbers.

On the contrary, the Red Cross estimated 10,000 deaths from the start
of hostilities through Feb 2004, so the above sites current count of 
22,000-25,000 seems a little high, but not excessively so. As the Red
Cross has several hundred people in-country and works closely to
support the Red Crescent, which has thousands of people all over Iraq,
I would trust their numbers.

What should be considered, though, is that most of these civilian
casualties are being committed by the same thugs who will go on
murdering civilians even if we left tomorrow, and were doing so before
we invaded. Rather than disappearing in the middle of the night or
being grabbed off the street to who-knows-where, they are being killed
in public, in front of other Iraqis, by the same thugs, so now nobody
can deny that the thugs are murderous bastards.

I also see in the newspaper today that a Pew study of muslim attitudes
shows that for the first time a majority are opposed to suicide bombing
of civilians and are opposed to bin Laden. I wonder if Osama pays as
much attention to the polls as western politicians...

Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
                                      -William Pitt (1759-1806) 
Blog: http://intlib.blogspot.com

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