Iraq Civilian Death Toll Tops 50,000

Dear Everyone;

A very disturbing story on what the Iraq War has done in civilian deaths. Using as close as possible to documented records some 50,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed in the last three years. This would be the equivalent of some 570,000 Americans being killed over the same time period.

For those of you who support the War on Iraq let's do a switch.

Suppose the Russians or the Chinese were the ones who had invaded Iraq and were doing to Iraq exactly what the US is doing to Iraq. How supportive would you be of what the Russians or Chinese were doing? If you believe the US was right in invading would you be as fanatic in support of the Russians or the Chinese or would you be saying that's different?

If you hesitate even a second to say you would fully support what the Russians or Chinese were doing based on it being exactly what the US has done then you are no better than the arm chair chicken-hawk generals of Congress who allowed Bush to needlessly send the troops in harms way in the first place based on lies and deceit and corrupted evidence and have done absolutely nothing since then to rein Bush in and bring the troops home now.

Ron Getty
SF Libertarian

P.S. I believe the Libertarian non-initiation of force statement means what it says and there can be no equivocation.

Here's the story if the links don't work.

http://www.latimes.com/

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-deathtoll25jun25,0,4970736.story?coll=la-home-headlines

War's Iraqi Death Toll Tops 50,000
Higher than the U.S. estimate, the tally likely is undercounted. Proportionately, it is as if 570,000 Americans were slain in three years.
By Louise Roug and Doug Smith
Times Staff Writers

June 25, 2006

BAGHDAD — At least 50,000 Iraqis have died violently since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, according to statistics from the Baghdad morgue, the Iraqi Health Ministry and other agencies — a toll 20,000 higher than previously acknowledged by the Bush administration.

Many more Iraqis are believed to have been killed but not counted because of serious lapses in recording deaths in the chaotic first year after the invasion, when there was no functioning Iraqi government, and continued spotty reporting nationwide since.

The toll, which is mostly of civilians but probably also includes some security forces and insurgents, is daunting: Proportionately, it is equivalent to 570,000 Americans being killed nationwide in the last three years.

In the same period, at least 2,520 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq.

Iraqi officials involved in compiling the statistics say violent deaths in some regions have been grossly undercounted, notably in the troubled province of Al Anbar in the west. Health workers there are unable to compile the data because of violence, security crackdowns, electrical shortages and failing telephone networks.

The Health Ministry acknowledged the undercount. In addition, the ministry said its figures exclude the three northern provinces of the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan because Kurdish officials do not provide death toll figures to the government in Baghdad.

In the three years since Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled, the Bush administration has rarely offered civilian death tolls. Last year, President Bush said he believed that "30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis."

Nongovernmental organizations have made estimates by tallying media accounts; The Times attempted to reach a comprehensive figure by obtaining statistics from the Baghdad morgue and the Health Ministry and checking those numbers against a sampling of local health departments for possible undercounts.

The Health Ministry gathers numbers from hospitals in the capital and the outlying provinces. If a victim of violence dies at a hospital or arrives dead, medical officials issue a death certificate. Relatives claim the body directly from the hospital and arrange for a speedy burial in keeping with Muslim beliefs.

If the morgue receives a body — usually those deemed suspicious deaths — officials there issue the death certificate.

Health Ministry officials said that because death certificates are issued and counted separately, the two data sets are not overlapping.

The Baghdad morgue received 30,204 bodies from 2003 through mid-2006, while the Health Ministry said it had documented 18,933 deaths from "military clashes" and "terrorist attacks" from April 5, 2004, to June 1, 2006. Together, the toll reaches 49,137.

However, samples obtained from local health departments in other provinces show an undercount that brings the total well beyond 50,000. The figure also does not include deaths outside Baghdad in the first year of the invasion.

The documented cases show a country descending further into violence.

At the Baghdad morgue, the vast majority of bodies processed had been shot execution-style. Many showed signs of torture — drill holes, burns, missing eyes and limbs, officials said. Others had been strangled, beheaded, stabbed or beaten to death.

The morgue records show a predominantly civilian toll; the hospital records gathered by the Health Ministry do not distinguish between civilians, combatants and security forces.

But Health Ministry records do differentiate causes of death. Almost 75% of those who died violently were killed in "terrorist acts," typically bombings, the records show. The other 25% were killed in what were classified as military clashes. A health official described the victims as "innocent bystanders," many shot by Iraqi or American troops, in crossfire or accidentally at checkpoints.

With the entire country a battleground, it is likely that some of the dead may have been insurgents or members of militias.

"The way to think about the violence is that it's not just the insurgent attacks that matter," said David Lake, a member of the Center for Study of Civil War, an international group of scholars who study the causes and effects of internal strife. "What we should be concerned about is the sense of security at the individual level…. If the fear has gotten out of control."

Societies fall apart when people stop believing the government can keep them safe them and instead turn to militias for protection, said Lake, who is a professor of political science at UC San Diego.

"The question is, have we crossed that threshold? My sense is, we probably have, and that's why I'm worried about the long-term outcome."

Three years of fighting have taken their toll on the country. Gauging how many people died in the first year after the invasion, which included the initial invasion and aerial bombardment of Baghdad, and weeks of near-anarchy afterward, has proved difficult.

According to a 2003 Times survey of Baghdad hospitals, at least 1,700 civilians died in the capital just in the five weeks after the war began. An analysis by Iraqi Body Count, a nongovernmental group that tracks civilian deaths by tallying media reports, estimated that 5,630 to 10,000 Iraqi civilians were killed nationwide from March 19 through April 2003.

Health Ministry figures for May in each of the last three years show war-related deaths more than tripling nationwide, from 334 in May 2004 to 1,154 last month. And as the violence has continued to escalate, it also has become increasingly centralized. At least 2,532 people were killed nationwide last month. Of those, 2,155 — 85% — died in Baghdad.

"Everything has increased," said one official in the Health Ministry who didn't want to be identified for security reasons. "Bombings have increased, shootings have increased."

Iraqi Body Count estimates that 38,475 to 42,889 Iraqis have been killed since the invasion. The estimate does not include deaths among the Iraqi security forces.

The toll in Iraq has been a sensitive issue for the Bush administration, which has maintained that it doesn't track civilian deaths. However, military officials in Baghdad acknowledged that they track the number of civilians accidentally killed by U.S. troops.

Eric Stover, Director of UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center and an expert on medical and social consequences of war, said that the high death toll makes rebuilding society increasingly difficult.

"The way to look at the effects of deaths on that scale is also in the context of how people are living," said Stover, who has also done human rights work in Iraq and identified mass graves in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

"It's not just the immediate deaths that people are dealing with, but fractured lives. They are living in this constant state of fear. It's a very gloomy picture."

[ Attachment content not displayed ]

Ron,

  "Those of you who support the War on Iraq?" I know I've mentioned the inaccuracy of this charge on an LPSF list before and no one argued with me, but I see the "war supporters" canard is back again. This controversy is not about war, it's about intervention.

  The only group that can credibly be said to be waging "war on Iraq" is the insurgency. Think about it -- they are deliberately destroying infrastructure in Iraq, deliberately killing Iraqi civilians, and even deliberately attacking holy sites, with the aim of provoking a religious civil war.

  Let's do a switch. If the U.S. government were doing these things as a matter of policy, wouldn't you be talking about how horrible that was?

  When the insurgents are openly doing precisely that, why aren't you condemning them the same way you would condemn the U.S. government for similar actions? Because for you it's not primarily about ending war, nor is it about defending human rights -- it's about opposing intervention. And not just intervention in general, but U.S. government intervention in particular.

  If I am wrong, then please tell me about some scenarios where you would support U.S. government military intervention in another country merely for the sake of ending war or defending human rights, when there were no "American" lives or "U.S. national interests" involved.

  I think the principle of upholding individual human rights is more integral to libertarianism than the principle of opposing military action by the government that claims jurisdiction over you whenever it acts militarily outside its arbitrary area of jurisdiction. If you disagree, let's debate the relative merits of those two principles, rather than stooping to accusing each other of being for war or terrorism.

  I assume you don't want to be accused of supporting Al Qaeda in Iraq, so please don't engage in such tactics yourself by accusing those who support the U.S. military presence in Iraq of supporting war. Intervention and war are two different things.

Yours in liberty,
        <<< starchild >>>

P.S. - Isn't it interesting that the Iraqi death toll seems to be going in reverse? According to a 2004 study in the prestigious British medical journal Lancet recently cited by an opponent of USgov intervention on a local LP list, 100,000 Iraqi civilians had already been killed at that time. Now the total is down to just half that. Amazing!

Dear Starchild;

If the USA had not intervened in Iraq those 50,000 dead civilians would still be alive. There would ne no USA inspired al qaeda terrorists attacks taking place anywhere in Iraq. The USA had no discernible rhyme or reason to intervene in Iraq.

I ask the question if Russia or China had done the intervention would you be as supportive of Russia and China as the USA in its intervention if they were doind the same things the USa was doing?

I would never support any USA intervention in any country anywhere for any reason - because there are no valid reason why the USA has to invade any country anywhere to impose human rights or end a war. It never works out that way and you can not show me any country for the last 100 years where the USA has only just intervened where it didn't turn into a hell hole of innocent civilian deaths.

The fact remains that intervention with its army of occupation and war produce the same results - innocent dead civilians who were killed as a result of "collateral damage."

You are just as dead as a result of intervention as war. Claiming it was intervention does not bring back one single innocent dead civilian from the cemetery.

This URL is for a web site of US military Interventions from 1890 through today. Show me a one where innocent civilians didn't get slaughtered and where the intervention had to take place.

http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html

Ron Getty
SF Libertarian

Dear Derek;

If the US isn't imperialistic why are there 175 military bases
around the world manned by 300,00 military personnel?

Ron Getty
SF Libertarian

--- In lpsf-discuss@yahoogroups.com, "Derek Jensen" <derekj72@...>
wrote:

Ron:

It's not possible to say that the Russians or Chinese would be

doing exactly

what the US has been doing in Iraq. The Russians and Chinese have

a long

historical record of expansionary imperialism while the US has

none.

-Derek

>
> Dear Everyone;
>
> A very disturbing story on what the Iraq War has done in

civilian deaths.

> Using as close as possible to documented records some 50,000

Iraqi civilians

> have been killed in the last three years. This would be the

equivalent of

> some 570,000 Americans being killed over the same time period.
>
> For those of you who support the War on Iraq let's do a switch.
>
> Suppose the Russians or the Chinese were the ones who had

invaded Iraq and

> were doing to Iraq *exactly *what the US is doing to Iraq. How

supportive

> would you be of what the Russians or Chinese were doing? If you

believe the

> US was right in invading would you be as fanatic in support of

the Russians

> or the Chinese or would you be saying that's different?
>
> If you hesitate even a second to say you would fully support

what the

> Russians or Chinese were doing based on it being *exactly* what

the US has

> done then you are no better than the arm chair chicken-hawk

generals of

> Congress who allowed Bush to needlessly send the troops in harms

way in the

> first place based on lies and deceit and corrupted evidence and

have done

> absolutely nothing since then to rein Bush in and bring the

troops home now.

>
> Ron Getty
> SF Libertarian
>
> P.S. I believe the Libertarian non-initiation of force statement

means

> what it says and there can be no equivocation.
>
> Here's the story if the links don't work.
>
> http://www.latimes.com/
>
>
> http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-

deathtoll25jun25,0,4970736.story?coll=la-home-headlines

>
>
> *War's Iraqi Death Toll Tops 50,000*
>
> *Higher than the U.S. estimate, the tally likely is undercounted.
> Proportionately, it is as if 570,000 Americans were slain in

three years.*

>
> By Louise Roug and Doug Smith
> Times Staff Writers
>
> June 25, 2006
>
> BAGHDAD — At least 50,000 Iraqis have died violently since the

2003

> U.S.-led invasion, according to statistics from the Baghdad

morgue, the

> Iraqi Health Ministry and other agencies — a toll 20,000 higher

than

> previously acknowledged by the Bush administration.
>
> Many more Iraqis are believed to have been killed but not

counted because

> of serious lapses in recording deaths in the chaotic first year

after the

> invasion, when there was no functioning Iraqi government, and

continued

> spotty reporting nationwide since.
>
> The toll, which is mostly of civilians but probably also

includes some

> security forces and insurgents, is daunting: *Proportionately,

it is

> equivalent to 570,000 Americans being killed nationwide in the

last three

> years.*
>
> In the same period, at least 2,520 U.S. troops have been killed

in Iraq.

>
> Iraqi officials involved in compiling the statistics say violent

deaths in

> some regions have been grossly undercounted, notably in the

troubled

> province of Al Anbar in the west. Health workers there are

unable to compile

> the data because of violence, security crackdowns, electrical

shortages and

> failing telephone networks.
>
> The Health Ministry acknowledged the undercount. In addition,

the ministry

> said its figures exclude the three northern provinces of the

semi-autonomous

> region of Kurdistan because Kurdish officials do not provide

death toll

> figures to the government in Baghdad.
>
> In the three years since Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled,

the Bush

> administration has rarely offered civilian death tolls. Last

year, President

> Bush said he believed that "30,000, more or less, have died as a

result of

> the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis."
>
> Nongovernmental organizations have made estimates by tallying

media

> accounts; The Times attempted to reach a comprehensive figure by

obtaining

> statistics from the Baghdad morgue and the Health Ministry and

checking

> those numbers against a sampling of local health departments for

possible

> undercounts.
>
> The Health Ministry gathers numbers from hospitals in the

capital and the

> outlying provinces. If a victim of violence dies at a hospital

or arrives

> dead, medical officials issue a death certificate. Relatives

claim the body

> directly from the hospital and arrange for a speedy burial in

keeping with

> Muslim beliefs.
>
> If the morgue receives a body — usually those deemed suspicious

deaths —

> officials there issue the death certificate.
>
> Health Ministry officials said that because death certificates

are issued

> and counted separately, the two data sets are not overlapping.
>
> The Baghdad morgue received 30,204 bodies from 2003 through mid-

2006,

> while the Health Ministry said it had documented 18,933 deaths

from

> "military clashes" and "terrorist attacks" from April 5, 2004,

to June 1,

> 2006. Together, the toll reaches 49,137.
>
> However, samples obtained from local health departments in other

provinces

> show an undercount that brings the total well beyond 50,000. The

figure also

> does not include deaths outside Baghdad in the first year of the

invasion.

>
> The documented cases show a country descending further into

violence.

>
> At the Baghdad morgue, the vast majority of bodies processed had

been shot

> execution-style. Many showed signs of torture — drill holes,

burns, missing

> eyes and limbs, officials said. Others had been strangled,

beheaded, stabbed

> or beaten to death.
>
> The morgue records show a predominantly civilian toll; the

hospital

> records gathered by the Health Ministry do not distinguish

between

> civilians, combatants and security forces.
>
> But Health Ministry records do differentiate causes of death.

Almost 75%

> of those who died violently were killed in "terrorist acts,"

typically

> bombings, the records show. The other 25% were killed in what

were

> classified as military clashes. A health official described the

victims as

> "innocent bystanders," many shot by Iraqi or American troops, in

crossfire

> or accidentally at checkpoints.
>
> With the entire country a battleground, it is likely that some

of the dead

> may have been insurgents or members of militias.
>
> "The way to think about the violence is that it's not just the

insurgent

> attacks that matter," said David Lake, a member of the Center

for Study of

> Civil War, an international group of scholars who study the

causes and

> effects of internal strife. "What we should be concerned about

is the sense

> of security at the individual level…. If the fear has gotten out

of

> control."
>
> Societies fall apart when people stop believing the government

can keep

> them safe them and instead turn to militias for protection, said

Lake, who

> is a professor of political science at UC San Diego.
>
> "The question is, have we crossed that threshold? My sense is,

we probably

> have, and that's why I'm worried about the long-term outcome."
>
> Three years of fighting have taken their toll on the country.

Gauging how

> many people died in the first year after the invasion, which

included the

> initial invasion and aerial bombardment of Baghdad, and weeks of
> near-anarchy afterward, has proved difficult.
>
> According to a 2003 Times survey of Baghdad hospitals, at least

1,700

> civilians died in the capital just in the five weeks after the

war began. An

> analysis by Iraqi Body Count, a nongovernmental group that

tracks civilian

> deaths by tallying media reports, estimated that 5,630 to 10,000

Iraqi

> civilians were killed nationwide from March 19 through April

2003.

>
> Health Ministry figures for May in each of the last three years

show

> war-related deaths more than tripling nationwide, from 334 in

May 2004 to

> 1,154 last month. And as the violence has continued to escalate,

it also has

> become increasingly centralized. At least 2,532 people were

killed

> nationwide last month. Of those, 2,155 — 85% — died in Baghdad.
>
> "Everything has increased," said one official in the Health

Ministry who

> didn't want to be identified for security reasons. "Bombings

have increased,

> shootings have increased."
>
> Iraqi Body Count estimates that 38,475 to 42,889 Iraqis have

been killed

> since the invasion. The estimate does not include deaths among

the Iraqi

> security forces.
>
> The toll in Iraq has been a sensitive issue for the Bush

administration,

> which has maintained that it doesn't track civilian deaths.

However,

> military officials in Baghdad acknowledged that they track the

number of

> civilians accidentally killed by U.S. troops.
>
> Eric Stover, Director of UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center and

an expert

> on medical and social consequences of war, said that the high

death toll

> makes rebuilding society increasingly difficult.
>
> "The way to look at the effects of deaths on that scale is also

in the

> context of how people are living," said Stover, who has also

done human

> rights work in Iraq and identified mass graves in Bosnia-

Herzegovina.

>
> "It's not just the immediate deaths that people are dealing

with, but

> fractured lives. They are living in this constant state of fear.

It's a very

[ Attachment content not displayed ]

Derek,

  I'm sure you meant to include a time frame with that statement, such as "during the postwar period." It seems to me that if one goes back a bit farther, you do find quite a significant record of USgov expansionary imperialism. What else would you call the colonization of the Phillipines and suppression of an independence movement there, or engineering the breakup of Columbia in order to build and control the Panama Canal in an independent Panama under a long-term lease?

  Nevertheless, I agree with what I think is your basic point, which is to remind people of the same fact that was so often forgotten or overlooked during the Cold War -- that for all its faults, the USgov is not the moral equivalent of significantly more authoritarian regimes in places like Russia and China.

Yours in liberty,
        <<< starchild >>>

Derek Jensen wrote:

It's not possible to say that the Russians or Chinese would be doing
exactly
what the US has been doing in Iraq. The Russians and Chinese have a long
historical record of expansionary imperialism while the US has none.

I usually try to stay out of war debates, but this is just not true. Ask
Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Panama, Hawai`i, Nicaragua... from the late
19th century on, the US has been pretty aggressive about expanding its
empire; in fact, from Manifest Destiny in the early 19th century, but we
got distracted by the late unpleasantness between the states.

Just because we kept it in our own hemisphere until recently doesn't make
it OK.

~Chris

Ron,

  Are you claiming that no military action by any government outside its commonly recognized area of jurisdiction ever saves lives? Or just that it never saves lives when the U.S. government does it? Or is the question of whether it saves lives unimportant to you, perhaps because you are unwilling to acknowledge that lives can be lost through inaction as well as action?

  Since you again pose the question about Russia and China, I will answer it, although I think my response should be predictable given my recent response to Derek. Of course I would not likely be as supportive of an intervention by the Russian or Chinese government as of an intervention by the U.S. government. They are not moral equivalents. I do not think the more authoritarian regimes in China and Russia are as conscientious as the U.S. government -- which is itself not conscientious enough -- about avoiding civilian casualties, and an intervention by one of those governments would be less likely to have increased freedom as its goal.

  You claim 50,000 dead civilians in Iraq would still be alive if the U.S. government hadn't intervened there. (I see you have vindicated my revised subject line for this thread!) Perhaps most of those particular individuals would still be alive -- as most of them probably also would be if there had been no insurgency! However there would likely be a *greater* number of other Iraqis dead if there had been no invasion, since the sanctions were reported to be killing more Iraqis than have died in the conflict:

April 30, 1998: UNICIF reports: "The increase in mortality reported in public hospitals for children under five years of age (an excess of some 40,000 deaths yearly compared with 1989) is mainly due to diarrhea, pneumonia and malnutrition. In those over five years of age, the increase (an excess of some 50,000 deaths yearly compared with 1989) is associated with heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, cancer, liver or kidney diseases." www2.unicef.org/pub/iraqsa

-from http://www.accuracy.org/article.php?articleId=44

  Please also note on that page the quotes from Bush (I) and Clinton administration officials indicating the absence of any intention or likelihood of sanctions being lifted as long as Saddam Hussein remained in power.

  So to summarize from the available data, the alternatives appear to have been between 50,000 additional deaths per year in Iraq under sanctions, or 50,000 additional Iraqi deaths in three years in the conflict (three times more).

  I know you're going to say you didn't support the sanctions. I didn't either. But I want you to acknowledge that invasion was preferable to sanctions in terms of human suffering. If you won't acknowledge that, then I think it's clear that you are simply motivated by an ideological opposition to U.S. government military intervention, rather than a desire to minimize Iraqi deaths.

  When I say it's about intervention, not war, I'm not talking about the causes of death in Iraq, which you seem to assume below. What I'm talking about is that Libertarians like yourself, the people at Anti-War.com, etc., are not in fact anti-war at all! You are anti-intervention. In your words, "I would never support any USA intervention in any country anywhere for any reason." I don't think you would say, "I would never support any war in any country anywhere for any reason," would you? You oppose war only to the extent that such a position is in synch with your anti-interventionist views. Therefore it is more honest for you to call yourselves "anti-USgov intervention" than "anti-war." I think you are trying to avoid acknowledging this.

  Isn't it true that you would rather see a war between, say, Israel and Iraq, than a U.S. government military intervention to stop such a war, even if you thought USgov intervention would result in fewer casualties? Please answer this question.

Yours in liberty,
        <<< starchild >>>

Dear Starchild;

A major clarification: I oppose wars. I oppose interventions. I oppose sanctions. I oppose trade embargoes. I oppose all such geo-political drivel.

Sanctions are sanctimoneous posturings of politicians who will always find gimmicks for friends of the family to make profits at the expense of dead civilians. Such as the phony UN Oil for Food program.

Sanctions always have unintended consequences as the 500,000 Iraqi children who starved to death or died from disease and malnutrition will attest. Then you have the stone hearted Madeline Albright who said it was worth it!!! Plus the innocent adult civilians who died from disease and starvation who could be considered to be the collateral damage by products of the sanctions.

Starchild you asked: Isn't it true that you would rather see a war between, say, Israel and Iraq, than a U.S. government military intervention to stop such a war, even if you thought USgov intervention would result in fewer casualties? Please answer this question.

I would oppose any intervention in a war between Israel and Iraq as Iraq is in no position to go to war against Israel and I can not conceive of any reason for Iraq to go to war against Israel as the US would have to approve such a thing as the US is running Iraq.

Did you really mean Israel and Iran? That could get interesting as Iran would have to go through Iraq to get to Israel or vice versa. Unless of course Israel used its nuclear weapons and turned the Middle East into one glow in the dark hot spot.

Yours in Stopping the Utter Madness of Wars and Interventions and Sanctions

Ron Getty
SF Libertarian

Ron,

  Yes, I did mean Israel and Iran -- sorry for the confusion. So I'd still like to hear your answer to that hypothetical, beyond your observation that it could "get interesting."

  Of course in my ideal world there would be no sanctions, wars, trade embargoes, or interventions either. Not to mention no starvation, disease, or aggression!

  But sometimes these values come into conflict with each other. The question is, what do you do then? Given a choice between sanctions expected to kill hundreds of thousands of people, or an intervention expected to kill a fraction of that number, which course of action should libertarians support as more preferable? Note I did not say "the most preferable," just "more preferable."

  The most preferable course of action in Iraq, in my view, would have been a non-coercively funded effort to take out Saddam Hussein's regime. Of course he could have been left to his own devices, ignoring the suffering of the people under his sway, as the European powers once took a "hands off" approach with Hitler.

  Just please don't call a policy that consciously allows the invasions of places like Kuwait, Iran, Sudatenland, and Alsace-Lorraine "anti-war."

Yours in liberty,
        <<< starchild >>>

Dear Starchild;

On Israel and Iran let the two fools blow themselves up. Then we'd have that much damn fool nonsense to worry about in the Middle East and the US could devote its fool undivided attention to further screwing up Iran.

Then we'd have no more posturing about Iran's nuclear 5 light years away nuclear bomb program and stop having to send $10 billion a year in aid to Israel and being led around by a ring through the nose when it comes to what's best for Israel over what's best for the US without Israel yanking the chain.

Then the Palestinains could have what's left as long as it didn't glow in the dark and could re-name the land Judea or some such long lost Biblical name or re-name it the State of Palestine.

Ron Getty
SF Libertarian

Ron,

  If you are joking about "let the two fools blow themselves up," please let me hear your serious response. If not, then it should be obvious that the "anti-war" label scarcely fits.

    <<< starchild >>>

Dear Starchild;

Your original question was the following:

Isn't it true that you would rather see a war between, say, Israel and Iraq ( Actually you meant Iran) , than a U.S. government military intervention to stop such a war, even if you thought USgov intervention would result in fewer casualties? Please answer this question.

Yes I would have no problem with Israel and Iran duking it out. But geography and geo-politics gets in the way of such an event happening. The geo-politics of war vs. intervention presupposes various scenarios happening politically and militarily before any intervention could be dreamed up allowing Israel and Iran to go mano a mano in a full-scale war.

First of all the conflict would be more of an aerial than ground battle. Israels airforce of some 570 aircraft would destroy Iran's airforce of some 210 aircraft either on the ground or in the air. Yes there would be Israeli casualties but not at the level to be experienced by Iran.

Secondly based on manpower active duty personnel are about equal 550,000 to 510,000. However while Israel relies on the reserve of virually all citizens 15-49 both men and women physically fit men total about 1.2 million in each group. While Iran has about 10 million men considered fit from 18-49 for military duty. Oops big differences there.

Thirdly, for Iran to get to Israel it would have to cross all of Iran and Jordan. And that ain't gonna happen.

However what could happen is Iran putting together a full-scale invasion of Iran and capturing 150,000 US hostages. Think this couldn't happen? US forces are strewn about Iran. See the mention of a 10 million man army of Iran stepping across the Iran border. Remember Iran fought Iraq for 10 years and lost 400,000 dead to Iraq's 600,000 dead. Ooops don't want that hostage situation to happen. Then Iran could use the hostages as cover for a cross Iran invasion of Israel. Then even with the US and Israeli airforces pounding the ground forces Itan would still have enough soldiers left over to swamp Israel.

Of course there would be the likelyhood of also calling on Jordan and Syrian and Egyptian troops to join the battle.
Israel would be forced to use its nuclear weapons like it almost did in the Yom Kippur War when Egypt made Israel blink and only through some fortunates of war and some errors by Egyptian field commanders did the Israelis win that one. But it was very close for awhile.

Israel is not equipped to fight a war across Jordan into Iran and across Iran to Iraq. Therefore US intervention is problematic or non-essential and not needed because the Israleis while they may be dumb aren't stupid.

Ron ( The Desert Fox Rommel) Getty
SF ( Sand Box Warrior) Libertarian

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