IRAQ R.I.P. = 8,000 by carbombs, 100,000

[Guest BlackJesus]

[color="green"][i]Things are going splendid [/color][/i]



[u]More than 8,000 Iraqis killed in insurgent attacks
Spokesman: Reliance on car bombs a 'distinctive shift'
Thursday, June 30, 2005[/u]

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Insurgent attacks in the last six months have killed more than 8,000 Iraqi civilians, police and troops, according to Iraq's interior minister.

Meanwhile Thursday, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad said the insurgency's reliance on car bombs is due to their "high payoffs."

In an interview with CNN, Iraqi Interior Minister Baqir Jabbur said "terrorists" had killed 8,175 people and wounded another 12,000 since January 2005.

According to the U.S. Department of Defense, there have been 307 U.S. fatalities in combat during the same period.

Jabbur said he was optimistic about the recent strides made by Iraqi security forces and predicted victory in the war against insurgents.

"We have a plan, and I think we need some months and we can get results ... We are surrounding the insurgency," he said.

Unofficial estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths during the Iraq war range from about 22,000 -- according to the Web site iraqbodycount.net -- to about 100,000 -- from an independent survey reported in The Washington Post. The Pentagon does not give numbers for civilian deaths in Iraq.

Jabbur said he believed the United States has enough troops deployed in Iraq. He said Wednesday the focus needed to remain on the training of more Iraqi troops and police.

Jabbur said the Iraqi-led counterinsurgency operation dubbed "Operation Lightning" has so far yielded 1,500 arrests of suspected insurgents around Baghdad. Of those, 500 have been released, Interior Ministry officials said.

He said Iraqi and American troops were poised to start a second phase of the operation, extending the reach of the campaign to a 60-kilometer (38-mile) radius around Baghdad.

Jabbur's office is in charge of Iraq's police force, which he said now numbers about 67,000.

The ministry hopes to recruit a total of 200,000, but financial restraints are complicating efforts to outfit them with weapons and equipment, he said.


[u]Political progress[/u]
On Thursday, U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Donald Alston said he believed fighters remained a potent, adaptive force and the lethal car bombings that have plagued Baghdad and other places in recent weeks, "will continue in Iraq for a period of time."

He estimated the number of insurgents as "between 15,000 and 20,000 at large, with a lot of that being folks who don't choose to fight every day." He estimated a core group to number in the hundreds.

Their main targets are Iraqi security forces and civilians, he said.

Alston said that in its first year of sovereignty, Iraq has made political progress and strides in developing security forces. But he noted that those forces had to be built "from scratch."

"We found an insurgency that was aggressive in several cities, frankly culminating in Falluja back in November," he said, referring to the U.S.-led offensive in November that destroyed the insurgency haven in the Anbar city.

"At that time, the attack levels were in the 900s per week. There was some ability of the insurgency and the terrorists to surge for the elections because of just how much that loss was going to mean to them.

"We have seen nothing like those levels of attacks to date since that time frame. So I think that the ability of the enemy to sustain high-volume attacks is just something that we haven't seen them to be able to reconstitute."

Alston noted the insurgents' reliance on a car bombing strategy lately, what he calls a "distinctive shift." That began when the new transitional government was announced at the end of May.

"We have seen this spring a move toward car bombs because of the high payoffs," said Alston.

Alston also pointed out that the insurgents "don't score every time they employ" a car bombing or a suicide car bombing, noting efficient procedures to interdict such strikes, detaining suspected bomb makers, and poor bomb-production quality.


[u]Other developments[/u]

U.S. and Iraqi forces hunting down insurgents in western Iraq detained two people at the site of a weapons cache Thursday. No fighting has been reported, the U.S. Marine Corps said. The Marines have been focusing on Hit, along the Euphrates River, and said that local people have helped "in locating roadside bombs and weapons caches."


The military said that local citizens in Kirkuk, north of Baghdad, helped coalition forces find "more than 4,000 pounds of high explosives near Kirkuk Air Base" Wednesday and Thursday, the military said.

[img]http://cagle.slate.msn.com/working/050629/stein.gif[/img]

[Guest BlackJesus]

[color="blue"][i][b]So let me see if I understand this correctly


In response to Bush thinking that Saddam was harboring Terrorists and that he had WMD's.....

The US has now detained Saddam, fed him Doritos, said Oops there were no WMD's, claimed that Democracy was on the march, and created a safe haven for Terrorists that now number as high as 20,000 !!!

all this after over 1,500 lives of Americans and hundreds of billions of dollars, 100,000 civilian lives, countless bldgs detoryed, .... While Osama parades around Afghanistan with his dialysis machine making Videos like he was Britney Spears sister [/b][/i][/color]


[img]http://www.aizuddindanian.com/voi/images/bush_dumb.jpg[/img]

[Guest BadassBengal]

[quote name='BlackJesus' date='Jul 1 2005, 12:45 AM'][color=blue][i][b]
The US has now detained Saddam, fed him Doritos, said Oops there were no WMD's
[right][post="109201"][/post][/right][/quote]

[img]http://forum.go-bengals.com/public/style_emoticons//24.gif[/img] [img]http://forum.go-bengals.com/public/style_emoticons//24.gif[/img] [img]http://forum.go-bengals.com/public/style_emoticons//24.gif[/img] [img]http://forum.go-bengals.com/public/style_emoticons//24.gif[/img] [img]http://forum.go-bengals.com/public/style_emoticons//24.gif[/img] [img]http://forum.go-bengals.com/public/style_emoticons//24.gif[/img]

[Storm]

Breaking News!

100 murders in Cincinnati alone!

I say we bring our soldiers back from Cincinnati! Oh wait! theres no war in Cincinnati?

[Guest CTBengalsFan]

20,000 dead in the last 2 years is better than 300,000-400,000 dead from Saddam for the few years before this started...

[Guest bengalrick]

[quote name='CTBengalsFan' date='Jul 1 2005, 07:41 AM']20,000 dead in the last 2 years is better than 300,000-400,000 dead from Saddam for the few years before this started...
[right][post="109261"][/post][/right][/quote]

facts put in perspective...





















can we ban this smartass

[Guest BlackJesus]

[quote]20,000 dead in the last 2 years is better than 300,000-400,000 dead from Saddam for the few years before this started...[/quote]


[i][b]Not true but a good attempt...... Saddam might have killed over a million of his own people over 30 years.... avg 33,000 a year. Good thing we cut that # down to 50,000 a year for 2 years. [/b][/i]

[Guest oldschooler]

[quote name='BlackJesus' date='Jul 1 2005, 01:30 PM'][i][b]Not true but a good attempt...... Saddam might have killed over a million of his own people over 30 years.... avg 33,000 a year.  Good thing we cut that # down to 50,000 a year for 2 years.    [/b][/i]
[right][post="109463"][/post][/right][/quote]



So you`re counting lives lost due to the insurgents
and "blaming" it on the U.S. ?

[Guest BlackJesus]

[quote]So you`re counting lives lost due to the insurgents
and "blaming" it on the U.S. ?[/quote]

[i][b]the total could be as high as 100,000 civilians and it doesn't distinguish between US killed or insurgent killed. Most agree the bombing from US planes killed in the neighborhood of 15-20,000. And as for insurgent number, if you believe Bush many of these terrorists have now migrated there to kill people, only because the US is there, ....... so if I send out invites to a party and the fuckers show up, whose fault is it when they spill punch on my neighbors carpet[/b][/i]

[Guest oldschooler]

[quote name='BlackJesus' date='Jul 1 2005, 01:40 PM'][i][b]the total could be as high as 100,000 civilians and it doesn't distinguish between US killed or insurgent killed.  Most agree the bombing from US planes killed in the neighborhood of 15-20,000.  And as for insurgent number, if you believe Bush many of these terrorists have now migrated there to kill people, only because the US is there, ....... so if I send out invites to a party and the fuckers show up, whose fault is it when they spill punch on my neighbors carpet[/b][/i]
[right][post="109472"][/post][/right][/quote]



By your way of thinking then Abe Lincoln was a S.O.B.
I mean he took our Nation to war and every person
killed was American and ALOT were civillians...but let`s
over look the fact that it was for the better of America
and the World...

[Guest BlackJesus]

[quote]By your way of thinking then Abe Lincoln was a S.O.B.
I mean he took our Nation to war and every person
killed was American and ALOT were civillians...but let`s
over look the fact that it was for the better of America
and the World...[/quote]

[i][b]Do you actually think this analogy works.... Abe Lincoln was fighting citizens who wanted to succeed from their country.... the ones that wanted to succeed also owned black people, and payed slave traders who packed boats and threw them overboard when the load got too heavy.


Bush invaded another seperate country on the other side of the world, siting WMD's..... now he has since said there are none, and tried to sell the whole "stopping genoicide" (even though when Saddam did most of his genocide he was an armed allie of the US)Bush did this while supporting genocidal dictators all across the globe, and his father didn't care when the Kurds were gassed in 89 [/b][/i]

[Guest oldschooler]

[quote name='BlackJesus' date='Jul 1 2005, 02:01 PM'][i][b]Do you actually think this analogy works.... Abe Lincoln was fighting citizens who wanted to succeed from their country.... the ones that wanted to succeed also owned black people, and payed slave traders who packed boats and threw them overboard when the load got too heavy.[right][post="109500"][/post][/right][/quote]


It works for me...I was making a comparison.
That doesn`t mean that they were exactly the same...
What I was saying is that BOTH did what they thought
was the best for our Country. BOTH led to civillians
and Americans being killed...






[quote]Bush invaded another seperate country on the other side of the world, siting WMD's..... now he has since said there are none, and tried to sell the whole "stopping genoicide" (even though when Saddam did most of his genocide he was an armed allie of the US)Bush did this while supporting genocidal dictators all across the globe, and his father didn't care when the Kurds were gassed in 89 [/quote]


Saddam was a thorn in our side for over a decade...
and a full year after 9/11. If he had done what he AGREED to do
after the 1st Gulf War...then there would be no war...but since he didn`t
let`s just blame Bush and tell people we are "enlightened" and "patriotic"
for doing so.

[Beaker]

The "insurgents" (media biased name for terrorists) will go wherever Americans are. They have bombed nightclubs in Europe and Indonesia, embassies in Africa, etc.

The reason they are in Iraq is that there is a power vacuum they now hope to exploit. We must stay there and make sure that vacuum is filled correctly. America was in Japan for 8 yrs after defeating them in WWII. They are an ally now.

Terrorists use car bombs and suicide bombs because they cant battle our forces directly. Also, they are playing the media game. Get the American media to report deaths every day and the support for the troops doing their jobs will erode. Thats what you guys are doing now. We ARE doing a good job there. Its not all gonna be roses in a year or two after a complete removal of a system that had been in place for over 30 yrs.

[Guest bengalrick]

beaker, great post man... our greatest enemy is ourselves and the terrorists know it... they have the best template in the world, b/c thats what happened in vietnam and now they are exploiting it... except guys like me and you keep saying it, maybe it will sink in that we just might win this war... and if we do, the world will be a better place... education, not guns are the answer, but w/out guns, we will never get in good w/ them, to educate them, or i should say their kids, b/c like many on here, they aren't going to change their minds... its just a fact of life, but over time they will be our allies... the japenese comparison is good, but not perfect b/c we were fighting the japenese gov't... we aren't fighting gov't's so it will be harder to get our message acrossed... it will take more time, but that doesn't mean that we will be in all out war for the whole time... our goal is to train the iraqi army, and come home and watch to see if others fall dictatorships fall also... hopefully, we can reform the UN and not have this problem anymore... we need a strong neutral force, w/ out corruption and veto power (b/c too much power in anything leads to abuse)... if we can get the UN doing what they should, we will be fine...

[Homer_Rice]

[quote name='Beaker' date='Jul 1 2005, 05:55 PM']The "insurgents" (media biased name for terrorists)...[right][post="109595"]<{POST_SNAPBACK}>[/post][/right][/quote]

There's an important distinction, that's why we now see the two terms used.

[Homer_Rice]

[quote name='bengalrick' date='Jul 1 2005, 08:03 PM']... our greatest enemy is ourselves and the terrorists know it...
[right][post="109649"][/post][/right][/quote]

Thank goodness we have the Patriot Act to keep us in line.

[Guest BlackJesus]

[quote]The "insurgents" (media biased name for terrorists)...[/quote]

[i][b][color="red"]I wonder what King George called The Colonialsists who were tar and feathering people, dumping tea in the harbor, and shooting at Red coats from the woods. [/color]




Each side makes their own terms, and usuall they are inaccurate. The reason why they use insurgent is because "Terrorists is one of the most misused perverted words in the English language" One who brings Terror,.... does that not apply to dropping a bomb from a B-52... that shit is terryifying. MLK and Mandela were both labeled Terrorists..... [/b][/i]

[Guest BlackJesus]

[img]http://cagle.slate.msn.com/working/050701/christo.gif[/img]

[Guest #22]

[quote name='BlackJesus' date='Jul 2 2005, 06:48 PM'][img]http://cagle.slate.msn.com/working/050701/christo.gif[/img]
[right][post="109995"]<{POST_SNAPBACK}>[/post][/right][/quote]
"Yankee dollar talk
To the dictators of the world
In fact it's giving orders
And they can't afford to miss a word"
-The Clash

[Guest BlackJesus]

[img]http://question-everything.mahost.org/images/two.jpg[/img]

[Lawman]

[u]There is no universally accepted definition of terrorism and even when people agree on a definition of terrorism, they sometimes disagree about whether or not the definition fits a particular incident[/u].

The National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism uses the definition set forth in statute by the United States Federal Government:


The term "terrorism" means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatanti targets by sub-nationalii groups or clandestine agentsiii, usually intended to influence an audience.

The term "international terrorism" means terrorism involving citizens or the territory of more than one country.

The term "terrorist group" means any group practicing, or that has significant subgroups that practice, international terrorism.

[Guest CTBengalsFan]

[quote name='BlackJesus' date='Jul 1 2005, 02:30 PM'][i][b]Not true but a good attempt...... Saddam might have killed over a million of his own people over 30 years.... avg 33,000 a year.  Good thing we cut that # down to 50,000 a year for 2 years.    [/b][/i]
[right][post="109463"][/post][/right][/quote]


50,000 a year while making the huge assumption that those numbers are accurate....

[Guest bengalrick]

i found this article today, and it goes right along w/ the "facts" that bj was presenting... it is from a right wing website, but the facts are the facts...

[quote]2) [b]A study released in March of 2003 by a British medical journal, the Lancet, showed that 100,000 civilians had been killed as a result of the US invasion.[/b] To be perfectly frank, it's hard to see how anyone who has even a passing familiarity with statistics could take Lancet's numbers seriously. Fred Kaplan from Slate explains:

"The authors of a peer-reviewed study, conducted by a survey team from Johns Hopkins University, claim that about 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war. Yet a close look at the actual study, published online today by the British medical journal the Lancet, reveals that this number is so loose as to be meaningless.
The report's authors derive this figure by estimating how many Iraqis died in a 14-month period before the U.S. invasion, conducting surveys on how many died in a similar period after the invasion began (more on those surveys later), and subtracting the difference. That difference—the number of "extra" deaths in the post-invasion period—signifies the war's toll. That number is 98,000. But read the passage that cites the calculation more fully:

[b]We estimate there were 98,000 extra deaths (95% CI 8000-194 000) during the post-war period. [/b]

Readers who are accustomed to perusing statistical documents know what the set of numbers in the parentheses means. For the other 99.9 percent of you, I'll spell it out in plain English—which, disturbingly, the study never does. [b]It means that the authors are 95 percent confident that the war-caused deaths totaled some number between 8,000 and 194,000. (The number cited in plain language—98,000—is roughly at the halfway point in this absurdly vast range.)[/b]

This isn't an estimate. It's a dart board.

[b]Imagine reading a poll reporting that George W. Bush will win somewhere between 4 percent and 96 percent of the votes in this Tuesday's election. You would say that this is a useless poll and that something must have gone terribly wrong with the sampling.[/b] The same is true of the Lancet article: It's a useless study; something went terribly wrong with the sampling."

[b]Bingo! What Lancet was in effect saying was that they believed 98,000 civilians died, but they might have been off by roughly 90,000 people or so in either direction. [/b]

Moreover, other sources at the time were coming in with numbers that were a tiny fraction of the 98,000 figure that the Lancet settled on. From a New York Times article on the Lancet study:

"[b]The 100,000 estimate immediately came under attack. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw of Britain questioned the methodology of the study and compared it with an Iraq Health Ministry figure that put civilian fatalities at less than 4,000.[/b] Other critics referred to the findings of the Iraq Body Count project, which has constructed a database of war-related civilian deaths from verified news media reports or official sources like hospitals and morgues.
[b]That database recently placed civilian deaths somewhere between 14,429 and 16,579, the range arising largely from uncertainty about whether some victims were civilians or insurgents. But because of its stringent conditions for including deaths in the database, the project has quite explicitly said, ''Our own total is certain to be an underestimate.''[/b]

Via GlobalSecurity.org, here's another Iraqi civilian death estimate:

[b]"On 20 October 2003 the Project on Defense Alternatives estimated that between 10,800 and 15,100 Iraqis were killed in the war. Of these, between 3,200 and 4,300 were noncombatants[/b] -- that is: civilians who did not take up arms."
Given all that, how any informed person can buy into Lancet's numbers is simply beyond me.[/quote]

this all came from this [url="http://www.rightwingnews.com/special/xyz.php"]article[/url], and since there are some great points in there, you may be seeing more from that article... how can estimates range from 10,000 - 15,000
another very interesting article i read today, but don't want to make its own thread for, is this [url="http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/804yqqnr.asp"]article[/url]

very, very interesting link, putting iraqi and US intellegence (info they have gotten after invasion) together to show that a saddam and al qaeda link was definatley present (come on, you knew that... just didn't want to admit it)... just for the record...
was saddam involved w/ terror and al qaeda? hell yes...
was saddam a direct part of 9/11? no...

did the bush admin ever say that he was a reason for 9/11? nope... [url="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3118262.stm"]click here[/url]

[i]"We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the 11 September attacks[/i]."

[Guest BlackJesus]

[i][b]Bengalrick... this also means that the Death toll could be as high as 194,000 you realize that right?

I love the quote on facts too... [img]http://forum.go-bengals.com/public/style_emoticons//24.gif[/img] Rush always says that [img]http://forum.go-bengals.com/public/style_emoticons//30.gif[/img] [/b][/i]

[color="blue"][i][b]regardless of the actual number which is in the thousands... those are thousands of people who are now dead for no reason.... innocent people killed by men with guns and bombs (for comfort, they had a flag with stars on stripes on their shoulder, whoopdedo)...

you know another group killed innocents too they were Al Qaeda on 9/11....

good thing we showed them.... "you're not the only fuckers who get to kill innocents, we can too" [/b][/i][/color]

[Guest bengalrick]

yeah, but it already sounds strange that two or three other sites are somewhere around 20,000 (give or take), and then this one poll comes out at 95,000 w/ a 90,000 variable and you pick the odd as one to thrive on... i realize you mentioned any where from 20,000 to 100,000 but be real... you know the number that pops out... and if the 20,000 is the more accurate number, that isn't many "straw" bombs... i'm not saying it doesn't happen, but we haven't killed 15-20,000 people from straw bombs... i just want it to be fair and ACCURATE... we are at war, and things are a little different, so we don't get out false information and start pissing everyone off... if it is a proven fact, backed up by good evidence, or in this case, if there were mixed and somewhat balanced results, through in the 100,000, but i don't think it is a fair assessment imo, and nothing to back it up...