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How Many Iraqis Died in the Iraq War?[W:496]

HOW MANY IRAQIS DIED?

  • Total voters
    45
  • Poll closed .
ecofarm said:
No, I should include that (his selling of the food). It would be about #6. The original #6 refers to the country having resources to pay for its own development to a large extent.
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Yes, I think that should be included. Allowing his own people to starve to line his own pockets should count too.

The UN Security Council started the Oil-for-Food program in 1996 to allow Iraq to sell enough oil to pay for food and other necessities for its population, which was suffering under strict UN sanctions imposed after the first Gulf War. But Saddam Hussein exploited the program, earning some $1.7 billion through kickbacks and surcharges, and $10.9 billion through illegal oil smuggling, according to a 2004 Central Intelligence Agency investigation. Wide-scale mismanagement and unethical conduct on the part of some UN employees also plagued the program, according to the UN Independent Inquiry Committee.
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ecofarm said:
I don't think it was a reason for the war. It was a reason why Iraq was at the top of the priority list, though other things were obviously far more important factors.
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Actually, I think they were that high on the priority list because we already had forces engaged there. In particular, the Air Force had several "Low Density, High Utilization" "Combat multiplier" units constantly tied up there since the end of the Gulf War. Iraq was on the list and it would make no sense to remove those units only to bring them back again later while also allowing Saddam free reign to do as he pleased. These systems could not be removed until the Iraq issue was settled, one way or the other.

Bush gave him a choice, comply or we end you. Since Neither G.H.Bush or Clinton had actually taken steps to end it, So-damned-insane didn't have a reason to believe we would do anything to him at all except maybe bomb a couple of facilities and then things would return to the way they were. G.H. Bush and Clinton bombed him several times, ostensibly over him playing games and kicking out the inspectors who were their to ascertain the status of his chemical weapons programs. However, he eventually kicked them out without Clinton responding (for various reasons). G.W. Bush gave the ultimatum, let them in, let them do their jobs or we end it our way. Saddam made his choice, Bush needed those assets elsewhere and didn't follow the familiar pattern.

Those assets were there to enforce the Northern and Southern No Fly zones that were established because Saddam liked to go bomb civilians and the UN didn't believe he should be allowed to. Not to mention the fact that the UN also didn't like the fact that he had gassed an unarmed village inside his own country. Saddam didn't like this and would occasionally target and even shoot at forces there to enforce the No-Fly zones. I was a crewmember on one of those assets, hence why I said he would sometimes shoot at me. (There were also zones where his movement of ground troops was also restricted)

So while oil might have played a role, the simple fact is that we could get far more oil from Iran if that was our goal. We needed to free up assets in order to continue the War on Terror. Unfortunately, while we did indeed free up those assets, we tied up too many of our other assets, so we ground to a halt.
 
DaveFagan said:
You should care because it was a "war of choice" not a defense against a threat or attack. The dead are still dead and We, the USA people are the fingers on the triggers. We took the war to Iraq and Iraq presented no threat, although it does have lots of feedstock for those Tejas refineries. OIL, me bucko, Black Gold and that's a damn good reason to attack and wipeout those slimy, no-good, usin' up my oxygen Iraqis. War is good bidness, and bidness is good, eh? I'm speakin' Texican there.
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Perhaps you should take off your "I hate Bush" glasses and take a closer look at the history leading up to the events. You might also take a closer look at the history of how much oil we actually get from Iraq and the middle east.
 
The main reason was to try to squelch extremism in the Arab world by creating a model where there was a dictator that everyone could agree needed to go. The strategy was fine, the tactics were horrible. Rumsfeld screwed the pooch by ignoring Shinseki.

Oil was way, way down the list.
 
Gwynne Dyer: Decade-old lessons from George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq

'WHY DID GEORGE W. Bush choose March 19, 2003, to invade Iraq, rather than some day in May, or July, or never? Because he was afraid that further delay would give United Nations arms inspectors time to refute the accusation—his sole pretext for making an unprovoked attack on an independent country—that Saddam Hussein’s regime was working on nuclear weapons.

The U.S. president couldn’t say that, of course, and so instead his administration’s spokesmen mumbled about the need to get the war over and done with before the summer heat made fighting impossible. Yet American soldiers proved perfectly capable of operating in that summer heat during the ensuing seven years of fighting, in which over 4,000 of them were killed.

That was nothing compared to the number of Iraqi deaths. At least five times as many Iraqis have died violently in the decade since the U.S. invasion as were killed by Saddam’s regime in the 10 years before the invasion. The exact number is unknown, but Saddam’s secret police were probably killing less than 2,000 people a year from 1993 to 2003. An estimated 121,000 Iraqi civilians have died in the military and political struggles of the past 10 years.

Iraq’s infrastructure has still not recovered to its prewar level. More than a million Iraqis still live in internal exile, unable to return to the homes from which they were “cleansed” during the Sunni-Shia sectarian war of 2006–2007. Another million have fled the country for good, including a large proportion of the country’s intellectual and professional elite.

Iraq ranks eighth from the bottom on Transparency International’s corruption index, ahead of Somalia and North Korea but below Haiti and Equatorial Guinea. The government in Baghdad, though dominated by sectarian Shia politicians, does little for the impoverished Shia majority. The Sunni minority fears and hates it. And the Kurdish ethnic minority in the north just ignores Baghdad and runs a state that is independent in all but name.

Iraq’s courts do the regime’s will, torture is endemic, and the swollen army and “security” forces (used almost exclusively for internal repression) eat up a huge share of the budget. And from the perspective of American grand strategy, the main result of the war has been to weaken the position of the U.S. in the Gulf region and strengthen that of its perceived opponent, Iran.

The United States spent about $800 billion on the Iraq war, and will eventually spend at least another trillion dollars on military pensions, disability payments, and debt service. Yet it achieved less than nothing. Why on earth did it invade in the first place?

Even the defenders of the invasion have stopped claiming that Saddam Hussein was cooperating with al-Qaeda terrorists who were plotting to attack the United States. They were also plotting to overthrow and kill Saddam, as everyone with any knowledge of the Middle East already knew.

The UN weapons inspectors never found the slightest evidence that Saddam had revived the nuclear weapons program that had been dismantled under UN supervision in the early 1990s. The people in the White House who took the decision to invade must have known that there was no such program: the way they carefully worded their propaganda in order to avoid explicit lying is ample evidence of that.

The strategist Edward Luttwak once suggested that the real reason was that the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 had been too easy. After 9/11 the American people really wanted to punish somebody, and Afghanistan had not provided enough catharsis. So another invasion was an emotional necessity, and, given the American public’s ignorance about the Middle East, almost any Arab country would do.

There was certainly a parallel desire among the neo-conservatives in the Bush White House to restore American power to unchallenged dominance after what they saw as the fecklessness of Bill Clinton’s administrations in the 1990s. That required a short and successful war that would put everyone else in awe and fear of American military might—but, once again, any weak and unpopular country would have done. Why Iraq?

The closest we can come to a rational answer is the argument, common in Washington a decade ago, that permanent military bases in Iraq would give America strategic control over the entire Gulf region.

The role of those bases would not be to ensure prompt delivery of the region’s oil to the United States at a low price: only 11 percent of U.S. oil imports come from there. The bases would instead enable the United States to block Gulf exports of oil to China if the United States found itself in a confrontation with that country. (Geostrategic arguments are often frivolous.)

None of these explanations can justify what was done, and we haven’t even gone into the damage done to international law by this blatantly criminal act. But can we at least conclude that the world, or even just the United Nations, has learned a lesson from all this?

Probably yes for the United States, at least until memories fade. (Give it 10 more years.) Not so much for the rest of the world, but then most other countries are less prone to invade faraway places anyway.'

Gwynne Dyer: Decade-old lessons from George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq | Georgia Straight
 
Geoist said:
I find it interesting you have a quote from Mencken in your sig. A man who would have been very opposed to the Iraq War. ;)
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Mencken was not infallible. He didn't support World War II, either.
 
DaveFagan said:
Gosh! Have you already forgotten that great TV show "Shock and Awe," on location in Baghdad and Iraq? Produced and Directed by the leader of buffoonery and ignorance, the infamous First Moron, his slipperiness, GWBush.
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All totally avoidable by your man, crazy Saddam.
 
DA60 said:
Gwynne Dyer: Decade-old lessons from George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq

'WHY DID GEORGE W. Bush choose March 19, 2003, to invade Iraq, rather than some day in May, or July, or never? Because he was afraid that further delay would give United Nations arms inspectors time to refute the accusation—his sole pretext for making an unprovoked attack on an independent country—that Saddam Hussein’s regime was working on nuclear weapons.

The U.S. president couldn’t say that, of course, and so instead his administration’s spokesmen mumbled about the need to get the war over and done with before the summer heat made fighting impossible. Yet American soldiers proved perfectly capable of operating in that summer heat during the ensuing seven years of fighting, in which over 4,000 of them were killed.

That was nothing compared to the number of Iraqi deaths. At least five times as many Iraqis have died violently in the decade since the U.S. invasion as were killed by Saddam’s regime in the 10 years before the invasion. The exact number is unknown, but Saddam’s secret police were probably killing less than 2,000 people a year from 1993 to 2003. An estimated 121,000 Iraqi civilians have died in the military and political struggles of the past 10 years.

Iraq’s infrastructure has still not recovered to its prewar level. More than a million Iraqis still live in internal exile, unable to return to the homes from which they were “cleansed” during the Sunni-Shia sectarian war of 2006–2007. Another million have fled the country for good, including a large proportion of the country’s intellectual and professional elite.

Iraq ranks eighth from the bottom on Transparency International’s corruption index, ahead of Somalia and North Korea but below Haiti and Equatorial Guinea. The government in Baghdad, though dominated by sectarian Shia politicians, does little for the impoverished Shia majority. The Sunni minority fears and hates it. And the Kurdish ethnic minority in the north just ignores Baghdad and runs a state that is independent in all but name.

Iraq’s courts do the regime’s will, torture is endemic, and the swollen army and “security” forces (used almost exclusively for internal repression) eat up a huge share of the budget. And from the perspective of American grand strategy, the main result of the war has been to weaken the position of the U.S. in the Gulf region and strengthen that of its perceived opponent, Iran.

The United States spent about $800 billion on the Iraq war, and will eventually spend at least another trillion dollars on military pensions, disability payments, and debt service. Yet it achieved less than nothing. Why on earth did it invade in the first place?

Even the defenders of the invasion have stopped claiming that Saddam Hussein was cooperating with al-Qaeda terrorists who were plotting to attack the United States. They were also plotting to overthrow and kill Saddam, as everyone with any knowledge of the Middle East already knew.

The UN weapons inspectors never found the slightest evidence that Saddam had revived the nuclear weapons program that had been dismantled under UN supervision in the early 1990s. The people in the White House who took the decision to invade must have known that there was no such program: the way they carefully worded their propaganda in order to avoid explicit lying is ample evidence of that.

The strategist Edward Luttwak once suggested that the real reason was that the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 had been too easy. After 9/11 the American people really wanted to punish somebody, and Afghanistan had not provided enough catharsis. So another invasion was an emotional necessity, and, given the American public’s ignorance about the Middle East, almost any Arab country would do.

There was certainly a parallel desire among the neo-conservatives in the Bush White House to restore American power to unchallenged dominance after what they saw as the fecklessness of Bill Clinton’s administrations in the 1990s. That required a short and successful war that would put everyone else in awe and fear of American military might—but, once again, any weak and unpopular country would have done. Why Iraq?

The closest we can come to a rational answer is the argument, common in Washington a decade ago, that permanent military bases in Iraq would give America strategic control over the entire Gulf region.

The role of those bases would not be to ensure prompt delivery of the region’s oil to the United States at a low price: only 11 percent of U.S. oil imports come from there. The bases would instead enable the United States to block Gulf exports of oil to China if the United States found itself in a confrontation with that country. (Geostrategic arguments are often frivolous.)

None of these explanations can justify what was done, and we haven’t even gone into the damage done to international law by this blatantly criminal act. But can we at least conclude that the world, or even just the United Nations, has learned a lesson from all this?

Probably yes for the United States, at least until memories fade. (Give it 10 more years.) Not so much for the rest of the world, but then most other countries are less prone to invade faraway places anyway.'

Gwynne Dyer: Decade-old lessons from George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq | Georgia Straight
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And once again we reinforce what the poll clearly defines. There is that which many Republicans want to believe separated from the truth. A nice rewrite of history is all that's required and I think some people are paid to deliver that history just like the surveillance. Then there is the truth divide caused by "partisanship," equally obvious from the poll. Iraq is/was about OIL and profit. "War is good business and business is good." Why else would the USA have a $700 billion Military Offense budget when there are no threats. Hegemony!
 
Wiggen said:
All totally avoidable by your man, crazy Saddam.
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Saddam attacked no one! We attacked Iraq. OIL. Let's see now, sand, sand fleas, scorpions, OIL and would anybody want any of that? We are Capitalism/Corporatism and this is our gov't profiting the Big Energy Corporations as a payback for bribes, oops, I mean campaign donations to the votes they own in the Congress. I only get one vote. Why am I subsidizing Big Energy? I'd rather give a skid row bum a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20.
 
DaveFagan said:
Saddam attacked no one!
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No one?

What about Iran, Kuwait, Kurds, Marsh Arabs, coalition aircraft, women, children...

The real question is who didn't Saddam attack.
 
ecofarm said:
No one?

What about Iran, Kuwait, Kurds, Marsh Arabs, coalition aircraft, women, children...

The real question is who didn't Saddam attack.
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Iran - Yep, he did that. We attacked Mexico at one time too.

Kuwait - The Kuwaiti's were using horizontal drilling techniques to tap into Iraqi oil fields, stealing Iraqi oil, and the Iraqi's knew it. Add that into a broke Iraqi national treasury, and the opinion that Kuwait was the 19th province of Iraq, and you have a takeover waiting to happen.

Marsh Arabs and Kurds were always trod upon. The Turks still look down upon their own Kurdish population and regularly pursue them into northern Iraq.

Coalition Aircraft? - What would happen if foreign combat aircraft were flying in US airspace? Hello....self-defense.

Women, children - Yep, wimminz and chill'un's most affected. I'm surprised that you didn't mention tribal animosities.
 
How Many Iraqis Died in the Iraq War?

Ford289HiPo said:
Iran - Yep, he did that. We attacked Mexico at one time too.

Kuwait - The Kuwaiti's were using horizontal drilling techniques to tap into Iraqi oil fields, stealing Iraqi oil, and the Iraqi's knew it. Add that into a broke Iraqi national treasury, and the opinion that Kuwait was the 19th province of Iraq, and you have a takeover waiting to happen.

Marsh Arabs and Kurds were always trod upon. The Turks still look down upon their own Kurdish population and regularly pursue them into northern Iraq.

Coalition Aircraft? - What would happen if foreign combat aircraft were flying in US airspace? Hello....self-defense.

Women, children - Yep, wimminz and chill'un's most affected. I'm surprised that you didn't mention tribal animosities.
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Self defense? They were under a ceasefire. Why isn't that clear to you?

Saddam agreed to no fly zones and when Schwartzkopf gave an exemption he used the opportunity to attack his own people.
 
Ford289HiPo said:
Iran - Yep, he did that. We attacked Mexico at one time too.

Kuwait - The Kuwaiti's were using horizontal drilling techniques to tap into Iraqi oil fields, stealing Iraqi oil, and the Iraqi's knew it. Add that into a broke Iraqi national treasury, and the opinion that Kuwait was the 19th province of Iraq, and you have a takeover waiting to happen.

Marsh Arabs and Kurds were always trod upon. The Turks still look down upon their own Kurdish population and regularly pursue them into northern Iraq.

Coalition Aircraft? - What would happen if foreign combat aircraft were flying in US airspace? Hello....self-defense.

Women, children - Yep, wimminz and chill'un's most affected. I'm surprised that you didn't mention tribal animosities.
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That Ford 289 Hi Po was a great little engine. Sometimes when one communes with ostriches and forgets to wash the sand out of their eyes, they become discombobbled. Happens frequently on this forum and is really fun to watch. Like the zoo, you're not supposed to feed the animals, but sometimes it's hard to resist.
 
DaveFagan said:
That Ford 289 Hi Po was a great little engine. Sometimes when one communes with ostriches and forgets to wash the sand out of their eyes, they become discombobbled. Happens frequently on this forum and is really fun to watch. Like the zoo, you're not supposed to feed the animals, but sometimes it's hard to resist.
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At this point, you have completely abandoned the topic of your thread and gone into flat-out pandering and name calling.
 
VanceMack said:
Ho Chi Minhs people brutalized south Vietnamese. When we bailed on them it was far worse for them. Our mistake was not our presence in Vietnam, it was that we didnt engage the war to defeat the enemy. The error was political, tactical. We should not have been there if our intent was to not defeat the enemy and you dont defeat an enemy like North Vietnam by fighting a fight by their rules. Glad you made it home safe, but seriously dood SIDE with Minh??? You realize how many south Vietnamese people he slaughtered on his way to taking over the country...right? **** dood...considering your zeal for Minh you must have had a hard on thinking about Saddam.

How many people would have died in a Vietnamese war had Minh decided to stay his ass in North Vietnam?
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Uh.....he's right, you know. We were the invaders in a civil war that was brought on by the desire to keep France in NATO. Ho was doing what any government would do, keep his country (and his political power base) in one piece. He also wanted US support to do it.
 
AliHajiSheik said:
Self defense? They were under a ceasefire. Why isn't that clear to you?

Saddam agreed to no fly zones and when Schwartzkopf gave an exemption he used the opportunity to attack his own people.
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I see you have a pseudo-sounding Arabic name tag, but how much time have you actually spent in the region? I was there for over 3 years.

Here's a simple fact - Arabs will use any "agreement" to their own benefit. Arabs will lie for their own benefit.
When Saddam attacked his own people, the Kurds were armed and marching marching south. They wanted US assistance to topple Saddam in '91, but we refused. Saddam used the opportunity to take out the opposition.
Why aren't you complaining about the Turkish invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan during the same period, where the Turks razed villages of women and children?
 
Ford289HiPo said:
Here's a simple fact - Arabs will use any "agreement" to their own benefit. Arabs will lie for their own benefit.
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What kind of racist crap is that?

Why aren't you complaining about the Turkish invasion of Iraqi Kurdistan during the same period, where the Turks razed villages of women and children?
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Because this thread is about Iraq and Saddam.
 
ecofarm said:
/facepalm
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Don't do that too hard. Remember, Slick Willy used Iraq as a target of convenience when he dropped cruise missiles on Baghdad to cover for his indiscretions in the WH.

Look up Operation Desert Fox.
 
Ford289HiPo said:
Don't do that too hard. Remember, Slick Willy used Iraq as a target of convenience when he dropped cruise missiles on Baghdad to cover for his indiscretions in the WH.

Look up Operation Desert Fox.
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That's not why.

I was 27, I remember it just fine.
 
ecofarm said:
What kind of racist crap is that?
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Oh, the race card. :roll: It won't work. That is they way they operate in that region. It's their culture.

ecofarm said:
Because this thread is about Iraq and Saddam.
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Yep. Saddam was the leader of the only secular country in the region. Women were looked upon as equals. Saddam was effectively holding together a country that had been cobbled together by the British post WW-1. Saddam WAS a known quantity in the region. We knew him. We could quantify his actions.
Now, we have nothing but a huge black hole that will eventually break off and be absorbed by Iran and Syria, the exception is Kurdistan. They seem to be doing pretty good for themselves at the moment...until the Turks pounce on them again.
 
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