| To: skinowski who wrote (150072) | 10/31/2004 2:34:07 PM | | From: Jacob Snyder | | | | <Do you really find Communism to be so invincible?>
Under certain situations, yes, they always won. The communists won when:
1. They championed the nationalist cause.
2. They fought on their own home turf, and we couldn't find local proxies.
3. We fought in a nation with a profoundly foreign culture
4. Our response was 100% military.
Islamism will eventually be defeated, just as Communism was. But not using the failed methods of the militarists. |
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| To: Keith Feral who wrote (150066) | 10/31/2004 2:44:52 PM | | From: Jacob Snyder | | | | <the police and troops of Iraq are fighting the resistance against rebel leaders with the help of US troops>
Iraqification is just another FaithBasedInitiative. Believing it requires ignoring all the available facts. But don't take my word for it, here's what our own military says:
From today's NY Times:
Commanders voiced fears that many of Iraq's expanding security forces, soon to be led by largely untested generals, have been penetrated by spies for the insurgents. Reconstruction aid is finally flowing into formerly rebel-held cities like Samarra and other areas, but some officers fear that bureaucratic delays could undermine the aid's calming effects. They also spoke of new American intelligence assessments that show that the insurgents have significantly more fighters - 8,000 to 12,000 hard-core militants - and far greater financial resources than previously estimated.
Perhaps most disturbing, they said, is the militants' campaign of intimidation to silence thousands of Iraqis and undermine the government through assassinations, kidnappings, beheadings and car bombings. New gangs specializing in hostage-taking are entering Iraq, intelligence reports indicate.
"If we can't stop the intimidation factor, we can't win," said Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, the commander of nearly 40,000 marines and soldiers in western and south-central Iraq, who is drawing up battle plans for a possible showdown with more than 3,000 guerrillas in Falluja and Ramadi, with the hope of destroying the leadership of the national insurgency. |
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| From: Suma | 10/31/2004 2:45:26 PM | | | | | | | Frontline is doing a TV presentation on the two candidates as I write. 2 until 4pm.. WDTV.. |
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| To: stockman_scott who wrote (150054) | 10/31/2004 2:47:07 PM | | From: toddy | | | | maureen dowd was a good read during the Clinton years.
filled with ironic humor, biting sarcasm and right on the mark. she lost her mojo in current Dubya reign but still
earns the nick from you know who - the cobra
this editorial written 10/5/03:
...........................................
Posted 10/5/2003 6:59 PM
What happened to looted Iraqi nuclear material?
By Brett Wagner
The release Thursday of chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay's report detailing America's six-month search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has reinflamed the debate over whether anyone will ever uncover that country's alleged stockpiles of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.
A great irony, however, seems to have gotten lost in that debate: As a direct result of President Bush's decision to invade Iraq without sufficient forces to secure and protect its nuclear research and storage facilities from rampant looting, enough radioactive material to build scores of dirty bombs now is missing and may be on its way to the international black market.
It didn't have to turn out this way. In the weeks before the invasion, the U.S. military repeatedly warned the White House that its war plans did not include sufficient ground forces, air and naval operations and logistical support to guarantee a successful mission. Those warnings were discounted — even mocked — by administration officials who professed to know more about war fighting than the war fighters themselves.
Undermanned
But the war fighters were right. Military commanders weren't given enough manpower and logistical support to secure all of the known nuclear sites, let alone all of the suspected ones.
It wasn't until seven of Iraq's main nuclear facilities were extensively looted that the true magnitude of the administration's strategic blunder came into focus.
The White House knew all along, for example, that enormous quantities of dangerous nuclear materials were at the Tuwaitha nuclear storage facility near Baghdad, sealed and accounted for by the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency. Soon after the war began, the IAEA warned the White House that it should strive to secure the facility quickly. When word of looting at the site began to leak out through the international media, the IAEA again warned the White House.
The looting, however, went on for more than two weeks before the U.S. took any action. When the site was finally secured and U.S. authorities permitted a brief inspection by IAEA officials, the inspectors were inexplicably forbidden to check the status of highly radioactive materials that could be used in dirty bombs. Many of these materials are now unaccounted for. What the inspectors were allowed to verify is how much uranium is now missing: at least 22 pounds.
Other looted nuclear sites include the Baghdad Nuclear Research Center, where significant quantities of partially enriched uranium, cesium, strontium and cobalt were stored. U.S. survey teams have not been able to determine how many of those materials are missing.
Small amount, huge effect
It takes only a small amount of such materials to arm a dirty bomb. The 22 pounds of missing uranium, for example, could arm a device that could shut down Capitol Hill or the New York Stock Exchange for weeks, if not months.
Properly built and encased with radioactive materials, a dirty bomb can kill thousands and render large areas uninhabitable for months or years. While their destructive capacity pales in comparison to that of actual nuclear bombs, a dirty bomb's capacity to inflict terror should never be underestimated.
Should an organization such as al-Qaeda acquire a dirty bomb, it is unlikely authorities could keep it out of the U.S. or prevent it from being detonated. Under such circumstances, a terrorist group would not even actually need to possess a second device; it would merely just have to say one was planted in a U.S. city. Imagine what the outbound highways would look like or the overall effect on our economy, our security, our civil rights, our way of life.
Several terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda, have shown interest in acquiring the radioactive materials necessary to transform an ordinary bundle of explosives into a weapon of mass terror. The blueprints and other components are commonly available. And now, thanks to sloppy war planning by the White House, the only missing component — radioactive materials — may be readily available, too.
Sort of takes the "pre-emptive" out of pre-emptive war, doesn't it?
Brett Wagner is president of the California Center for Strategic Studies and a professor at the U.S. Naval War College.
usatoday.com |
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| To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (150079) | 10/31/2004 3:21:28 PM | | From: skinowski | | | | economic stress, war with growing chaos and death counts, a divided intelligence community, isolated European allies, systemic distortion on economic reporting, clouds of suspicion on truthfulness on his lack of war service
OK, but Al Q has been denied the use of Afghanistan, which they practically owned previously..., Iraq is a big open question, as they manage to train a rather sizable military and security force... (Even Kerry thinks he could win the war from here on). Markets rallied up and haven't fallen apart yet, indicating that things may not be too bad so far.... Many people read the new OBL tape almost as a request for a hold in hostilities, and I think there may be something there to that effect... Etc, etc. In short, there are many pro's to balance the con's.
I vote for Bush - for the above and other reasons. Glad that this stupid divisive campaign is almost over. Whoever wins, I just hope that they do it with a large enough margin, so as to spare us another 4 years of lawyering over poorly impregnated chads.... |
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| To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (150102) | 10/31/2004 3:29:18 PM | | From: Noel de Leon | | | | "They say that religion is on the right side of American politics,...." Good reason for not voting for BushII.
As to hope, considering the choices that is the only strategy.
As far as the experiment Kerry/MacArthur goes neither you nor I can do other than speculate and I refuse to do so. To base ones vote on such speculation is irresponsible. |
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| To: Noel de Leon who wrote (150110) | 10/31/2004 3:49:15 PM | | From: Nadine Carroll | | | | As far as the experiment Kerry/MacArthur goes neither you nor I can do other than speculate and I refuse to do so. To base ones vote on such speculation is irresponsible
One can, however, take an open-eyed look at the man's history, not just what he's been saying for the last month. |
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| To: Noel de Leon who wrote (150099) | 10/31/2004 3:51:25 PM | | From: Nadine Carroll | | | | Just for the record the Taleban were supported by the US while the USSR was in Afghanistan. That support was massive.
Just for the record, the Taleban didn't exist while the USSR was in Afghanistan. They were formed by the Pakistani ISI with Saudi support during the civil war than followed the Soviet withdrawal. |
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| To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (150103) | 10/31/2004 4:05:21 PM | | From: skinowski | | | | JS, you mentioned the study which estimates Iraqi war-related deaths. Of course, even one single death of an innocent person is tragic... but it appears that the methodology of the study was rather faulty, and actually I am surprised that The Lancet agreed to publish it.
The crucial point, I think, is that their (interview based) estimates of pre-war mortality in Iraq are far lower then what it was shown to be in previous studies (5 per 1000 population, vs. 8.1 or 6.8 as established in pre-war studies)
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war stories
100,000 Dead—or 8,000
How many Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war?
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Friday, Oct. 29, 2004, at 3:49 PM PT
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:
We estimate there were 98,000 extra deaths (95% CI 8000-194 000) during the post-war period.
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. 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.)
This isn't an estimate. It's a dart board.
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. The same is true of the Lancet article: It's a useless study; something went terribly wrong with the sampling.
The problem is, ultimately, not with the scholars who conducted the study; they did the best they could under the circumstances. The problem is the circumstances. It's hard to conduct reliable, random surveys—and to extrapolate meaningful data from the results of those surveys—in the chaotic, restrictive environment of war.
However, these scholars are responsible for the hype surrounding the study. Gilbert Burnham, one of the co-authors, told the International Herald Tribune (for a story reprinted in today's New York Times), "We're quite sure that the estimate of 100,000 is a conservative estimate." Yet the text of the study reveals this is simply untrue. Burnham should have said, "We're not quite sure what our estimate means. Assuming our model is accurate, the actual death toll might be 100,000, or it might be somewhere between 92,000 lower and 94,000 higher than that number."
Not a meaty headline, but truer to the findings of his own study.
Here's how the Johns Hopkins team—which, for the record, was led by Dr. Les Roberts of the university's Bloomberg School of Public Health—went about its work. They randomly selected 33 neighborhoods across Iraq—equal-sized population "clusters"—and, this past September, set out to interview 30 households in each. They asked how many people in each household died, of what causes, during the 14 months before the U.S. invasion—and how many died, of what, in the 17 months since the war began. They then took the results of their random sample and extrapolated them to the entire country, assuming that their 33 clusters were perfectly representative of all Iraq.
This is a time-honored technique for many epidemiological studies, but those conducting them have to take great care that the way they select the neighborhoods is truly random (which, as most poll-watchers of any sort know, is difficult under the easiest of circumstances). There's a further complication when studying the results of war, especially a war fought mainly by precision bombs dropped from the air: The damage is not randomly distributed; it's very heavily concentrated in a few areas.
The Johns Hopkins team had to confront this problem. One of the 33 clusters they selected happened to be in Fallujah, one of the most heavily bombed and shelled cities in all Iraq. Was it legitimate to extrapolate from a sample that included such an extreme case? More awkward yet, it turned out, two-thirds of all the violent deaths that the team recorded took place in the Fallujah cluster. They settled the dilemma by issuing two sets of figures—one with Fallujah, the other without. The estimate of 98,000 deaths is the extrapolation from the set that does not include Fallujah. What's the extrapolation for the set that does include Fallujah? They don't exactly say. Fallujah was nearly unique; it's impossible to figure out how to extrapolate from it. A question does arise, though: Is this difficulty a result of some peculiarity about the fighting in Fallujah? Or is it a result of some peculiarity in the survey's methodology?
There were other problems. The survey team simply could not visit some of the randomly chosen clusters; the roads were blocked off, in some cases by coalition checkpoints. So the team picked other, more accessible areas that had received similar amounts of damage. But it's unclear how they made this calculation. In any case, the detour destroyed the survey's randomness; the results are inherently tainted. In other cases, the team didn't find enough people in a cluster to interview, so they expanded the survey to an adjoining cluster. Again, at that point, the survey was no longer random, and so the results are suspect.
Beth Osborne Daponte, senior research scholar at Yale University's Institution for Social and Policy Studies, put the point diplomatically after reading the Lancet article this morning and discussing it with me in a phone conversation: "It attests to the difficulty of doing this sort of survey work during a war. … No one can come up with any credible estimates yet, at least not through the sorts of methods used here."
The study, though, does have a fundamental flaw that has nothing to do with the limits imposed by wartime—and this flaw suggests that, within the study's wide range of possible casualty estimates, the real number tends more toward the lower end of the scale. In order to gauge the risk of death brought on by the war, the researchers first had to measure the risk of death in Iraq before the war. Based on their survey of how many people in the sampled households died before the war, they calculated that the mortality rate in prewar Iraq was 5 deaths per 1,000 people per year. The mortality rate after the war started—not including Fallujah—was 7.9 deaths per 1,000 people per year. In short, the risk of death in Iraq since the war is 58 percent higher (7.9 divided by 5 = 1.58) than it was before the war.
But there are two problems with this calculation. First, Daponte (who has studied Iraqi population figures for many years) questions the finding that prewar mortality was 5 deaths per 1,000. According to quite comprehensive data collected by the United Nations, Iraq's mortality rate from 1980-85 was 8.1 per 1,000. From 1985-90, the years leading up to the 1991 Gulf War, the rate declined to 6.8 per 1,000. After '91, the numbers are murkier, but clearly they went up. Whatever they were in 2002, they were almost certainly higher than 5 per 1,000. In other words, the wartime mortality rate—if it is 7.9 per 1,000—probably does not exceed the peacetime rate by as much as the Johns Hopkins team assumes.
The second problem with the calculation goes back to the problem cited at the top of this article—the margin of error. Here is the relevant passage from the study: "The risk of death is 1.5-fold (1.1 – 2.3) higher after the invasion." Those mysterious numbers in the parentheses mean the authors are 95 percent confident that the risk of death now is between 1.1 and 2.3 times higher than it was before the invasion—in other words, as little as 10 percent higher or as much as 130 percent higher. Again, the math is too vague to be useful.
There is one group out there counting civilian casualties in a way that's tangible, specific, and very useful—a team of mainly British researchers, led by Hamit Dardagan and John Sloboda, called Iraq Body Count. They have kept a running total of civilian deaths, derived entirely from press reports. Their count is triple fact-checked; their database is itemized and fastidiously sourced; and they take great pains to separate civilian from combatant casualties (for instance, last Tuesday, the group released a report estimating that, of the 800 Iraqis killed in last April's siege of Fallujah, 572 to 616 of them were civilians, at least 308 of them women and children).
The IBC estimates that between 14,181 and 16,312 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war—about half of them since the battlefield phase of the war ended last May. The group also notes that these figures are probably on the low side, since some deaths must have taken place outside the media's purview.
So, let's call it 15,000 or—allowing for deaths that the press didn't report—20,000 or 25,000, maybe 30,000 Iraqi civilians killed in a pre-emptive war waged (according to the latest rationale) on their behalf. That's a number more solidly rooted in reality than the Hopkins figure—and, given that fact, no less shocking.
Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate.
Article URL: slate.msn.com |
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