A Reader’s Report: Deeper into the Lancet Numbers
Thousand of articles and blog-postings worldwide have already been generated in response to the so-called “Lancet Report” which suggests 100,000 Iraqi war deaths.
Let’s add one more. One of our most intrepid and industrious blog commenters — none other than the now infamous GMroper — who stirred it up here last week with his profiling of both John Kerry and GW Bush – is back with another provocative contribution.
I want you to take a few minutes to read his entire argument which I have saved to a file and that you can read by clicking here. GM goes farther than the Fred Kaplan piece I posted yesterday in deconstructing and really demolishing the figure of 100,000 deaths contained in the Lancet Report. As Kaplan also noted, the real figure based on the report’s methodology might be as high as 198,000 or as low as 8,000 or maybe much lower or higher. Indeed, GM figures that there’s 1/10th of 1% per cent chance that it is 100,000.
Says GM of his analysis– which he has written up just for this blog:
“Two caveats should be noted here: (1), Figures do not lie, but liars figure. In addition, (2) there are three types of lies: Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics.”
Reading GM you’ll see he’s a very handy statistician. And, while like most of us, GM has made his own political views quite open on this blog (GM’s one of our resident Bushies), his deconstruction is not ideological or political. Nor does it write off the crucial importance of what the actual number of war dead might really be:
“The loss of life for these people is horrendous enough without a biased and frankly partisan report sent out with obvious efforts to effect an election. Should you doubt that, please consider the following. (1) they claim peer review, but that was done in only a few weeks, I have talked to many colleagues who tell me peer review is seldom done in less than 6 months and often it takes a year. (2) Les Roberts, the principal author of this article insisted that it be published before the election, ostensibly so that both candidates would make comment about the need to protect civilians and plan to do so. Hogwash, only one of the two candidates has a chance to do that and that is the winner of the election. Publishing the results after the election would have given the winner then necessary message. And lastly, (3) Les Roberts was a vocal critic of the war in the first place, do you really think he didn’t want to “effect” the election process and used horrendous numbers to do so? Lies, damn lies and statistics indeed!”
I also want to go out of my way to clarify why I have now done two postings on this issue. I feel compelled to offer the explanation after I have been chastised by the politically correct (and the morally impaired) for, say, giving Fidel too hard a time without giving “equal time” to offenses committed in Haiti.
I have done two postings on this precisely because I oppose the war in Iraq and because I am rather disgusted with the way the administration not only bans photos of our own war dead but also doesn’t bother to publish some estimate of the Iraqi civilian dead.
This is an unacceptable standard — one that serves as an example of how not to do things. Therefore, IMHO. tossing around unreliable, imprecise and flawed tallies of the victims of unjust policy only plays into the hands of those who shape that policy by discreditng its critics.
I’m not speaking for GM here, only for myself. But what a pleasure to have such an engaged commenter as GM who has taken the time and effort to make one more outstanding contribution to our ongoing and open dialogue.
Again our ground rules: Flail away or applaud GM’s work. Leave his person and your unfounded guesses about his motive and intent out.
October 30th, 2004 at 11:56 pm
Your objections to the current Administration, in my estimation, are vastly bolstered by your objections to the unprincipled critics of said Admin. Unforntunately, aside from my Korean and Vietnam vet father, you are the only sane opposition voice I hear.
George Bush should be losing, nay should be lost, yet when the best the Democrats can set forth is JF Kerry speaks volumes to the dearth of character within US politics.
October 31st, 2004 at 1:58 am
Marc, I’d be careful about being prematurely impressed with GMroper’s statistical acumen. Your own leaves something to be desired. There is actually far less than a 1/10th of 1% chance of the actual figure being 100,000 – exactly 100,000, that is. (GMRoper can probably explain why.) You might retort, “Well, you know what I meant.” Actually, Marc, I don’t. Because YOU don’t know you mean when you say it. Statistics is a trickier subject than that. I know: I got a solid year of it under my belt in college, as part of two years of engineering-degree math prerequistites. (And I’m glad I did, because later, in physics, I was able to understand perfectly what Einstein REALLY got the Nobel Prize for.)
GMRoper doesn’t cite sources in any detail. Doesn’t that make you at least a little suspicious? His figures for UNICEF’s estimate of infant mortality rate now in Iraq, for example. I go to UNICEF and I get a slightly different number:
http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/iraq.html
You also get a different picture, one that suggest that UNICEF only gets numbers from the parts of Iraq it feels safe enough in.
The important thing to understand about methodology in cases like these is this: such radical uncertainties are themselves a huge, blinking red light. If a country can’t count its own war dead to within a reasonable margin of error when civilian casualties are touted as being unprecedentedly light, you’re looking at a country that’s still in very big trouble. Could it be 8,000 or less? Could it be 195,000 or more? Geez, it’s pretty messed up that we can’t even tell, isn’t it?
GMRoper is worried that a household can’t produce a death certificate for the dead child it might still be grieving. Gee, it couldn’t have been because the hospital was closed for weeks or months? Without electricity for too long? Maybe the doctors closed that hospital because they realized it was becoming more dangerous than leaving their patients were sitting out in the street, watching their babies die in their arms?
GMRoper supposes that people would exaggerate the number of deaths in their own household, and hypothesizes this on a basis that draws not from any previous studies of similarly distressed populations, and any follow-on corrections to those demographics , but rather from … I still can’t believe this … a much-noted INDUSTRIAL-psych phenomenon he remembers as “the Westinghouse effect.” Bzzt. Roper, that’s called “the Hawthorne Effect.” And please note: the original interpretation of the Hawthorne Effect has long since been debunked anyway:
http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/history/hawthorne.html
But the real howler is Roper’s “methodology” in even dragging the Hawthorne Effect into a picture like family grief. How do you work that, Roper? Families become ever more “productive” of exaggerations of their grief, the more “official” the census taker is? Oh please.
Is this recent study nevertheless flawed? And perhaps seriously so? I wouldn’t be terribly surprised. That happens. Many supporting figures for the supposed Cambodian “autogenocide” trace back to a politically-motivated census conducted by the invading Vietnamese, during which they asked, merely, “did the Khmer Rouge kill any of your family?” In close-knit clan-based Cambodian rural society, same dead second cousin ended up being counted six times or more. This study sounds like it might have serious geographic skew, apart from having better-than-Vietnamese methodology overall. Interestingly, the authors defend it as the same methodology used to estimate the number of Kosovars killed by Serbs. Gee, could they be referring to a certain study that estimated 200,000 Kosovars killed (a number that figured heavily in the apologetics for NATO’s collateral damage to Serbia), when the real figure turned out to closer to 20,000? Hm, I’m not going there.
Suffice it to say: I agree that this report, the haste with which it was released, the possible lack of adequate peer review, and the pre-election timing all indicate that there is partisan bias in the TIMING at least. What alarms me is that, as far as I know, nobody else is in an unbiased position to tell me, to within a reasonable confidence interval, just how bad the collateral damage is. Why is the picture still so fuzzy in the run-up to an election where Bush only puts rose-tinted Iraq-ulors before carefully filtered partisan audiences while out on this increasingly frenetic presidential stump? The U.S. invaded in spring 2003, and we don’t even know how many people died as a result, to within TENS of thousands? So how can we possibly know how many January Iraqi votes will be legit?
October 31st, 2004 at 4:47 am
When I posted the above, I hadn’t read Fred Kaplan’s supposedly devastating “deconstruction” of the Lancet report. Now, having read Kaplan, I’m even more appalled by the statistical illiteracy of certain high profile detractors of this report.
It would be very easy to go blow-by-blow, tearing apart what Kaplan has so blithely thrown together … so … let’s get started!
The New York Time article immediately cited by Kaplan leads off with this:
“An estimated 100,000 civilians have died in Iraq as a direct or indirect consequence of the March 2003 United States-led invasion …”
This is ridiculous – the actual authors of the article don’t claim anything like the precision implied. No wonder Kaplan was disappointed to read the actual article, which begins:
“The risk of death was estimated to be 2.5-fold (95%CI 1.6 –4.2) higher after the invasion when compared with the preinvasion period. Two-thirds of all violent deaths were reported in one cluster in the city of Falluja. If we exclude the Falluja data, the risk of death is 1.5-fold (1.1 –2.3) higher after the invasion. We estimate that 98,000 more deaths than expected happened after the invasion outside of Falluja and far more if the outlier Falluja cluster is included.”
Now, note the word “expected.” This isn’t your father’s “expected” as in “we expected the baby sometime in the last two weeks, but finally went for a C-section.” This is the “expected” of the highly technical field of statistics, which allows for vary wide ranges, and yet is meaningful in a statistical sense. The *expected* IQ of the next person you run into is exactly 100. The probability that it will be 63 is quite low. The likelihood that it’s significantly higher or lower than 100 is nevertheless very high, but the probability of a given IQ trails off as you diverge from 100.
A bit further on in the Lancet report: “Interpretation: an estimated 100,000 civilians have died in Iraq as a direct or indirect consequence of the March 2003 United States-led invasion …”
Well, considering that they decided to exclude Fallujah, and avoided areas that even their fellow Iraqi researchers considered too dangerous, why is this unreasonable, in light of all their previous, careful qualifications to the number? In view of the endless qualifications (the main text of the article says right out that the number is “uncertain”, why is Kaplan pretending that this report hides its uncertainties in statistical jargon? He quotes this bit:
“We estimate there were 98,000 extra deaths (95% CI 8000-194 000) during the post-war period.”
Then says this – quite sneeringly, too – about it:
“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.”
“Disturbingly”? It’s an article for technical professionals! Are they supposed to have a “Statistics for Dummies” sidebar?
Kaplan continues:
“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.”
That may be plain English, but it doesn’t spell it out. Because if it did, you’d see that it’s Kaplan who has gotten something terribly wrong.
Draw a bell curve. You’ve seen those, right? Now draw two vertical lines, one at each tail, just about where you think 5% of the area under the curve would be included to the left or right. That’s what “(95% CI 8000-194 000)” means. It doesn’t mean that the probability of 8,000 deaths or 194,000 deaths is equal to the probability of 100,000 deaths. Exactly 100,000 deaths is very unlikely, but it’s still considerably more likely than those other two numbers. Kaplan’s looseness with statistics extends to his “99.9%” – actually, more than one person in a thousand is likely to see the reasoning flaw implied above, if only because more than 0.1% of the population has taken some kind of statistics course.
Kaplan continues:
“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.”
Apples and oranges. The authors of this study don’t hide the reasons behind the high likelihood of error, much as Kaplan would like to pretend they did. They are quite forthright about the possible sources of error. The clearly stated uncertainties stem from conservatism on the part of the researchers, and from chaotic state of data collection in Iraq today. Amazingly, the Iraqi health ministry only counts infant deaths in hospitals, for example, a figure that certainly understates that figure significantly in a country where it’s often hard to make a phone call to determine whether there’s a hospital close enough (and functional enough) to be worth getting a death certificate from.
Kaplan goes on, quoting Burman as saying:
“We’re quite sure that the estimate of 100,000 is a conservative estimate.”
Then adding this:
“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.’”
Kaplan probably misconstrues what Burnham was saying. As an EXPECTED value (in the statistical sense of “expected”) Burnham may be saying “We used conservative assumptions in arriving at this expected-value number.” And you can’t interpret it as saying it’s only within the range Kaplan says, because in this style of estimating, it could be higher or lower (but with a confidence of only 5%.)
Kaplan again:
“They … 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.”
Actually, the authors take pains to point out several ways in which their methodology might not be “perfectly” representative, and make no claims of perfection. Here’s a choice example:
“To account for the potential that the Falluja data are profoundly skewing the mortality estimate or the potential that there is a recall bias in the infant mortality data, a lowest plausible death toll has been calculated excluding the Falluja data and assuming that
half the measured increase in infant mortality has been an artifact of selective recall. Removing half the increase in infant deaths and the Falluja data still produces a 37% increase in estimated mortality. The inclusion of this estimate does not mean that investigators believe that either bias has occurred. Instead,this estimation reflects the concern that investigators cannot fully discard the potential for bias from these two factors.”
You want that in plain English? OK, here it is: “When we get ridiculous enough to pretend that Fallujah didn’t happen, and that any woman could actually forget that one of her babies died if it happened to be a few years back, we’re still looking something IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD of a 37% increase over our baseline assumption.”
Regarding this effort to make sure their EXPECTED value (note statistical sense of the word) was “conservative”, Kaplan darkly hints at some hidden agenda:
“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?”
Reset your head Kaplan: all they were trying to do was make the point that they are willing to exclude a conspicuous outlier in the interests of conservatism, in view of all the uncertainties.
And more:
“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.”
Gee, sounds like the results are “inherently tainted” to produce an UNDERestimate, if anything. They couldn’t get past a checkpoint? Danger ahead – hence, a likelihood of greater death toll. Not enough people in one area? Well, what should that tell you, if it was hitherto a relatively populous area? (And if it wasn’t, how does that skew the result very much? And if it was an *abandoned* area, well, the soon-cited Beth Osborne DaPonte of Yale would say that not counting anything there would tend to underestimate deaths, because refugees in wartime die in greater numbers than anyone except those in the neighborhood of a direct bomb hit.)
More: only *apparently* citing DaPonte, Kaplan says,
“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.”
Slow down. 1980-85 corresponds to the bulk of the Iran-Iraq War – one of the deadliest post-WW II wars. That war ended in Aug 1988. Thus, the 6.8 mortality rate figure for ’85-’90 probably overstates the mortality rate before Gulf War I, since it doesn’t reflect about a year and half of peace with Iran.
OK, and now: how can numbers be “murkier” but “clearly” go up from this probably overstated 6.8 figure? What was Beth Osborne DaPonte’s direct quote about these figures? Kaplan doesn’t supply one.
So let’s check her out, shall we?
And here’s what we find, in a web-reprinted BusinessWeek article:
http://www.worldrevolution.org/projects/webguide/article.asp?ID=565
In other words, one reason why DaPonte might go for a generally higher figure during much of the 90s is the same reason she almost got ousted by none other than Dick Cheney over a decade ago. She went public with a figure of 70,000 Iraqi civilians killed directly and indirectly Gulf War I, way higher than Dick wanted to go for an invasion that many, if not most, Americans will characterizing as “hardly killing anyone.” That count can only have gone higher after the report that doomed her government career, since she was counting after-effects that dragged on for awhile after it was issued. (One of the most persistent of which was denying Iraq chlorine for purifying water under the anti-WMD pretext, which was a significant contributor to infant and child mortality.
Kaplan makes no mention of this inconvenient fact about DaPonte. Nor does he mention anywhere that quite a lot of the killing of Kurds during the sanctions period was at the hands of other Kurds, working hand in glove with Saddam’s forces, in putting down U.S.-sponsored destabilization attempts (of which Ahmed Chalabi’s was only the most shameful and pathetic.) Since the Lancet report is aiming only to put some estimate on civilian casualties, using DaPonte’s *aggregate* (but “murky”, and uncited) figures is a bit disingenuous. One wonders what DaPonte herself thinks of Kaplan’s citation of her. Probably not much, since it sounds like she’d say, “if the figures in Lancet aren’t supportable, the fact is, we’re not doing better while fighting this resistance than Saddam was going while fighting his own resistance, and it’s unacceptably bad either way.”
Kaplan continues:
“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 …”
Ah, how many journalists are forced to take a statistics course? I really wonder about that. The bias for cold, hard numbers accurate down to the decimal point will inevitably lead to significant underestimates. And in a country in chaos, it will lead to laughable underestimates. Wouldn’t it be great if somebody had the resources to triple-fact-check every death, everywhere? I don’t think countries do that very often even in peacetime.
October 31st, 2004 at 4:56 am
I made some errors in the above, including quoting the same section twice, and some typos.
But you know what? My errors are nothing compared to how statistically illiterate Fred Kaplan is. So I’m outa here. If this is the level of debate right now, I have much better things to do with my time. Obviously, trying to reason with people about statistics in this political environment is pissing in the wind. Spin it all however you want.
October 31st, 2004 at 8:25 am
A deconstruction of Lancet far better than mine can be found here http://obsidianorder.blogspot.com/2004/10/pick-number-any-number.html
October 31st, 2004 at 8:40 am
Yeah, I looked at that. Obsidian Order was good as far as it went, and the CDA report cited was fine work – within some limits that should be understood. Those limits are defined largely by what sorts of numbers you can get faxed into the Green Zone. I.e., they are based on what numbers you can get SAFELY.
The report under discussion is primarily flawed by the small numbers of deaths reported, using a methodology that, with more field workers and more effort, and more area coverage, might eventually produce something that we haven’t seen yet: a truly credible estimate with tolerable sampling error. The dilemma is obvious: anyone willing to take those sorts of risks in Iraq these days is likely to have an axe to grind. Anyone not willing to take such risks is likely to produce an underestimate based only on official sources. Isn’t that a bad enough sign in itself? The Lancet report closes on a note of encouragement: it says that better numbers are possible. I hope it encourages some other people to step up to the plate.
Now, I *really* am outa here.
October 31st, 2004 at 9:16 am
Hi, Marc!
Was it Emerson who said that the radical of today is the stuffed shirt of tomorrow?
Happy Sunday!
October 31st, 2004 at 9:47 am
As a “statistically correct” projection, The Lancet report is, as the authors themselves admit in an interview with Spencer Ackerman on TNR, imperfect – and perhaps terribly flawed or damnably worthless as a statisticans construct to mathematical cogniscenti. As an empirical project conducted on the ground in Iraq, the results of the thousands of random interviews with familes are not refutable and should be disturbing to anyone who actually cares about the issue at hand. I remain more impressed by the comittment of the people who conducted the study to digging out facts of the matter than the dissectons proffered by various bloggers from – if you’ll forgive my Rumsfeldism – their air-conditioned offices.
October 31st, 2004 at 9:55 am
Hey, Mike, thanks for that. I found your taking apart the claims of Berman and others about Cambodia to also pretty darned sharp. That was on Totten’s blog that you did that, nice job.
I find it odd that Marc thinks I’m pointing at him for not giving Haiti, a much worse human rights violator than Cuba, equal time. I guess that’s what happens when aiming to stereotype people from the left that disagree with you, just don’t read what critics from the left actually write.
I haven’t actually responded to Marc directly except when I think there are alternative explanations for things he sees as major catastrophes and the like. My equal time comment has been primarily directed at that which has far greater capacity (and therefore responsibility) for the American obsession with Cuba, namely the “liberal” media, which systematically ignores more serious violations in places like Haiti.
Re: the Iraqi numbers. It is odd to hear those who were willing to believe any number thrown out by the US on “WMD”s or numbers killed by Sodom, Milo, Ortega,…Or who throw out the craziest stats about the Great Leap Forward famine, Cambodia ‘genocide’, etc [cue to the robots, this is the chance to say--"AHA, you support the Khymer Rouge..."]… Might one suggest a tad inconsitency here?
October 31st, 2004 at 12:21 pm
Michael Turner: Y’know… you spent an awaful lot of words to only further convince me that the Lancet Report lacks any relaibility. You put some dings in Kaplan and GM< but do nothing to bolster the Lancet study which remanins–in my eyes– un-bolsterable.
October 31st, 2004 at 1:16 pm
Dings I have had a few.
Dings are, to me, nothing new!
I labor for the Truth
Capital “T” you know
And lots of dings I show.
But truth is out there you see
It’s still there for you and me.
I’ll keep trying to find it there.
So a few dings will come, I do not care!
And when Truth finaly itself reveals,
away the darkness it steals;
and glorious light doth appear
that to brotherly love we finally near.
October 31st, 2004 at 1:27 pm
Terrific food for contemplation GM and Michael T.
Michael, by the way, although I generally tend to list more toward your analysis than GM’s (although you both make excellent points), it should be noted that the “Westinghouse effect†that GM cites is not a misnomer, but another version of the “Hawthorne effect†that you mention. Both suggest that studies regarding worker productivity are likely to be skewed by—not only the variables in any given study—but because those being studied tend to perform better in the light of attention.
GM also mentions the Heisenberg effect….You remember Werner Heisenberg…the father of quantum mechanics, and author of the uncertainty principal. Heisenberg posited that the act of observing something essentially changes the thing itself.
How exactly this relates to Lancet, I’m not sure—unless GM you want to completely throw out any and all studies compiled using self-reporting.
Nonetheless, frankly I’m delighted to be reminded about all of the above principals and plan to bring them up the next time I guest lecture at a journalism class and the little darlings start nattering to me about journalistic “objectivity.”
As for the bottom line—Silent (and occasionally Surly) Call says it well: As an empirical project conducted on the ground in Iraq, the results of the thousands of random interviews with families are not refutable and should be disturbing to anyone who actually cares about the issue at hand.” In other words, as I said before, we should facter Lancet in—not take it as gospel—or throw it out altogether.
OT: A normally very sensible friend—also a respected therapist—has just called me to ask if the fate of the Presidential election hangs on the outcome of today’s football game between the Greenbay Packers and the Washington Redskins.
Thoughts?
October 31st, 2004 at 1:41 pm
silent cal: “As a “statistically correct” projection, The Lancet report is … perhaps terribly flawed or damnably worthless… As an empirical project conducted on the ground in Iraq, the results of the thousands of random interviews with familes are not refutable and should be disturbing to anyone who actually cares about the issue at hand.”
I agree completely, on both counts. However, if you look at what they’re actually counting – which is not only civilian deaths, and not only deaths due to violence – the numbers begin to make sense, within the huge margin of error. I can’t say anything more without seeing the primary data which I am attempting to obtain from the authors.
silent cal: “I remain more impressed by the comittment of the people who conducted the study to digging out facts of the matter than the dissectons proffered by various bloggers”
So am I. However, I cannot help asking “cui bono”. Clearly the authors wanted to exaggerate their numbers, and to time the release just right. The abstract of the paper bears almost no relation to their findings… this is not neutral scientific research, there is clearly an agenda. The big question for me: was the enemy involved? They have conducted psy-ops directed at journalists before, and they have released plenty of extremely-hard-to-believe statistics, especially in Falluja… food for thought.
October 31st, 2004 at 1:46 pm
I meant “Cal” not “Call.” (The perils of spell check.)
VERY moving poetry, GM. ; -)
October 31st, 2004 at 2:05 pm
rosedog and GM: I don’t think that a Westinghouse effect will apply here very much. However, there are several effects that specifically affect studies of this type: telescoping and imperfect recall. Telescoping is the tendency to mis-remember when effects happened, making older events appear more recent. If you ask people whether they were robbed in the past year, or in the year before that, you will uniformly find that more people say they had were robbed in the year before that. Why? The longer ago something happened, the harder it is to remember exactly when. They probably *were* robbed 3-4 years ago but do not remember the exact time. Imperfect recall is that less-important events tend to be more easily forgotten the longer ago they happened. If you ask people whether they stubbed their toe, more will say they did in the last year than two years ago. In this study infant deaths *may* fall in this category which is why the pre-war number is lower than other estimates.
October 31st, 2004 at 3:20 pm
“was the enemy involved” ?
Probably depends on how you define “enemy”…
October 31st, 2004 at 3:35 pm
I’m curious just how – aside from the obvious issue of polling in a war zone – the Lancet study compares in relative accuracy to the myriad polls we’re being treated to on the presidential race which vary radically poll to poll and week to week. Does GM think that Gallup is doing a better job than Lancet ? I mean 8 or 9 hundred interviewees based on a subjective guesstimate of likely voters broken down by party affiliation strikes me as something just bit better than a shot in the dark ? Should we be as dismissive ? If not, why not ? If so, why are these projections the focus of reams of commentary by the punditry and pack journalists ?
Also, I’ve read that Zoby just did a phone poll directed toward cell phones and younger voters. Kerry crushed Bush. Very interesting. Of course, I’m sure the sampling errors and confidence rate and whatever and et cetera mean it’s total garbage from a methodological perspective, but it’s garbage that no one else has picked through yet. As potential wild cards go that suggest a Kerry win, I find it interesting.
October 31st, 2004 at 3:49 pm
“The big question for me: was the enemy involved? They have conducted psy-ops directed at journalists before, and they have released plenty of extremely-hard-to-believe statistics, especially in Falluja… food for thought.”
That’s almost a farcical question. The resistance couldn’t even begin to compete with the US in psyops operations, either in absolute senses or in quality. The US has journalists joining them as ‘embedded’ members and are very vulnerable to all kinds of psyops campaigns in the most direct sense. One need only think of the last few months’ ‘reporting’ that occurs everytime the US drops a ‘precision’ bomb on civilians. The reporters then dutifully repeat the military press handout that states the ‘precision’ bomb targetted and hit ‘insurgents’ and/or ‘terrorists’ [the latter word being equated with anyone the US opposes]…end of story. The guerillas fighting the US could never match such marketting sophisitication, even if they tried.
October 31st, 2004 at 4:16 pm
Also, I’ve read that Zoby just did a phone poll directed toward cell phones and younger voters. Kerry crushed Bush.
–then add on the new voters that the Gallup folks understimate bigtime…
October 31st, 2004 at 4:29 pm
From Juan Cole, who is probably a lot more able to give an expert opinion on the topic of the study at hand:
I think the results are probably an exaggeration. But they can’t be so radically far off that the 16,000 deaths previously estimated can still be viewed as valid. I’d say we have to now revise the number up to at least many tens of thousand–which anyway makes sense. The 16,000 estimate comes from counting all deaths reported in the Western press, which everyone always knew was only a fraction of the true total. (I see deaths reported in al-Zaman every day that don’t show up in the Western wire services).
The most important finding from my point of view is not the magnitude of civilian deaths, but the method of them. Roberts and Burnham find that US aerial bombardments are killing far more Iraqi civilians than had previously been suspected. This finding is also not a surprise to me. I can remember how, on a single day (August 12), US warplanes bombed the southern Shiite city of Kut, killing 84 persons, mainly civilians, in an attempt to get at Mahdi Army militiamen. These deaths were not widely reported in the US press, especially television. Kut is a small place and has been relatively quiet except when the US has been attacking Muqtada al-Sadr, who is popular among some segments of the population there. The toll in Sadr City or the Shiite slums of East Baghdad, or Najaf, or in al-Anbar province, must be enormous.
October 31st, 2004 at 4:31 pm
As to who is going to win, at this point, it’s just a matter of waiting.
The Hopkins study has been, I think, thoroughly discredited, while it’s goal of causing people to look at civilian casualties right before the election has been achieved.
The real numbers of civilian casualties would be useful to know, but I don’t see how it can be done. Marc, I disagree with you about it being the military’s responsibility to keep track of them, simply because it is impractical.
Also, I would like to put this in context. Has any military ever been able to keep track of civilian casualties? If so, who? If not, what makes this war special other than your objection to it?
My other challenge to opponents of this war is to tell me your approach and what your approach would have produced.
I think this war could have been run better, but that applies to every war, including the one in Afghanistan, where 750 Americans, allied with various groups, replaced a government in two months, and produced a relatively stable outcome.
October 31st, 2004 at 5:08 pm
“As to who is going to win, at this point, it’s just a matter of waiting.”
Au contraire, it’s already over. It’s just a matter of when the US leaves, not whether or not it will be defeated anymore.
On one matter I certainly agree, this war is not that much different from any other war, thus the point. The largest numbers of casualties are civilians, and among them women, children, and the elderly, for the obvious reasons. On what could have been differently? How about not invading a country to help a president out with his reelection chances? In a democratic country, when the majority of the population are against a war in the first place, surely that was one option.
October 31st, 2004 at 5:19 pm
Actually I was referring to the election.
If you really think this war was about improving Bush’s election chances, you haven’t been paying attention. The Afghan war by itself would have done that, because it was a historic success. The president is catching nothing but criticism over Iraq. It is hardly a war for an election boost.
The argument that the largest number of casualties are civilians is completely unsupported. We have killed a large number of bad guys – sometimes at the rate of hundreds per day.
As to whether the US is defeated, it depends on who gets elected. Under Kerry, we can be assured that the Vietnam bug-out will be duplicated, leaving chaos behind us. With Bush, that is not going to happen. We have hardly been defeated. The insurrection is localized and we have just started a campaign of taking out its sanctuaries, such as Fallujah.
But you do sound as if you want us to be defeated. Well, nothing changed on the left. I remember from rallies I attended the chant “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, NLF Is Going To Win,” always coming from the looney left like the SDS and VVAW. They got their wish, thanks to thee Democrats. It was a shameful event in our history.
October 31st, 2004 at 5:32 pm
“If you really think this war was about improving Bush’s election chances, you haven’t been paying attention. The Afghan war by itself would have done that, because it was a historic success. The president is catching nothing but criticism over Iraq.”
You talk as though Bush had some crystal ball or people around him that felt that was a strong possibility. Neither is the case of course. It’s not great secret that he felt he was going to gain political capital from the relatively easy task of overthrowing Sodom. There was never any sense, aside from obligatory statements made in line 456 of any given speech that there was an element of political risk. The Iraq ‘victory’ was clearly a major part of Rove’s strategy. In fact, it has thrown the Rove team off balance since the US has lost Iraq.
I wish the claim that civilians suffer most greatly and constitute the greatest # of casualties, but if they weren’t in this war it would be a major first. Your claim that the US has killed hundreds of insurgents can only be believed if we are to believe every word out of command central. few do anymore, for obvious reasons.
My guess with Kerry is he might even involve the US longer in Iraq, for fear of being attacked for doing otherwise. LBJ would be the model for that.
While I agree with you that Nixon was a great Democrat, I disagree that the SDS, VVAW, antiwar activists, represented a small proportion of the US opinion of the Vietnam War. Whether I wish or don’t wish the US lose is immaterial, since it already has lost in Iraq. Maybe there’s some way to invade a country under false pretenses and then try to privatize everything under the sun there, keep in place anti-union laws that Sodom made, and let foreign companies send home 100% of profits tax free…but Iraq isn’t going to be the model for that I’m afraid.
And, since it is a matter of such little importance that even armchair warriors (not you, you’re older than 30) and the Bush clan younguns’ don’t see the war as that terribly worth picking up a gun and going to Iraq to die for…I wouldn’t get to worked up about the reality that we have lost the war. It’s obviously not as important as the marketers proclaim.
October 31st, 2004 at 5:36 pm
Anonymous writes: “The resistance couldn’t even begin to compete with the US in psyops operations, either in absolute senses or in quality.”
On the contrary, I think that is the one area where we are much weaker, especially because of the ease with which our own media (even the Lancet) can be subverted. The Belmont Club has more about that:
http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/2004/05/news-coverage-as-weapon-historian-john.html
and examples of specific psy-ops:
http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/2004/04/coincidences-circumstances-fueling.html
October 31st, 2004 at 5:42 pm
Steve,
The reason why people are willing to except numbers given to them in regards to deaths in Kosovo, Kurdistan, Cambodia, GLF is because in all of those cases it took years to come up with the accurate body counts. Nobody actually knew how grizzly those atrocities were until after the fact.
Most of those in the human rights community are not as ideological as someone like yourself. They want truth. It is politically convenient for you to chose the highest body counts possible for atrocities that US is responsible for and choose the smallest possible counts for events that the may have been committed by communists or enemies of the US.
The sad truth is that the body count is probably higher than Bush supporters are touting and much lower than the study. Either way it is a ignominy that so many people have died via “collateral damage.â€
The US have surely killed many many more civilians than the insurgence. But the insurgence is willing to kill innocent people for political means. At the least, you would think that would make them morally reprehensible to the supporters of the resistance. But murder of the innocent in that case is alright… as long as you are opposing US imperialism.
October 31st, 2004 at 5:42 pm
“On the contrary, I think that is the one area where we are much weaker, especially because of the ease with which our own media (even the Lancet) can be subverted.”
Gosh, and you’re one to pick on others for methodology? Belmont compares the Civil War, WW2…with this unnecessary military adventure. Belmont is trying to deal with an absolute issue, when the issue is plainly relative in nature. That is, if the current US occupation of Iraq were as supported and legitimate as WW2 or the Civil War…his absolutist take would be relevant entirely. But, of course, the Iraq adventure is hardly qualitatively of the WW2 or Civil War sort. Not even close.
October 31st, 2004 at 5:53 pm
“The reason why people are willing to except numbers given to them in regards to deaths in Kosovo, Kurdistan, Cambodia, GLF is because in all of those cases it took years to come up with the accurate body counts. Nobody actually knew how grizzly those atrocities were until after the fact.”
Actually, as Michael Turner has so adeptly done on Totten’s comment section, it is easily demonstrable that many of the claims that make up Berman’s arguments on Cambodia are bogus and hyped. Does that mean there weren’t awful atrocities? No. Does it mean that the charge of genocide and million or millions killed is bogus. Yes. Ditto the GLF famine I”m afraid.
http://www.flonnet.com/fl1621/16210150.htm
I”m not sure why the reference to my ‘ideological’ sways, indeed whom did I reference but the Marc Cooper approved Juan Cole? Did that offend your sensibilities? I doubt it did, indeed I agree, the numbers are probably somewhere in the middle, maybe around 50k, though who knows.
In the end it doesn’t really matter, in fact the only number of concern to the debate in the US on the current US occupation is how many Americans die or are injured, kidnapped. All others are not high on our list of priorities.
October 31st, 2004 at 6:17 pm
Blank
Your assertion that Bush invaded Iraq for political purposes is a nice, paranoid leftist theory. The only problem is it isn’t true. There were a number of reasons. WMD’s were an important one. Removing a government that was dealing with terrorists and might potentially armed internal terrorists (Al Qaeda) was another. There are plenty more.
Likewise your assertion that we have lost Iraq is without foundation. It is amazing that you have these ungrounded facts in your head. You probably imagine that we lost Vietnam also.
As to believing the commanders, the US learned it’s less as a result of Vietnam. You may not get every detail from the military, but they are very unlikely to lie to you. Johnson ordered them to lie in Vietnam, resulting in a great loss of credibility. When the Tet Offensive happened, which was a stunning US victory, the media reported it as a loss. One reason was the credibility lost by MACV.
Today, they’re not going to do that. They understand that credibility is critical to prosescuting a war in a democratic society.
In addition, much of that information about casualties came from embeds who witnessed it. Sadr’s militia was slaughtered. It’s that simple. They were unprofessional, ignorant and greatly outgunned.
Finally, you have to assume the military is stupid and their weapon systems don’t work to believe that we have not killed a large number of insurgents (btw, many were killed in Fallujah by the Marines, mostly by gunfire). Since today’s military is better educated than any in history, is made up of all volunteer professionals, and armed with amazing technology, ranging from UAV’s to precision bombs to great communications, it is really making a lot of unfounded assumptions to think they are ineffective at killing who they want to kill.
I don’t know about you, but I’m familiar with a lot of that technology (and the physics behind it). I have also corresponded with or talked to people who have been using it. It works. It is precise. I recently talked to one fellow who killed about 20 of them in one day (a SEAL sniper). The Marine snipers in Fallujah were exacting similar tolls.
Of course they have killed a lot of rebels. But our military made a decision not to use enemy body counts, because of the distortions in incentives it caused in Vietnam.
Also, I disagree with you about this being like other wars. Certainly it shares the characteristics of “fog of war” stupid decisions that get people killed, and things like that. However, when attacking, our forces are quite different than in any other war. They have the recon and the precision weapons that no army has ever had before. So rules-of-thumb about collateral casualties are likely to be incorrect. All other things equal, the collateral damage would be greatly reduced. However, the very fact that those systems are available could change tactics in a way that might increase the collateral damage. I doubt it, but its possible.
As to the war being lost, I’d say only if Kerry gets in and gives it away. This war is trivial compared to ‘Nam, and yet we won ‘Nam on the battlefield at least twice (1968 and late 1972), only to have the leftists in congress give it away.
October 31st, 2004 at 6:36 pm
“Your assertion that Bush invaded Iraq for political purposes is a nice, paranoid leftist theory”
No, actually it’s not paranoid at all, there has been plenty of writing about that in the mainstream corporate owned media [I know, I know, GE, Westinghouse, Viacom are bulwarks of the left wing...--speaking of paranoid].
I don’t have to make any assumptions about military stupidity, all I have to do is read their own data. For example, 50/50 “precise” bombs missed Sodom and “highvalue” assets during Scare and Frighten Campaign. If my stats are correct, that works out to a 0% success rating.
The “precision weapons” you praise so highly work about as well as the 0% bombs that targeted ‘high value Sodom assets”?
And, sorry, we never won Nam, not even close. Won a lot of battles, but the hearts and minds were lost long before your ’68 and ’72 victories. I do agree with you that Nixon was a great Democrat however, far better than Clinton. Seriously though, if you think the US lost because of liberals, you must be outtayour mind. They voted overwhelmingly in favor of the GOT Resolution for starters. And you ignore the overwhelming popular sentiment against the war by ’68, which can’t be blamed on liberals for sure, since they were so slow in catching up with the rest of the population. By ’72 there was no ignoring that popular and business sentiment were against staying in the war any longer, at least with troops on the ground that is. Only wishful thinking purports otherwise these days.
WMDs were most certainly not a key one, indeed there was plenty of information available from official sources in intelligence that suggested that was a very small part of it all. I’d recommend the hardly left wing AND Marc Cooper endorsed Karen Kwiatowski on that for starters.
Actually the embeds had little idea about how many guerrillas were killed in Najaf, they rarely speak the language to find out such information to begin with and stick to military talking points as a fallback. They tend to play the role of cheerleader more than anything else.
October 31st, 2004 at 7:07 pm
Another traitor speaks out:
javascript:vidpop(‘video/version3/why_qt.html’)
October 31st, 2004 at 7:08 pm
http://www.winbackrespect.org/video/version3/why_qt.html
October 31st, 2004 at 7:10 pm
http://www.brookesstory.com/quicktime-low.htm
October 31st, 2004 at 7:36 pm
Well, I’ve gotten a dismissive don’t-confuse-me-with-all-this-math swat from Marc Cooper, and only bliss-hippie doggerel from GMRoper. Not sure I want to say much more to this audience. I will note, however this comment from rosedog:
“… it should be noted that the “Westinghouse effect†that GM cites is not a misnomer, but another version of the “Hawthorne effect†that you mention.”
Do you have a citation from a social science/psych dictionary to support that? As far as I’m concerned this is just a slip – people remembering that Mayo’s experiments were done at a Westinghouse facility, and no more.
Google lists only 13 links for “westinghouse effect” – the first of which is from a junk science site, the second from a reader review on Amazon of an SF novel, the third an entry from a high school physics teacher who is clearly unaware of the status of the Hawthorne Effect hypothesis. The link for the marijuana hydroponics mailing list entry should give you some indication of the reliability of these various informants.
Googling on “Hawthorne Effect” gives you 10,000 links, and even a few where you’ll find out that there never was a Hawthorne Effect as pronounced what Mayo documented and what GM Roper so blithely hypothesizes may be at work in a context where any such effect would be unlikely to apply.
In only glancing at other comments made, I see that Obsidian brings up the “telescoping effect”. For this effect to be relevant, you have to assume that someone wouldn’t remember whether, in the last four or five years, a household member died BEFORE or AFTER a superpower invaded their country and toppled their government. The Lancet study generously yields to potential critics of the study this bizarre hypothesis, and STILL comes up with a probable higher death rate, within the limited precision possible in such a study.
Obsidian’s critique seems to come down to this: it’s not really fair to count combatant casualties, because if an Iraqi wants to fight us, his death isn’t really a consequence of our takeover of their country. Hm, I see. Maybe he died indignant that hospitals have less electricity than during the Saddam period, that his female relatives are facing a greater risk of rape than under Saddam, that for the first time ever, he got dragged from his car and robbed at gunpoint by crooks who were exultant over the fall of Saddam, and the negligence of the Americans. But I must admit, it’s true: his decision to take up arms and put his own life at risk by going up against the Occupation truly is his own decision. The question is: if Bush’s picture of Iraq is right, why did that combatant make that decision in the first place?
October 31st, 2004 at 8:16 pm
Steve, if you are listening to media who claims the only reason for going into Iraq was political, you need to broaden your sources. A lot. The assertion is simply wrong, dead wrong.
In Vietnam, General Giap himself wanted to sue for peace in 1968, and it was only the reaction to Tet, which was totally misreported, that caused him to change his mind. You can find that in his biography – this isn’t a fantasy of mine.
In late 1972, the Christmas bombing campaign took only 12 days to convince the North that they needed to sue for peace. And they did, and we got a peace. It was enforceable by maintaining a threat of resuming the bombing, and supplying of weapons and military supplies to the South. It was tested once by the North, and they were clobbered. But congress voted to make it illegal for US forces to go to Vietnam, and cut the aid almost to nothing. After that, South Vietnam fell to an armored invasion much larger than the force we used in the Gulf War.
As to the hearts and minds, you are probably one who believes that the war in Vietnam was a popular uprising. But it wasn’t. In the mid ’50s, when the countries were officially partitioned, people were allowed to choosse their country – north or south, and were supposed to have freedom of movement (the North, of course, impeded that movement – I knows someone whose parents had to pay a bribe to get to the south). Thus those who wanted communist government moved north. Those who moved or stayed in the south did not want communist government, rationally preferring a corrupt but not totalitarian dictatorship to the ccommunist totalitarian dictatorship. It still took the communists in the north several years of internal fighting and executions to stabilize their government before they could consider attacking the south.
The North also ordered Viet Minh fighters in the south to stay and to marry into families in the south. These fighters became the Viet Cong.
The Tet Offensive of 1968 and two more VC offensives that year wiped out the VC. After that, the only forces in Vietnam were regular army forces from a neighboring hostile country – communist North Vietnam.
Regarding hearts and minds – this was one of the disasters (for the VC) in Tet 68. They thought that the people shared their goals and would rise up and join them. That didn’t happen. The people wanted nothing to do with communists. This preference didn’t change – we had the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese right up until the time we betrayed them.
As one should expect, what the people wanted was to be left alone. The communists didn’t do that, and the people, hearing from relatves in the North, knew what sort of society they would be forced to live in. This is why we were able to recruit huge numbers of self-defense forces in the South, and those forces are why we won the war in Vietnam, only to lose it in congress.
You have to ask yourself… why were there no refugees from non-communist South Vietnam, but there were about a million boat people who took enormous risks fleeing communist Vietnam. The answer is obvious: communism was imposed on the south by a large scale, multi-front invasion. People didn’t like communism, so the boogied.
That doesn’t include the hundreds of thousands who went to “re-education camps” from which many never returned. Nor does it include the tens of thousands executed outright.
The left has those deaths and the Cambodian massacre deaths on their hands.
Your argument about precision weapons is silly. The problem wasn’t the weapons, it was the intelligence that put those high value targets in the wrong place. Sheesh1
Having participated in the Vietnam War, and payed attention to what was going on, I am well aware of the homefront issues. Johnson screwed up the war big time, and lied about it a lot. The people of the US were not happy with this. However, polls showed that even in 1972 a majority of Americans were in favor of winning the war. Don’t try to blow smoke about Vietnam – it ain’t gonna work. And don’t believe that because the anti-war movement was huge, that it had that much influence. It was fun to watch that movement just vanish as soon as the draft was ended, btw – it tells me that it was full of chickendoves.
I realize that liberals have these pleasant myths about Vietnam, backed up by various lefty professors like that yo-yo Chomsky, but they don’t substitute for the truth. And yes, lots of people voted for the GOT resolution, which means nothing.
The terrorists are for Kerry in this election (obvious in Bin Laden’s tape) because they want us to repeat our Vietnam sell-out in Iraq.
You assert that WMD’s were not a big reason for the Iraq war. Care to cite reliable sources? Do you understand the logic of the War on Terror? It’s really simple: the biggest threat is terrorists acquiring WMDs, especially nukes or contagious biologicals. Almost the entire effort is about preventing that, because there is no way to keep terrorists from successfully using them once they have them. Hence pre-emptive activities. Put another way, this is post 9-11 thinking. If you don’t get it, you don’t understand the real threat that 9-11 woke us up to. 9-11 demonstrated that terrorists are willing to cause mass casualties, something many anti-terror people didn’t expect.
By the way, “corporate media” does not represent the right or corporatons. Most corporate media in the US today is left leaning (see the Yale study). Journalists created this “editorial independence” from owners and they use it for their own ends.
I’m not going to go into depth, but simply the fact that they have not asked Kerry to release all oof his Navy records, even though he made his Vietnam experience as the core of his campaign, tells you that they are in his corner. That the Swifties had to write a book before the media noticed them is another clue, since the Swifties held a news conference in early May in which all of Kerry’s commanders and their bosses up to an Admiral all said he was unqualified to command. The way the Swifties has been treated is another clue. I know some of these guys, and the press simply applied double standards in evaluating the Swifties evidence.
October 31st, 2004 at 8:20 pm
Michael Turner,
Are the crooks a result of American negligence? Don’t you remember that before the war Saddam empties his jails of criminals (but not political prisoners)?
Imagine that happening here. Would you then say that someone was negligent when the crime rate skyrocketted?
Otherwise, I would say folks need to forget the study. It is crap for reasons many here have posted.
If people want to talk about noncombatant casualties, 15,000 or 20,000 ought to be enough to fuel the discussion, and those numbers are far more credible (and, of course, in the confidence interval of the study).
October 31st, 2004 at 8:37 pm
Mr. Turner is both correct, and way off base. I should have used the term Hawthorne Effect as it is more well known, but decades old memories gave me Westinghouse effect. However, both are applicable as both studies indicated (perhaps wrongly) that the effect of being observed acts on those being observed.
Mr. Turner stated “But the real howler is Roper’s “methodology” in even dragging the Hawthorne Effect into a picture like family grief. How do you work that, Roper? Families become ever more “productive” of exaggerations of their grief, the more “official” the census taker is? Oh please.”
This is a rather cynical and snide take on the subject. I did not imply that they became more productive, I implied that observation changes what is observed. Mr. Turner is aware of this and resorts to snideness to attempt refutation. That he tries says plenty about his POV.
My intent was that the presense of the interviewers MAY have influenced the people interviewed if they had some inkling as to what it was that the researchers were after. If he denies this, than he’s not as bright as what he thinks he is.
The Hawthorne Effect has indeed been challenged and perhaps convincingly so. But it has not been “Debunked.” This site http://www.medjournal.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=986 published just this month supports the Hawthorne Effect. Sorry Mr. Turner, you just didn’t search far enough.
Regarding the accuracy of the numbers, Mr. Turner states “Could it be 8,000 or less? Could it be 195,000 or more? Geez, it’s pretty messed up that we can’t even tell, isn’t it?”
Which is precisely my point, in fact, Mr. Turner was kind enough to make it for me. Though I doubt that he intended to do so.
Mr. Turner makes it seem as I’m quite callous in “worrying” about the ability of the Iraqi families to produce death certificates. I neither said nor implied any such thing and his attempt to make it so again speaks to his dishonesty. I questioned the absense of the information in the report, to whit: “What is NOT reported in the paper (oddly enough) is how many families actually produced certificates or other official documents proving the death was due to violent means. Without that statement, we cannot have any verification that their information is either valid or reliable.” There was NO reason not to include some such statement; perhaps such as “34% produced such documents.” or perhaps “because of the war and lack of civil controls, no documents could be produced.” Or, “No documents were produced when requested” or even “everyone produced at least one document when requested.”
That Mr. Turner doesn’t like my humorous attempt at poetry is entirely his problem, not mine. Art is in the eye of the beholder. Mr. Turner may not know Art, but he does know that he didn’t like my poem. Tough, I didn’t write it for you Mr. Turner, I wrote it for me.
Lastly, Mr. Turner states “Suffice it to say: I agree that this report, the haste with which it was released, the possible lack of adequate peer review, and the pre-election timing all indicate that there is partisan bias in the TIMING at least.” He reinforces a point that I made, grudgingly perhaps.
October 31st, 2004 at 9:13 pm
Thanks GM.. As I said in the original, surmising one’s intent and motivation is always a swamp. Glad u can stay out of it.
October 31st, 2004 at 9:50 pm
Marc writes, “surmising one’s intent and motivation is always a swamp. Glad u can stay out of it.”
Hmmm, not sure I did. But perhaps that is what you are telling me.
October 31st, 2004 at 9:50 pm
Somehow John Moore’s investment in applying the lessons of Vietnam to the war in Iraq is, in and of itself, a cause for assuming that the situation under discussioin has already spun out of control and that the diminishing, second and third tier arguments in defense of the decisions that brought us to this juncture are essentially acts of political desperation.
The enemy mouthpieces over at Newsweek magazine offer this, in an obvious attempt to sap the morale of patriots: “The truth is, neither [Bush nor Kerry] is fully reckoning with the reality of Iraq — which is that the insurgents, by most accounts, are winning. Even Secretary of State Colin Powell, a former general who stays in touch with the Joint Chiefs, has acknowledged this privately to friends in recent weeks, Newsweek has learned. The insurgents have effectively created a reign of terror throughout the country, killing thousands, driving Iraqi elites and technocrats into exile and scaring foreigners out. “Things are getting really bad,” a senior Iraqi official in interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi’s government told Newsweek last week. “The initiative is in [the insurgents'] hands right now. This approach of being lenient and accommodating has really backfired. They see this as weakness.”
….Just as worrisome, the insurgents have managed to infiltrate Iraqi forces, enabling them to gain key intelligence. “The infiltration is all over, from the top to the bottom, from decision making to the lower levels,” says the senior Iraqi official. In the Kirkush incident (massacre of unarmed [!?!?] Iraqi security forces), the insurgents almost certainly had inside information about the departure time and route of the buses. Iraqi Ministry of Defense sources told Newseeek the Iraqi recruits had not been allowed to leave the base with their weapons because American trainers were worried that some of them might defect.”
Also, 60 Minutes, another outfit who’s sole raison d’etre is to make our President look bad, had another enemy psy-ops report tonight on the appalling lack of body and vehicular armor available to our troops. The Reserve commander interviewed was visibly seething with anger at the incompetence and disregard for our troops on the part of those who had thrust them into this situation. Shameful.
Of course, I’m certain that John Moore has an explanation for all of this based on the doctrine of “catastrophic success”. I can’t wait for a screed of several pages length explaining the peculiar genius of our Commander in Chief and the Pentagon suits regarding troop strength and force protection.
Bring it on…
October 31st, 2004 at 9:58 pm
“Steve, if you are listening to media who claims the only reason for going into Iraq was political, you need to broaden your sources. A lot. The assertion is simply wrong, dead wrong.”
Oh god, not the old, “it’s the liberal media line”, after all they did to help to sell the war in the runup to the current occupation of IRaq? No, they’re not the only reason, but that now even prowar newspapers like the Wash Post, NYTimes, Wall Street Journal, etc. have made such points…it’s certainly not something that I get from conspiracy theorists, I can assure you. And of course, Karen Kwiatowski is hardly left wing and is in fact Marc Cooper approved.
Your attempt to refute my point about ‘precision’ weapons proves my point I see, namely that the exact set of circumstances that led to the numerous dead civilians in the Baghdad 0 for 50 case also leads to numerous civilians dead now, namely “bad intelligence”. oops as it were.
Nothing obvious in the Bin Laden tape, in fact he has it in for both Bush and Kerry and seems to see both as irrelevant to bigger picture issues that motivate his strategies and designs. And, like Tucker Carlson, that infamous wobblie, I think those strategies and designs are issues we should focus on.
On the WMD issue, I cite Marc Cooper approved and rightwing Karen Kwiatowski.
The corporate media is leftwing, but rolled over and let the Bush administration use it to sell its war plans prior to the current US occupation of Iraq. yeah, right.
“As to the hearts and minds, you are probably one who believes that the war in Vietnam was a popular uprising. But it wasn’t.”
The Pentagon Papers reveal a different reality I’m afraid.
“I know some of these guys, and the press simply applied double standards in evaluating the Swifties evidence.”
Evidence? They’ve yet to provide any evidence that Kerry blamed the troops for Vietnam Policy or that he held ‘secret’ Paris meetings. Just lies to obscure the extent to which veterans came back and opposed the Vietnam War. Thus the smear campaign has received way more attention than it deserves, when such basic and indefensible claims are made and repeated without serious evidence.
I notice you avoid answering that by the way. I guess you have no evidence he accused the troops of being responsible for the atrocities that were being committed in the war and not the leaders of the government back home.
October 31st, 2004 at 10:16 pm
http://mediamatters.org/items/200410260001
October 31st, 2004 at 10:29 pm
Bravo, Cal!
(And you too, Steve.)
October 31st, 2004 at 11:20 pm
I read the Wall Street Journal every day. I have never seen an article implying that the Iraq war was done for political purposes. I have seen numerous analyses of the other reasons. The idea that the Iraq was was a political move makes Bush a cold blooded mass murderer – someone willing to kill thousands and spend huge amounts of money on a risky attempt to gain some political points. While I might imagine Kerry doing that (a person who knows him told me that he considered him a sociopath), that just isn’t a Bush thing. Sorry, but the political theory is nonsense.
As far as the WMD issue, a link to whatever you are referring to would be useful. If you are going to cite authority, give a link. I believe if you type in a URL, not inside HTML, it will work.
Regarding the Pentagon Papers, there are two kinds of uprising. There were Buddist and other minor uprisings against Diem. These were not particularly violent. They were nothing like the VC uprising, which is the interesting one. The Pentagon papers does describe the Viet Minh left-behind and their efforts. And that is the uprising that counts.
If you want evidence of Kerry blaming the troops for a policy that did not exist, read his Senate testimony of 1971. When he talks about atrocities, day by day with full knowledge at all levels of command, he is talking about atrocities as if they were a widespread, frequent and approved practice. That turns a lot of troops into war criminals, since this implied very large number of atrocities have to be committed by someone. Furthermore, if you read the ‘monstser clause’ of that same testimony, he says that millions of veterans are going to return with their heads screwed up by what they had to do.
Now you may imagine that this isn’t talking about all troops, but that isn’t the experience of vets. Many ran into difficulty getting jobs and accusations, because people thought they were nuts, as Kerry implied, and stone killers of kids. That was the real effect. Finally, of course his testimony is wrong. Atrocities in Vietnam were not unusually frequent. We know of two mass killing incidents (Tiger Force and Me Lai) but there were probably a few more, along with more isolated incidents. About 200 soldiers were convicted of something related to war crimes. Out of 2.5 million, that’s a tiny number.
October 31st, 2004 at 11:23 pm
Kerry’s words: I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.
There are blatant lies. Of course, he hides behind Winter Soldier (the “investigation” – well discredited), but there are a number of lies there. First, many of those testifying were not Vietnam Veterans, they were imposters. Also, many were lying – one of them recently apologized for his lies and said he had seen no atrocities, but had been coached in what to say. Second, atrocities were in fact isolated instances, and were not allowed by officers “at all levels of command.” Even the worst, Me Lai, was stopped by a passing helicopter pilot, who landed, and held the platoon at gunpont and ordered them to stop. They could have blown him away in a second if they wanted to, so you can see an act of courage stopping this rogue group. See the end of this for more lies by Kerry.
Here is a link to a “fisked” copy of his statement; http://www.tiny vital.com/BlogArchives/000799.html
Read the whole thing, including the questions period. Kerry tells many, many lies. For example, he says that we used weapons against the Vietnamese that we would never us against Europeans. That was a VC talking point, but it was false… and even if it wasn’t, there is no way Kerry would have been able to know that. He was so ignorant that he thought the use of .50 caliber machine guns against people was a war crime, which it is not. The evidence that he had a secret Paris meeting in addition to his overt Paris meeting is in the FBI files at wintersoldier.com.
As to how many veterans came back and opposed the war, VVAW had about .1% of the veterans in it.
October 31st, 2004 at 11:23 pm
But the bulk of the Swiftboat charges were related to Kerry’s behavior in Vietnam. For example, it is beyond obvious that his first Purple Heart was fraudulent. He got it for an action at Cam Rahn Bay, 2 months after I left there. At the time there were essentially no enemy present – it was such a safe backwater that people took R&R there from other parts of ‘Nam. Several people who were there testified that there was no enemy fire in the incident in which Kerry slightly (a scratch) wounded himself. One of those people is now the Admiral in charge of Navy JAG – a very reputable source. The medal was granted 3 months later, after the people who had originally refused to grant it (thee doctor and the CO) and the witness (the Admiral) were no longer in Vietnam.
This is but one example. For some strange reason, the press is unwilling to accept eyewitness testimony by people who were at various incidents. For example, there were 11 people who testified that there was no enemy fire during Kerry’s bronze star event, and no second mine explosion, for which Kerry claimed a purple heart for a wound in the butt, which actually was received earlier that day when Kerry threw a grenade into a pile of rice (not in combat situations).
So there you have three false medals. I’m not going to bother with the rest. I will say that contrary to Kerry campaign spin, the Swifties are not all republicans (O’Neil, the most visible spokesman, is an independent who would probably have voted for Edwards if Edwards had been nominated.
One thing ab out the swifty thing – it shows that Kerry, through his campaign, is still willing to attack large numbers of combat vets if it is to his advantage.
The “smear campaign” was a result of some of the Swifties reading Kerry’s hagiography, and realizing that it was very different from what had actually happened.
If the swifties are lying, then you are saying sixty combat vets who have signed affidavits under oath are all lying. And yet the only thing these guys have in common is that they served with Kerry.
KERRRY:
blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties
FACT:This is not true. The racial makeup of the units, and of casualties, was a surprisingly good match with the US population.
KERRY:We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them
FACT: This is nonsense in general. There were cases where villages were infiltrated by Viet Cong and the villagers would ask the US to destroy it, not only getting rid of the VC, but also getting them a new village, since we replaced damaged structures with new ones.
KERRY:We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.
FACT: Again, Nonsense. America was shocked by My Lae and it was a major issue.
KERRY: We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of Orientals.
FACT: Free Fire zones did not mean you could shoot anyone. They meant that you didn’t have to coordinate with other units before firing. In other words, it mean t that the danger of blue-on-blue didn’t exist. That’s all it meant. One thing the Swifties objected to was Kerry’s tendency to shoot first and check later. In one of these incidents, a sampan was attacked, killing a little kid and another member of the family. Kerry filed a false action report saying that there were several VC who jumped out of the boat before opening fire, a report contradicted by the gunner.
KERRY:We fought using weapons against “oriental human beings,” with quotation marks around that. We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in the European theater or let us say a non-third-world people theater,
FACT: Again, total lie. The US was prepared to use nuclear weapons against Europeans in the event of a Russian invasion. I challenge anyone to say what weapon we would not use.
KERRY:and so we watched while men charged up hills because a general said that hill has to be taken, and after losing one platoon or two platoons they marched away to leave the high for the reoccupation by the North Vietnamese because we watched pride allow the most unimportant of battles to be blown into extravaganzas, because we couldn’t lose, and we couldn’t retreat, and because it didn’t matter how many American bodies were lost to prove that point. And so there were Hamburger Hills and Khe Sanhs and Hill 881′s and Fire Base 6′s and so many others.
FACT: Kerry shows his lack of understanding of the most basic aspects of this war. Westmoreland foolishly fought a war of atrition. So if bad guys hold a hill, you take it, killing them, and then leave. Interestingly, that tactic had ended by the time Kerry was in theatre, because Abrams adoped a strategy of providing security to South Vietnamese villagers, rather than attrition.
KERRY:Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese
FACT: Is there anyone who doesn’t understand the essential absurdity of this statement and its implication? It is a sound byte, nothing more. It is, of course, wrong.
KERRY:But the issue, gentlemen, the issue is communism, and the question is whether or not we will leave that country to the communists or whether or not we will try to give it hope to be a free people.
But the point is they are not a free people now under us. They are not a free people, and we cannot fight communism all over the world, and I think we should have learned that lesson by now.
FACT: Here Kerry is essentially saying that communism is just as good as the weak dictatorship in Vietnam. If you believe that to be true, I suggest you visit the non-capitalist part’s of China, or visit Vietnam. Notice his saying we cannot fight communism all over the world. Ten years later Reagan did exactly that, and defeated the Soviet Empire, the primary communist power, and freed tens of millions of people in the former satellite states.
KERRY:the hypocrisy in our taking umbrage in the Geneva Conventions and using that as justification for a continuation of this war, when we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions, in the use of free fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search and destroy missions, the bombings, the torture of prisoners, the killing of prisoners, accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam.
FACTS: Once again he is making American soldiers to be monsters. He also claims as violation of the Geneva convention some practices which are perfectly legal (and still used today): free fire zones, H & I fire, search and destroy missions, and bombing.
KERRY:We are also here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We are here to ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatric and so many others. Where are they now that we, the men whom they sent off to war, have returned? These are commanders who have deserted their troops, and there is no more serious crime in the law of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded.
FACT: This is a remarkable passage. The people whose location he questions are Johnson Administration officials. Of course they weren’t there in 1971. This guy is whacko! And he talks about deserting his troops, when that is exactly what he did, using the arrival of his 1st purple heart (after he had gotten two others) to bug out after 3 months of combat. Most people in that unit, who only left when seriously wound, came back when they healed.
Anyway, if this doesn’t convince you that Kerry was lying a whole lot, then nothing will.
October 31st, 2004 at 11:24 pm
In the above, I had to break up the hotlinks to get through the &^$$%^ spam filter on this site!
October 31st, 2004 at 11:29 pm
There’s something very sad about people who’ve become obsessed with a lost cause.
October 31st, 2004 at 11:34 pm
John Moore (and others) let’s try to keep the postings shorter and more succinct if u want anyone to read them.
November 1st, 2004 at 1:03 am
I have a post on this subject at Crooked Timber. I don’t think any new issues are raised in GMRoper’s piece which I don’t cover there.
There is a kernel of truth to the critique, which is that extrapolated numbers such as the 100K estimate are a bad way to summarise regression results. Econometricians almost never do this, epidemiologists almost always do, and econometricians are right.
Anyone saying, however, that the Lancet study would fail an undergraduate course, is simply talking nonsense. There are no material errors of methodology, and all of the important difficulties involved are discussed in the paper. The confidence interval is wide, but is honestly reported. This is what I nickname the “Devastating Critique” school of thought, under which perfectly normal departures from the Platonic Form of an epidemiological study are blown up into gross negligence by people who don’t like the conclusions.
By the way, the statement that there is something odd or recherche about the 95% confidence interval is, to coin a phrase, “simply not true”.
The debate over UNICEF figures are muddying the water. The study is comparing own-averages for the sample before and after the event. If one wants to make the claim that this sample has an unrepresentatively low level of infant mortality before the invasion, then one cannot treat the sample as representative of infant mortality after the invasion. All one can do, which is what the authors actually did, is adjust the confidence interval to take account of the small sample size, which is almost certainly the reason why the infant mortality rate differs from the UNICEF number (which is itself a pretty shaky number).
The crucial fact here is that, as large as the confidence interval might be,
_it_does_not_include_the_number_zero!.
In other words, there is less than a 2.5% chance that you would have got this sample if the invasion had actually made things better (which I am assuming was the purpose of the invasion). The only way that one can launch any real attack on this fundamental conclusion is by doing what “Obsidian Order” does and arbitrarily ruling out some deaths as being deaths of “combatants”, who of course were not born as combatants, but became combatants when their country was invaded. The other argument on Obsidian Order (the penultimate paragraph which compares confidence intervals of death rates before and after the attack) is clearly wrong because it throws away the information that the pre- and post- invasion death rates were estimated from the same samples, meaning that the confidence interval on the increase would tend to be narrower than the confidence interval estimated by subtracting the means.
These critiques are not “devastating” and they do not “demolish” the Lancet study. They in general exhibit a much lower level of statistical sophistication than the study they attempt to criticise.
November 1st, 2004 at 1:08 am
Yikes!!! John X Moore, I’m relatively new here but its my impression there are few people here intersted in unfilterred, boring, irelevant, disingenous and reactionary proaganda seeking to attack Kerry’s Vietnam service. 30 years after the war if you wish to continue to defend hideous war crimes as well as the deaths of millions of vietnamese in a brutal war thats your choice. But long 547 transcripts are an insult to the intelligence (not to mention stomachs of us all)
THAT DOG WILL NOT HUNT HERE. Try it out somewhere else, let us know how it went.
November 1st, 2004 at 1:08 am
Finally, I’d note that the Iraq Body Count number is 16,000, not 15,000. And since it is prepared from newspaper reports (and only English language newspaper reports at that) it represents a lower bound on the true number, not a central estimate. To be honest, I have to doubt either the sincerity or the diligence of anyone who throws around the number 15K without keeping this point clear.
November 1st, 2004 at 1:10 am
And finally finally, I have no idea what Marc means by the scare quotes here:
Thousand of articles and blog-postings worldwide have already been generated in response to the so-called “Lancet Reportâ€
It was definitely a report, and it definitely appeared in The Lancet.
November 1st, 2004 at 1:59 am
Michael Turner: “I see that Obsidian brings up the “telescoping effect”. For this effect to be relevant, you have to assume that someone wouldn’t remember whether, in the last four or five years, a household member died BEFORE or AFTER a superpower invaded their country and toppled their government.”
You misunderstand me. In this case telescoping will likely increase the pre-war mortality figures, because deaths three years ago might get counted as two years ago. The point is that the study does not address that.
Michael Turner: “Obsidian’s critique seems to come down to this: it’s not really fair to count combatant casualties, because if an Iraqi wants to fight us, his death isn’t really a consequence of our takeover of their country.”
No, my critique is that we should be clear about what we’re counting. The study actually looks at the difference between gross pre-invasion and post-invasion mortality rates, but their summary says “individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces”. There is a huge difference between the two.
Regarding combatant casualties… what you’re saying is wrong on so many levels that I don’t know where to start. We are *trying* to set up a democratic government of Iraqis. A few people would like to prevent that, and we are fighting them. We don’t have anything approaching a popular uprising… just a few disaffected Shia youths following a charismatic leader with Iranian backing, and a larger number of very unhappy tribal Sunnis who wish to return back to the days when they were top dogs, and working together with Al Qaeda fighters from abroad. Total probably 10-15,000. The majority of Iraqis would certainly like us to leave, but only *after* we and they’ve defeated the insurgents.
November 1st, 2004 at 2:04 am
Anonymous writes: “The largest numbers of casualties are civilians, and among them women, children, and the elderly, for the obvious reasons.”
Generally true, but not in this case. If Iraq was patterned after a conventional war like the Russians in Afghanistan or the US in Korea, we would expect half a million or more deaths, a lot of them from lack of food, epidemics, and plain exposure to the elements when people become refugees. Obviously none of that has happened here.
November 1st, 2004 at 2:15 am
>>We are *trying* to set up a democratic government of Iraqis. A few people would like to prevent that, and we are fighting them
Out of interest, d’you remember what we were trying to do in South Vietnam?
November 1st, 2004 at 5:43 am
GMRoper writes: “The Hawthorne Effect has indeed been challenged and perhaps convincingly so. But it has not been “Debunked.” This site http://www.medjournal.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=986 published just this month supports the Hawthorne Effect. Sorry Mr. Turner, you just didn’t search far enough.”
The authors of the above-linked article can’t even get the definition of Hawthorne Effect right. They give their as: “the mere awareness of being under observation can alter the way in which a person behaves.”
Exercise for GM Roper: look up the REAL definition of the Hawthorne Effect. Geez, talk about “not searching far enough” – you don’t even know what the term means.
In the meantime, you might also apply yourself to the question of how you’d conduct any kind of poll WITHOUT increasing the pollee’s awareness of ‘being under observation.’” If what you imagined to be the Hawthorne Effect so seriously perturbs memory to the extent you seem to suggest, we simply wouldn’t have any polls. Golly, come to think of it, we couldn’t even have voting, because casting a ballot means writing down something that somebody will eventually pay attention to, and maybe that extra attention could make you vote for Bush when you were really intending to vote for Kerry, or vice versa.
November 1st, 2004 at 6:39 am
“We are trying to set up a democratic government of Iraqis”
Lest we forget, this war was proposed as an essential preemptive measure in response to an attack on our soil. That proposition had very little credibility at the time and those of us who were dubious have been proven catastrophically correct. Now, a year and a half after the dice were rolled, we appear to be not even close to some mid-point of a nation-building project among ethnic and religious rivals in an Arab country that has become – post-occupation – ridden with active terrorist factions, apparently armed largely with weapons and munitions that have become freely available as a result of the chaos.
The only law in Iraq that seems to be be holding is the law of unintended consequences. I’m remembering a year or so ago when the good folks who brought us to this, like Ms. Condaleeza Rice, were making brave analogies to the occupation of Germany and Japan. One wondered from which orifice such analysis was emanating. Now we are discussing the war in the context of Vietnam. I would suggest that analogies to Lebanon might soon be on the table. There is a word for the kind of policy and the strategizing that has guided us into Iraq. The word is failure – multi-leveled, monumental and most likely prolonged.
Having said that as a critic of the war, I’m fully prepared to support President Kerry when he attempts to bolster our forces and bring greater international resources to bear in Iraq. Some anti-war folks will be angry with him for not simply withdrawing. I will remain angry with the clique who dragged us into this muck in the first place and thank Kerry for assuming the burden of leading us out of a tunnel that looks longer and darker than even I suspected. What most concerns me is the fact that given a dedicated, even fanatical insurgency rooted among locals and very little in the way of credible local counter-forces, failure in Iraq by any measure is a distinct possibility. The storm this will unleash politically in this country is not something I want to contemplate at this point, but whatever happens tomorrow the next four years are going to be ugly.
November 1st, 2004 at 7:44 am
“I read the Wall Street Journal every day. I have never seen an article implying that the Iraq war was done for political purposes.”
You might wanna check out the May 2, 2003 edition for starters.
“Again, Nonsense. America was shocked by My Lae and it was a major issue.”
Really? So there was no coverup? Interesting.
“If you want evidence of Kerry blaming the troops for a policy that did not exist, read his Senate testimony of 1971. When he talks about atrocities, day by day with full knowledge at all levels of command, he is talking about atrocities as if they were a widespread, frequent and approved practice.”
Actually, what made that testimony and the debate against O’Neill so powerful was that Kerry was able to cite considerable documentation to support his contention. O’Neill on the other hand could only whine and distort.
“First, many of those testifying were not Vietnam Veterans, they were imposters”
False: http://mediamatters.org/items/200409030004
“We are also here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We are here to ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatric and so many others. Where are they now that we, the men whom they sent off to war, have returned? ”
You’re using that quote to prove he blamed the troops? Wow!!
Sick at heart Cal wrote, “I’m remembering a year or so ago when the good folks who brought us to this, like Ms. Condaleeza Rice, were making brave analogies to the occupation of Germany and Japan. One wondered from which orifice such analysis was emanating.”
Hey, you forgot the richest analogy of all, the Iraq invasion as a continuation of the Civil Rights Movement!! That was as prize as they get.
November 1st, 2004 at 12:46 pm
True. Many were imposters. See “Stolen Valor” for details. A number were determined to be vets who had not gone to Vietnam. Others were Vietnam vets who were exaggerating their record (like Hubbard, one of the leaders, whose claims of various adventures have been thoroughly discredited. It appears he never went to ‘Nam. Some of those testifying were not vets at all, and had stolen identities of real vets. When asked to sign affidavits by investigators (after they had been given immunity from prosecution for any war crimes they had testified to), every one of them refused.
Winter Soldier was classic agitprop guerilla theater. It was held in Detroit at Jane Fondas insistence, because that would be “closer to the workers” – Jane has never been a bright bulb. Kerry was present at that event.
We had a rally in DC on Sept 12. As one of the organizers, I know that the guy we had who had been a Winter Soldier “witness” was for real. He gave a speech where he described how he had seen no atrocities but was coached into describing all sorts of things. He came to ask forgiveness of the many thousands of us at the rally, and he got it.
So I don’t know where your link got its info, but it wasn’t valid. Try http://wintersoldier.com/ for the truth.
November 1st, 2004 at 12:51 pm
No, I didn’t use that quote to prove he smeared us. I used that quote to show what kind of a twit he was. It would appear you are not interested in honest argumentation, since you pick that quote out of all the ones I provided.
Actually, what made that testimony and the debate against O’Neill so powerful was that Kerry was able to cite considerable documentation to support his contention. O’Neill on the other hand could only whine and distort.
I have never seen O’Neil either whine or distort, and I doubt if he would do that. Of course, I have the advantage of actually knowing the guy, something you may not have.
Kerry was never able to site documentation that supports his contention (which one?), not if his contention was that he slandered us. You can deny it all you want, but we know when we are being slandered. I am quite capable of reading his entire testimony and analyzing it. I provided some details of his lies above, along with his slanders of our troops. GO back and look more closely.
November 1st, 2004 at 12:56 pm
dsquared,
People here are tired of ‘Nam so I’m not going to go into depth. We were in ‘Nam as part of Kennan’s containment doctrine, trying to stop the spread of communism. I don’t know if anyone actually intended to implant a democracy or not, although some said that was our goal. A dictatorship of the kind that was there until the communists took over would have been far better for the Vietnamese people and for us.
November 1st, 2004 at 1:09 pm
Marc,
I will try to keep the postings shorter. I don’t know how I would do that with the one that took a bunch of Kerry quotes and analyzed them – that is logically one piece, but the rest could be.
Your spam filter, if it is still running, also encourages shorter messages to reduce the odds of a “comment spam” reject. Still, it would be nice if you could, when you get time, replace that spam filter with something else.
In any case, I thank you for your forum.
November 1st, 2004 at 2:19 pm
True. Many were imposters. See “Stolen Valor” for details.
–really? http://mediamatters.org/items/200409030004
http://www.brookesstory.com/quicktime-low.htm
November 1st, 2004 at 2:19 pm
Since the tireless, obsessive John Moore has now, in effect, blamed George Kennan for the Vietnam war, it is worth noting that Kennan was an opponent of the Vietnam escalation (he supported McCarthy’s anti-war campaign in ’68) and has also spoken out against the plan for an Iraq war when it was being cooked up.
November 1st, 2004 at 3:10 pm
“I have never seen O’Neil either whine or distort, and I doubt if he would do that. ”
You should watch him whine about the antiwar movement in the Cavett debate, where he was plainly outmatched.
And Surly Cal, stop confusing us with inconvenient things like facts.
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