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[Joey Carr <joey AT metalab.unc.edu>]

First of all, no doubt the Ba'athists are uniformly horrible people, ought
to be executed to the last, but even if that were fact it would not excuse
an unjust war.

I wanted to admonish you to check you figures about how many Iraqi
casualties occured... certainly there were more than a couple thousand,
they were dying three hundred to an "engagement".

But, perhaps not suprizingly, there's almost no reliable information
available on the subject.

Here's the most reputable source I could find quickly:

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/nightline/World/iraq030528_casualties.html

This source lists:
620 civilian deaths in Baghdad, 256 in Najaf, 425 in Karbala and as many 
as 1,100 in Nasiriyah

Anyone find a better count?  Now, that's just a couple thousand civilian
deaths; as everybody knows, once you don a uniform you're no longer human
and not worthy of anyone's sypathies.

-Joey


On Thu, 4 Sep 2003, Steven Champeon wrote:

> on Thu, Sep 04, 2003 at 03:22:41PM -0400, trekkie AT spamcop.net wrote:
> > Quoting "David R.Matusiak" <dave AT matusiak.org>:
> > 
> > > and now we are looking at footing the bill for a trillion dollar
> > > Economic Stimulus package to the country we just destroyed.  please
> > > tell me there is some freaking Leprechaun and Gold at the end of this
> > > Black Rainbow.
> > 
> > This is the problem I had with the war. We *have* to rebuild Iraq now
> > that we destroyed it no matter who is in office.
> 
> We destroyed Iraq? That's news to me. I thought it was the Ba'ath Party
> and thirty years of despotic rule that destroyed Iraq. Sure, there were
> the UN-imposed sanctions after the first time Hussein tried to invade
> Kuwait (and lost at great cost), and the millions dead after he tried to
> invade Iran (and lost at far greater cost), but come on - the recent
> unpleasantness killed what, a couple of thousand people? And the
> infrastructure destroyed since the war far outweighs the damage done by
> coalition troops. Or are you talking about the government?
> 
> I agree we need to follow through and help the Iraqi moderates build a
> stable government, and one way to keep the hardliners out of power is to
> make everyone else reasonably happy and prosperous. But we didn't
> destroy Iraq, the country. They did that quite handily on their own.
> 
> Steve
> 
> 

-- 
Like the ski resort of girls looking for husbands and husbands looking
for girls, the situation is not as symmetrical as it might seem.
                -- Alan McKay