A growing number of Iraq women are having illegal abortions. Surprise, surprise.
I’m sure conservatives will all pretend to be shocked and horrified — a sentiment they rarely express for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians we’ve slaughtered, or the millions we’ve driven from their homes. I’m sure there will be some hand-wringing over the fact that Iraqi women don’t want to bring more children into the world — a world that we single-handedly destroyed.*
We’ve killed hundreds of thousands of people — the husbands, children, parents, brothers and sisters of these women. We’ve displaced them and turned them into refugees. We’ve made it impossible for them to get medical care. We’ve made pregnancy itself incredibly dangerous. We’ve turned their homes into war zones. We’ve made day-to-day life — going to the mosque or the market or a neighbor’s house — a game of Russian roulette.
I wouldn’t be scrambling to have a child, either.
And I know “pro-life” conservatives aren’t too concerned about the women involved, but I’d imagine that illegal abortion in Iraq isn’t particularly safe. Just more collateral damage, I guess.
Thanks to Morningstar for the link.
*Not saying we destroyed the whole world; I’m saying that we destroyed the worlds of many Iraqis.
Not just yet anyways.
Conservatives will blame the women for having sex, just like they do to women over here.
I wonder if they’ll blame the American soldiers who raped them?*
*Not saying all American soldiers rape. But it is completely naive to think that they’re all 50s-era Boyscouts.
Not even the most fantastical of death toll estimates claims that millions of Iraqi civilians have died in the Iraq War. Even if you include the period when sanctions were causing a humanitarian crisis, the figures offered by Saddam’s government are hardly a reliable measurement.
Shoddy.
RKMK, I’m prior military myself, and I’m a little bit offended by your comment. I know that not all of the men in the military are boyscouts, but there’s not even a significant percentage of them that are rapists. I knew quite a few scumbags during my service, but the proportion of asshats to regular guys was about the same as when I was a civilian. I guess I just resent the implication that while not all American soldiers rape, the majority probably do. That’s simply not true, and most of the men and women I know in the military are disgusted and appalled by those who commit such acts and are equally frustrated with our prolonged and unhelpful presence in Iraq.
Um, I’m not quite sure how to tell you this…
Yeah that was a typo. I meant hundreds of thousands, as I wrote in the preceeding paragraph.
On the whole, I’d feel safer around a 21st century US soldier than around a 50s-era boy scout.
Btw, the above was in reference to your impression of 50s-era Boyscouts, not your impression of American soldiers.
On the other hand, every last female vet that I’ve talked to in depth enough to address the issue has said that she was sexually assaulted while in the military. This argues that there are a fair number of slimeballs in the military who are not above taking advantage of those who are not in a position to fight back against them and who are being allowed to get away with their behavior. (Which is not to say that the majority or even plurality of soldiers are rapists, but a moderately large percentage…say, 10% or even 1%, can do a lot of damage in this situation because the normal social controls, whether police or peer pressure, are not in effect.)
Millions? Well, drop the ‘s.’ But we’re rapidly approaching 1 million dead–it was ~655,000 as of the middle of 2006 and things have been getting worse since then. If we break it down to about 200,000 deaths/year (2003 to 2006), then we should be at 850,000 right now.
The UN-estimated excess deaths due to the sanctions over the 90s clearly put us over the 1 million mark at this point. Did we kill them all directly? No. Would they have died if we hadn’t imposed sanctions or invaded? Probably not (which is what “excess deaths” covers).
Disgusting.
And I spent five years in university near a military college and a base, witnessing the rampant misogyny that springs from that kind of culture. The four women I know who were raped during my time there were all raped by students from RMC; I myself was slipped a date-rape drug at the Christmas formal at their school, along with a dozen other women who ended up at the hospital. When one of my friends decided to press charges against one of them (who was a former friend of hers, a classic NiceGuyTM) she was inundated with instant messages from his friends, saying things like, “Don’t ruin his life! Sure, he had sex with you while you were passed out, but it wasn’t rape. It was date rape, if anything!”
I am in no way saying that all men who serve in the military are rapists. I am saying that those in the military live in a culture that promotes uber-bonding within the corp, womanizing as sport, and dehumanization and demonization of “others”; it’s institutionalized patriarchy. Add in an absence of rape education [see: "It was date rape, if anything!"], and there’s a high risk of developing a culture where rape can easily occur.
And that’s not even touching all those pesky studies about the statistical correlations between rape and war.
This number was from a poorly thought out estimate from Lancet, which has been widely debunked. Why do you continue to promote it?
Secondly, maybe you should take a look at who is doing the killing there. Who is bombing schools, hospitals, markets and using retarded kids as bomb. And you blame the US for this? You should really refocus on the people actually doing the killing and who are responsible for the continued bloodshed.
The sooner they stop killing everything insight and imposing some medieval religion on the areas they do have control of, things will improve. Jump onto the proper ship here.
Weren’t the sanctions imposed after Saddam invaded Iraq. And weren’t the sanctions not on food products? Saddam horded the food, stole oil for him and his kids. And somhow, the humanitarian crisis there at the end of his reign is the US’s fault. Now, that’s an interesting take ;)
Luckily, Lorien, it’s not an either-or situation — Saddam could have been evil, the current terrorism in Iraq could be a huge problem, and the U.S. invasion could have been a complete mess.
I think there’s enough killing to go around. If you think U.S. soldiers aren’t killing civilians, you’ve really got your head in the sand.
It’s also worth noting that the terrorist groups in Iraq that are killing civilians have come in as a response to the U.S. occupation.
Because the only people who have “debunked” it are people who know nothing about statistics and have a political agenda. Dennis Prager and Rush Limbaugh are not qualified to “debunk” the Lancet.
Well, let’s see:
Prior to US invasion, few to no bombings. In fact, the only one that we know of was sponsored by the CIA (and admitted to by Allawi, since he’s the guy who did it).
After US invasion, bombings have steadily increased to their present pace of at least one a day.
Now, you can try to argue that the US invasion and overthrow of the government had absolutely nothing to do with the complete breakdown of civil order in Iraq, but then you’d really reveal yourself to be a fucking moron who doesn’t understand cause and effect.
Right now, the US is like the guy who parks his car at the top of a hill, doesn’t put on the parking brake, and when it rolls downhill killing people, says, “Well, who knew that could happen?”
Them, plus the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, Fred Kaplan (a Pulitzer Prize-winning journo for Slate), the LA Times’ Iraq war correspondent, and the Coalition Provisional Authority, just to pick a few names out of Wikipedia. But hey, it fits your narrative, right?
No, the Ba’ath party didn’t really need to plant bombs to fill up its mass graves.
And of those four named, the only one that would actually be qualified to critique the statistics would be the CRED. Unless you can point me to Fred Kaplan’s or the LA Times’ Iraq war correspondent’s degrees in statistics?
And quoting the CPA is just desperate. “Look, the people who have a vested interest in saying that civilians aren’t dying in large numbers say that civilians aren’t dying in large numbers! Who’d'a thunk it!”
Nature magazine has an article titled, “Iraq death toll withstands scrutiny” in their October 19, 2006 issue. Nature is one of the most respected scientific journals. And you think that Fred Kaplan is more qualified to decide if the Lancet was right than the peer-reviewed scientists at Nature?
That’s not the argument. You’re trying to claim that Iraq was already chaotic. It wasn’t. It descended into chaos after the US invasion.
You can whine and complain all you want about how Saddam was a bad bad man (and he was), but that doesn’t absolve the US for what we’ve done to destroy Iraq. You can’t say, “But Saddam was worse!” because at this point, we’ve killed more Iraqis than he ever did in his 30 years of dictatorship.
You will never be able to wash that blood off your hands, Shankar. Never. It will stain all of us until the day we die.
Slight correction: I keep referring to it as the “Lancet” study, but they’re just the publishers. The study was actually done by Johns Hopkins University.
But, hey, who’s ever heard of a second-rate medical school like Johns Hopkins? And they only had death certificates to verify 92% of the deaths, so clearly that means that no deaths occurred at all.
None of whom have the slightest credentials as epidemiologists or scientists in general. The reviewers at Lancet and actual well respected and credentialed professionals in the field all agree that the basic methodology and conclusions of the Roberts et al studies are sound. Frankly, the conservative claims to “debunking” this always remind me of their claims to have “debunked” evolution. Not the sort of thing that is going to win the Republicans any friends in the scientific community. Not that that seems to be a priority for them…
That having been said, though, I (and most experts*) agree that there were problems with the study and that it is probably somewhat inaccurate. Specifically, it is almost certainly an undercount. The methodology used is notorious for undercounting events. Furthermore, their count of non-violent deaths suggested that the rate of non-violent deaths was unchanged from prior years. How likely is it that in a country where most of the hospitals were bombed by the US, many if not most doctors have been arrested, kidnapped, or simply emigrated, the potable water supply, phone system and electric grid have been destroyed, and there is a curfew that prevents emergency vehicles from reaching those in need there would be no change in the non-violent death rate? Not a chance. If they undercounted the number of non-violent deaths, which they almost certainly did, they also undercounted the violent deaths, since the same methodology was used for both.
Finally, remember that the baseline used in this study was the pre-invasion death rate. In other words, the death rate while sanctions and intermittent bombings were occuring. So a number of the pre-invasion deaths could probably be justly attributed to the US as well. In short, no millions is not a wild overestimate.
*Those are separate catagories: I’m not claiming to be an epidemiologist.
Ahem. Excuse me. I am now going to correct a very silly error I made in my last post. CRED, of course, does have credibility as an epidemiologic organization. And, perhaps unsuprisingly, listing CRED as a group that has “debunked” the Roberts/Burham studies is misleading to say the least. Here is a link to a letter that three members of CRED, not unambigously representing the organization, wrote to Lancet. It does not “debunk” the study, it simply points out that there were ways in which a stronger study could have been done and that it wasn’t the platonic ideal scientific study. Well, no, it wasn’t. But letters which attempt to debunk studies, ie demonstrate that they have no validity, rarely start with lines like these:
” Gilbert Burnham and colleagues’ Iraq mortality study fills an important information gap in a country where reliable mortality statistics are rare ”
In other words, they found the study useful and generally reliable, if imperfect and suggested some ways in which a follow up study might be improved. Not exactly the rousing debunking that the conservatives were so desperately hoping for.
You are making an argument by authority. If your contention is that no one can judge the validity of the Lancet/John’s Hopkins Study without a degree in statistics, I have to bow out–I don’t have one. But that contention is idiotic, and based, IMO, solely on your need to blindly defend these numbers. If the numbers went the other way, you’d be defending Kaplan et alia’s creds as perfectly legitimate.
There are interests on all sides, and it’s naive to pretend that there aren’t.
Talking to you about the war is like talking to a Republican about abortion.
Diane defended the statistics much better than I could have. Please read her responses.
Though I have yet to understand why quoting people who are actual experts has become an “argument by authority” that can be ignored. Yes, let’s ignore the people who actually know something about the subject in favor of people who are pulling their observations out of their ass.
Talking to you about the war is like talking to an alcoholic who refuses to admit he has a problem even as they pull him out of the wreckage of his car. Willful ignorance is not something you should be proud of.
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