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Current Events » in reply to I believe that is the first major incident of collateral damage in months

re: Deaths in Iraq
Tom Brosz — (archived)

Instead of blowing steam out your ears, look at the data for a change.

Since the end of the combat at the beginning of May in 2003, almost every civilian death has been caused by someone other than U.S. forces. The main exceptions to this were the two assaults on Fallujah.

My source for this is Iraqbodycount.org, and this paper. Keep in mind that this source is virulently anti-war, and that their sources and definitions of "civilian" are fuzzy at best in this situation. Their category of "criminal" needs a lot of work, too. Also note that their data only goes up to last March, so the numbers would be higher now.

Now, here's something interesting. If you subtract out the combat period deaths to find out what the occupation toll is, you get about 3,646 civilians killed by U.S.-led forces (assuming Iraqbodycount is accurate) between May of 2003 and March of 2005. In that same time period, approximately 1,380 U.S. forces died, and died because they were using tactics that minimized civilian casualties and put themselves in far more danger than someone flying a bomb run. Just a little perspective

Most of that paper's statistics combine the combat and occupation phase, which makes numbers like "42 percent killed by the U.S." highly misleading when talking about the current occupation situation.

It's also instructive to go to their home site, and go down the data list. You read it, and then tell me who's killing all the civilians.

Pulling statistical ghosts out of your ass doesn't carry any more weight with me than the supposed hundreds of Americans that have been put away by the Patriot Act. The proof? There's no evidence of it.

Now, as for your main argument, I said "major" and I meant it. I'm well aware of individual incidents that are more recent. But dig up the last incident like this particular one that made the papers, and tell me when it happened.

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