Tulsi: Trump: Stop hiding Saudi role in 911 and protecting Al Qaeda

Believe it or not, there are people who opposed the war in Iraq, oppose the US support of Saudi Arabia in Yemen, *and* Russia's support of Assad. However, we don't discount the Syrian deaths as "only" a few thousand civilians, as if they don't matter. And we don't imagine a cabal of journalists huddling together at Katz's Deli to devise a "narrative" to overthrow Assad.

paulsurovell said:

nohero said:

Only an idiot thinks that the people fighting in Syria were involved in planning or carrying out 9/11.  Anybody who argues otherwise is lying.

Straw man argument. No one said that. And you know it.

 When you hit "quote" to reproduce my post, you deleted a lot of text after that.  With all due respect, here's some more of the text, which gives better context and is all the response I have to give to your post above.

nohero said:

paulsurovell said:
Tulsi Gabbard's statement accuses Trump of desecrating the memory of 9/11 by acting to protect the perpetrators 9/11, ...

...
Only an idiot thinks that the people fighting in Syria were involved in planning or carrying out 9/11.  Anybody who argues otherwise is lying.  Anyone who invokes 9/11 to argue that we should let Assad kill as many people he wants, is insulting the memory of the victims and their survivors, and isn't "about peace".

paulsurovell said:

South_Mountaineer said:

paulsurovell said:

South_Mountaineer said:

paulsurovell said:
I don't see pushback as a bad thing. It often helps clarify an issue. What I've written on the White Helmets is itself pushback against the MSM narrative.

 What specific "MSM narrative" are you "pushing back" at?  Is it the narrative that the White Helmets don't fake footage?  Is it the narrative that they're noncombatants and not terrorists?  Or something else?

The narrative that supports the goal of regime-change in Syria and the various distortions and omissions that are used to promote that goal. The failure to report the truth about casualties, downplaying the role of Al Qaeda and omission of dissenting views by experts and reporters on the alleged Syrian chemical attacks, are three of the main themes.  The role of the White Helmets is a secondary issue that falls under the MSM's downplaying the role of Al Qaeda.

The White Helmets can't be that much of a secondary issue, since your own post says that you're writing about them as "pushback".  So your answer confirms that since you think "the role of Al Qaeda" is downplayed, you are pushing back on the position that the White Helmets DON'T fake footage -- calling it fake footage is one of the claims of the Syrian government and others who say the rebels are just terrorists.  You're also pushing back on the position that the White Helmets really are noncombatants who are there to rescue people, and not terrorists making up stories about the Syrian government bombings.  I think you're falling for the propaganda that the Syrian government and its supporters want you to fall for.

Scott Ritter wrote a long analysis of the White Helmets in 2016 that I recommend reading in full. Here's an excerpt:
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-white-helmets-and-the-inherent-contradiction-of-americas-syria-policy/

Without casting aspersions on the heroism of its members in rescuing Syrian civilians, without this propagandist value the White Helmets would not receive donations on the scale that they currently enjoy. The recent denial of an entry visa into the United States by the Department of Homeland Security to the head of the White Helmets, Raed Saleh, serves as a case in point, underscoring the sensitivity that surrounds the White Helmets and their close proximity to entities—Al Nusra Front and Islamic State—that have been officially deemed as terrorist. The White Helmets are useful only so long as they stay on message, and that message is delivered through a narrative constructed from carefully edited imagery put out by the White Helmets themselves. Simply put, if the White Helmets turn off their cameras, America will turn off the money.

The messaging of the White Helmets is not serendipitous, but rather part of a deliberate strategy that imbues every aspect of their work. The images and videos depicting the work of the White Helmets inside Syria are exclusively self-produced and distributed. Even a recent documentary film distributed by Netflix (not surprisingly titled “The White Helmets”) had to rely on the White Helmets for the film shot inside Syria (Khaled Khatib, the White Helmet media activist, was trained by the film’s cinematographer on how to operate the specialized camera used in the film). The only entity allowed to tell the White Helmets story are the White Helmets themselves, and in this they have been very successful—their work has garnered them the attention, support and admiration of numerous organizations, parties and luminaries outside Syria (Russia and Iran, allies of Assad, being the notable exceptions).

A Magnet for Terror

The compelling way in which the White Helmets document the horrors of the Syrian civil war enables people like Samantha Power to score political points at the United Nations and elsewhere. But the message is a double-edged sword, as it also ably shines a spotlight on the very actions the anti-Assad forces use to justify their resistance—especially Al Nusra Front and Islamic State, in both of whose territory the White Helmets freely operate. As U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has said, “There is no one who has done more to make Syria a magnet for terrorism than Bashar al-Assad.” Or put another way, the United States is the No. 1 funder and facilitator of one of the most effective recruiting tools by terrorists inside Syria today—the White Helmets.

 After reading all of Scott Ritter's article, not just the excerpts -- it's not an analysis of the White Helmets.  It's a discussion of the complex politics of dealing with the Syria Civil War.  The article does document their heroism, and their danger from Syrian forces that deliberately target civilian rescuers.

The article doesn't support your claims about them (and undercuts them, especially in the details about the White Helmets really being civilian rescuers), which I commented on in the quoted posts: "You are pushing back on the position that the White Helmets DON'T fake footage -- calling it fake footage is one of the claims of the Syrian government and others who say the rebels are just terrorists.  You're also pushing back on the position that the White Helmets really are noncombatants who are there to rescue people, and not terrorists making up stories about the Syrian government bombings.  I think you're falling for the propaganda that the Syrian government and its supporters want you to fall for."

paulsurovell said:

cramer said: Statista.com says that  12,133 civilians were killed in Iraq in 2003 and 11,736 in 2004. Its source is Iraqbodycount.org.  https://www.statista.com/statistics/269729/documented-civilian-deaths-in-iraq-war-since-2003/ https://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/

For argument's sake, I'll stipulate to the IBC counts, which average 33 for 2003 and 32 for 2004, which are more than 4 times higher than by Russia in Syria, and were presumably not the result of "US deliberately targeting Iraqi civilians."

 Your math is off again. You're assuming that all those civilians were killed by U.S. forces and none by opposing forces. Now, we could apply the percentages from the Lancet study, which would give us averages of 27 a day both years, but that'd be foolish, because percentages formulated from an epidemiological study can't be transferred to numbers tallied in a completely different way by another organization. Kind of like your comparison of civilian death tolls in two separate wars in two countries with distinct populations and battle zones.

Even 15 years after the start of the Iraq war, the death toll there, in the words of a WaPo headline, "is still murky." That should say something about contemporary calculations that get us the likes of "7.3 civilians per day."

dave23 said:
Believe it or not, there are people who opposed the war in Iraq, oppose the US support of Saudi Arabia in Yemen, *and* Russia's support of Assad. However, we don't discount the Syrian deaths as "only" a few thousand civilians, as if they don't matter. And we don't imagine a cabal of journalists huddling together at Katz's Deli to devise a "narrative" to overthrow Assad.

 You said earlier:

dave23 said:

I'm more tired of the war-by-proxy than you'll ever be.

This and the quote above beg the question: How "tired" are you of the "war-by-proxy?"

Are you tired enough to agree with Jeffrey Sachs that the US should end the war by getting out of Syria or are you not too tired to support continued US involvement in the war because you oppose "Russia's support of Assad."

South_Mountaineer said:

  After reading all of Scott Ritter's article, not just the excerpts -- it's not an analysis of the White Helmets.  It's a discussion of the complex politics of dealing with the Syria Civil War.  The article does document their heroism, and their danger from Syrian forces that deliberately target civilian rescuers.

Yes, it's a discussion in which Ritter analyzes the sources of support, the politics and the role of the White Helmets as a recruiting vehicle for -- as Ritter says "terrorists inside Syria today."  I quoted Ritter on the heroism of the White Helmets.

South_Mountaineer said:

The article doesn't support your claims about them (and undercuts them, especially in the details about the White Helmets really being civilian rescuers), which I commented on in the quoted posts: "You are pushing back on the position that the White Helmets DON'T fake footage -- calling it fake footage is one of the claims of the Syrian government and others who say the rebels are just terrorists.

Read the bold sections in my excerpt of Ritter's article.

South_Mountaineer said:
You're also pushing back on the position that the White Helmets really are noncombatants who are there to rescue people, and not terrorists making up stories about the Syrian government bombings.  I think you're falling for the propaganda that the Syrian government and its supporters want you to fall for."

 I've never said the WH are terrorists, I've said they cooperate with terrorists. The authenticites of their videos of alleged chemical weapons attacks have been challenged by several experts, including Scott Ritter:

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/a-shocking-lack-of-intelligence-in-our-missile-strike-on-syria/

While a war of words transpired in New York, on the ground in Syria the situation was evolving in a manner which began to threaten the narrative marketed by the White Helmets, SAMS and other sources that had peddled the information used by Washington, London and Paris to build a case sustaining the allegation of chemical weapons use by the Syrian government. The Army of Islam, having been thoroughly defeated on the field of battle by the Syrian army, abandoned Douma for refuge in rebel-held Idlib province. As the probability of unfettered access to the actual sites of the alleged chemical attacks became reality, the locations and people captured on film at what had become Ground Zero in Douma were about to be placed under a microscope of scrutiny where fact would ultimately triumph over fiction.

[ . . . ]

New videos had emerged from within Douma in the days following the alleged chemical attack, provided by the White Helmets, which claimed to show yellow 150-pound chlorine gas cylinders dropped by the Syrian military on targets inside Douma, including one site where numerous deaths were reported . . . However, questions soon emerged about the legitimacy of the White Helmet video as proof of a chlorine attack, namely around the lack of damage to the cylinders involved, the lack of any indication that the cylinders contained chlorine gas, or, if they did, any chlorine gas leaked from the cylinders (the regulator valves on both canisters appeared to be undamaged and closed, and the physical integrity of both canisters seemed intact, prompting the question as to how any gas was alleged to have originated from either). Complicating matters further was the fact that, on April 9, a Russian military unit had arrived at the scene of the alleged gas attack to investigate and found no evidence of any chemical attack

[ . . . ]

The OPCW advance party deployed to Beirut on Thursday, April 12, and was joined by the rest of the team on Friday, April 13. Their plan was to deploy to Damascus on Saturday, April 14, and begin their work shortly thereafter. If chlorine had been used in Douma, as the White Helmets, SAMS and others claimed, inspectors would be able to find evidence of such in the form of various chloride salts, produced by the hydrochloric acid that was in turn produced through the reaction of chlorine gas with any substance it encountered upon release. The Russian military experts who visited Douma on April 9 were no doubt aware of this. If the OPCW team was able to detect significant traces of chloride salts, then the Russian findings would be debunked, and the claims of the White Helmets, SAMS and others bolstered.

The American-led military attack on Syria took place while the OPCW fact-finding mission assembled in Beirut; on Saturday, April 14, while the team drove to Damascus, Syria was dealing with consequences of this act. Despite this new reality, the Syrian government met with the fact-finding mission to discuss the arrangements needed for the team to travel to Douma to carry out its tasks. Problems soon arose regarding the security of the OPCW team . . .

While the OPCW inspectors waited in Damascus, the Syrian government provided them with access to 22 medical personnel it claimed had treated the alleged victims of the chemical attack, and who could provide testimony that no such attack took place. While the OPCW has not indicated whether these interviews actually took place, or what the findings of any such interviews were, insight into their probable content could be found via Russian media, which aired interviews with two Syrian medical personnel who appeared in the White Helmet video showing victims of the alleged chemical attack being treated in Douma.

In one such interview, a person identified as Khalil Azizah, claiming to be a medical student who works in the emergency room of the central hospital of Douma, declared that “a house in the city was bombed. The upper floors of the building were destroyed and a fire broke out on the first several floors. All those who were injured in this building were brought to us. The residents of the upper floors had signs of smoke inhalation from the fire’s smoke. We provided assistance based upon the symptoms of smoke inhalation. During this time an unknown person came in. I don’t know him. He said that this was an attack using poisonous substances. People were frightened, there was a struggle; the relatives of the wounded began to spray each other with water. Other people without medical training began putting anti-asthma inhalers in children’s mouths. We didn’t see a single patient with signs of chemical poisoning.”

Khalil Azizah claimed that the incident in question took place on April 8, one day after the alleged attack of April 7. However, he referred to the same video shot by the White Helmets and pointed to his image in the video as one of the personnel providing medical treatment. As such, there is no doubt that the incident Khalil Azizah refers to is the same one recorded by the White Helmets. Moreover, Azizah’s narrative of smoke inhalation is consistent with the finding of the French intelligence report on the Douma chemical attack, which noted that, based upon an examination of the images of the alleged victims, one of the possible explanations behind the symptoms produced was “hydrocyanic acid” (the solution of hydrogen cyanide in water). Hydrogen cyanide is something not found in either chlorine or sarin exposure, but prevalent in the smoke produced by structure fires. The presence of hydrogen cyanide would be explained by a structure fire, and as such, Azizah’s testimony provides a viable alternative explanation for the victims being treated by the Douma hospital, as well as those filmed dead at the scene of the alleged chemical attack.

[ . . . ]

Meanwhile, the delay for getting the OPCW inspectors into Douma prompted the United States, the United Kingdom and France to speculate that Russia was sanitizing the site of the attack of any evidence that would show chemicals were used, a charge Russia vehemently denied (and something the various news reports conducted at the scene would suggest was not, in fact, the case). Not to be outdone, the head of the White Helmets claims to have provided the OPCW fact-finding mission the locations of “mass graves” containing the victims of the alleged chemical attack. The forensic viability of these bodies (for which no documentation exists and no chain of custody has been provided linking them to the chemical incident in question, if they in fact exist) is virtually nil, and it is unlikely the OPCW would seek to have them exhumed in any event. The allegations of their existence, however, represents the latest in a series of roadblocks that have been placed in the way of the OPCW inspectors.

The truth is out there, waiting on the ground in Douma. There is no doubt that the OPCW fact-finding mission has the forensic investigatory capability to detect the presence of chemical agents at the scene of the alleged chemical attack of April 7. The amount of chlorine necessary to have produced the number of casualties claimed is significant, and as such the chemical residue unique to such an event would be present in large quantities, and easily detected; no amount of “sanitation” by Russia or any other party could eliminate these traces.

Postscript: After 5 months the OPCW hasn't determined what was on the ground in Douma.

DaveSchmidt said:

paulsurovell said:

cramer said: Statista.com says that  12,133 civilians were killed in Iraq in 2003 and 11,736 in 2004. Its source is Iraqbodycount.org.  https://www.statista.com/statistics/269729/documented-civilian-deaths-in-iraq-war-since-2003/ https://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/

For argument's sake, I'll stipulate to the IBC counts, which average 33 for 2003 and 32 for 2004, which are more than 4 times higher than by Russia in Syria, and were presumably not the result of "US deliberately targeting Iraqi civilians."

 Your math is off again. You're assuming that all those civilians were killed by U.S. forces and none by opposing forces. Now, we could apply the percentages from the Lancet study, which would give us averages of 27 a day both years, but that'd be foolish, because percentages formulated from an epidemiological study can't be transferred to numbers tallied in a completely different way by another organization. Kind of like your comparison of civilian death tolls in two separate wars in two countries with distinct populations and battle zones.
Even 15 years after the start of the Iraq war, the death toll there, in the words of a WaPo headline, "is still murky." That should say something about contemporary calculations that get us the likes of "7.3 civilians per day."

Yes I mistakenly interpreted the Johns Hopkins press release to mean that 100,000 excessive deaths were all caused by US coalition violence. But if you look at the updated Johns Hopkins raw data, over three years 55% of the excessive deaths were caused by violence, and in 2003-2004, the US coalition caused 36% of those violent deaths. So that's 100,000 x 55% = 55,000 x 36% = 19,800 Iraqi civilians killed by US coalition forces in 2003-2004.  The daily average is 19,800 / 365 = 54.2 which is nearly 8 times the SOHR figure for Syrian civilians killed by Russians (7.2 per day). If you want to quibble over using the 55% three-year estimate for violent deaths, we can recalculate the data over the 3-year period, but there wouldn't be a significant difference.

Johns Hopkins also updated their 2003-2004 data in 2006 and got 112,000 excessive deaths, which would raise the numbers by 12%.

In addition to the Johns Hopkins raw data, I would recommend the actual SOHR press release, reported in Times of Israel article I cited earlier, which suggests that its calculations include Russian ground forces as well as the air force.

The Iraq Body Count numbers are lower, but like I said earlier, I'm happy to stipulate them.  The IBC numbers are the lowest among independent estimates of Iraq civilians killed as a result of the US invasion.

But the point is not that any of these numbers are exact, they are all estimates. The point is that when contrasted with the SOHR numbers, they help illustrate why the MSM narrative that Russia is deliberately targeting civilians defies common sense and why the MSM won't publish the SOHR data.

paulsurovell said:

If you want to quibble over using the 55% three-year estimate for violent deaths, we can recalculate the data over the 3-year period, but there wouldn't be a significant difference.

 If I wanted to quibble — and I do, because I think the reckless practice of arithmetic can be instructive when the discussion is really about the calculus of narratives and motives — I’d note that 365 is the wrong divisor, because the 2003-04 period covers March 2003 to September 2004. (And don’t forget the leap day!)

.

paulsurovell said:

But the point is not that any of these numbers are exact, they are all estimates. The point is that when contrasted with the SOHR numbers, they help illustrate why the MSM narrative that Russia is deliberately targeting civilians defies common sense and why the MSM won't publish the SOHR data.

If you base your argument on numbers, then the numbers matter.  Mr. DaveSchmidt did the heavy lifting, so you've moved away from basing your claim on the numbers.

Whether Russia deliberately targeted civilians doesn't depend on the numbers.  It depends on the nature of attacks.  In other words, it's not numerical, it's narrative.

[Edited to remove my erroneous comment.  h/t Mr. DaveSchmidt]

Brutal

nohero said:

[Edited to add]  The words from Mr. Surovell that I quoted used to be in the post right above this one.  Now it's "edited", so the words went down the Memory Hole.

 Whatever the reason for the 1:21 p.m. deletion, which as far as I'm concerned is Paul's business, those words remain intact at the end of his post from 5:22 a.m.

DaveSchmidt said:

nohero said:

[Edited to add]  The words from Mr. Surovell that I quoted used to be in the post right above this one.  Now it's "edited", so the words went down the Memory Hole.

 Whatever the reason for the 1:21 p.m. deletion, which as far as I'm concerned is Paul's business, those words remain intact at the end of his post from 5:22 a.m.

 The 1:21 deletion will be reinstated and explained later tonight.

DaveSchmidt said:

nohero said:

[Edited to add]  The words from Mr. Surovell that I quoted used to be in the post right above this one.  Now it's "edited", so the words went down the Memory Hole.

 Whatever the reason for the 1:21 p.m. deletion, which as far as I'm concerned is Paul's business, those words remain intact at the end of his post from 5:22 a.m.

 My error.  I saw a blank "edited" post from Mr. Surovell, and thought that was the one I had quoted from.  I was thinking of not being accused of inventing a quote, and didn't check further up.  I will revise that post.

paulsurovell said:

DaveSchmidt said:

nohero said:

[Edited to add]  The words from Mr. Surovell that I quoted used to be in the post right above this one.  Now it's "edited", so the words went down the Memory Hole.

 Whatever the reason for the 1:21 p.m. deletion, which as far as I'm concerned is Paul's business, those words remain intact at the end of his post from 5:22 a.m.

 The 1:21 deletion will be reinstated and explained later tonight.

 Looking forward to it.

i don't know about anyone else but I stayed up all night waiting for the explanation. 

paulsurovell said:

Are you tired enough to agree with Jeffrey Sachs that the US should end the war by getting out of Syria or are you not too tired to support continued US involvement in the war because you oppose "Russia's support of Assad."

 Ah, so you think if the US removed itself that the war would end entirely? 

paulsurovell said:

DaveSchmidt said:

nohero said:

[Edited to add]  The words from Mr. Surovell that I quoted used to be in the post right above this one.  Now it's "edited", so the words went down the Memory Hole.

 Whatever the reason for the 1:21 p.m. deletion, which as far as I'm concerned is Paul's business, those words remain intact at the end of his post from 5:22 a.m.

 The 1:21 deletion will be reinstated and explained later tonight.

The dog ate my explanation. A new one will be posted within 24 hours. My assistant is working on the first draft. Tick Tock

paulsurovell said:

South_Mountaineer said:

  After reading all of Scott Ritter's article, not just the excerpts -- it's not an analysis of the White Helmets.  It's a discussion of the complex politics of dealing with the Syria Civil War.  The article does document their heroism, and their danger from Syrian forces that deliberately target civilian rescuers.

Yes, it's a discussion in which Ritter analyzes the sources of support, the politics and the role of the White Helmets as a recruiting vehicle for -- as Ritter says "terrorists inside Syria today."  I quoted Ritter on the heroism of the White Helmets.

 There's a lot you didn't quote.  Here's some more from your Scott Ritter article that you didn't quote.

“They have all chosen, they have all chosen to risk their lives to save others,” Le Mesurier told CNN’s Sanjay Gupta in a May 2015 interview, “and that makes every single one of them a hero.” The founder of the White Helmets then introduced the CNN audience to two themes that dominate the White Helmet experience—barrel bombs and the “double tap.”

“These bombs are so malignant,” Gupta explained, describing a barrel bomb, “full of explosives, rebar, wire, nails, anything else that can brutally maim and kill.” Le Mesurier elaborated further: “A barrel bomb dropping on your house is like a 7.6- magnitude earthquake 50 times a day.”

But it is not just what these bombs do when used, Le Mesurier noted, but the manner in which they are employed, especially against the White Helmets. “Helicopters normally carry two barrel bombs and they drop the first barrel bomb, which then explodes, and the pilot then remains in the sky, circling where the explosion took place,” Le Mesurier told Gupta, “waiting for a crowd to gather and waiting for rescuers to come to the scene. When a crowd gathers, they release the second bomb, and that is a double tap.”

“Eighty-four White Helmets have now been killed, mostly by double taps,” Gupta reported. “It’s why Syria is one of the most dangerous places in the world, and why being a White Helmet might be the most dangerous job in the world. And yet, they go on—2,600 have saved the lives of 18,000.”

They're civilian rescuers who save people bombed by the Syrian government.  You're smearing them because they work where the rebels are -- which is kind of the point of being civilian rescuers who save people bombed by the Syrian government.  Not to mention the deliberate bombing BY the Syrian government OF those civilian rescuers.

South_Mountaineer said:

They're civilian rescuers who save people bombed by the Syrian government.  You're smearing them because they work where the rebels are -- which is kind of the point of being civilian rescuers who save people bombed by the Syrian government.  Not to mention the deliberate bombing BY the Syrian government OF those civilian rescuers.

 Scott Ritter speaks truth to power. Yes, he acknowledges the heroism of the White Helmets and he cites estimates of how many people they've rescued. You would like that to be the end of the story, but it's not. Ritter also says this about the White Helmets play another role -- and it's a fact, not a smear:

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-white-helmets-and-the-inherent-contradiction-of-americas-syria-policy/

. . . the United States is the No. 1 funder and facilitator of one of the most effective recruiting tools by terrorists inside Syria today—the White Helmets."

This is how Ritter explains that assertion: (1) The White Helmets are not neutral actors but, rather, are decidedly and vocally anti-Assad. (2) This jibes with the goals of their Western benefactors, who are motivated to promote their work. (3) This promotion plays into the hands of the Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front, which also shares that goal.

In other words, the White Helmets chose a side (or had a side chosen for them, according to Ritter’s account). Their heroics have been praised around the world. That makes them a recruiting vehicle for terrorists. Lesson: Either the White Helmets should have shut up, or the governments and Oscar-winning documentarians of the West should have.

That’s quite different from any implication that the White Helmets are serving as an active propaganda front for Al Qaeda.

Side note: Ritter, too, appears to like the phrase “hand in glove,” although he applies it to the White Helmets and the West, not WH and AQ: There is a symbiotic, hand-in-glove relationship between the anti-Assad rhetoric of the ostensibly “neutral and impartial” White Helmets and the policy objectives of their funders, a relationship that embodies the notion of a quid pro quo relationship between the two.

I'll start filling in the deleted post with updated responses to Dave Schmidt's critiques of the math, based on a closer reading of the PDF of the full text of the Lancet article.  I'll discuss the implications of the math later today. Part 1:

DaveSchmidt said:

paulsurovell said:
I'm sure your "hasty look" included these calculations
84% of 100,000 is 84,000. 95% of 84,000 is 79,800 ~ 80,000
so what's the comeback, now that I've set it up?

 Thanks. That's what I thought. So to recap the problem:
100,000 is the estimate of the number of Iraqi civilians whose deaths can be attributed to the war. The summary does not give an estimate of how many of those deaths were from fighting; it says only that a majority were due to violence. Which leaves us with 95 percent of 84 percent of an unspecified toll.
 

The summary says:

The researchers  . . . estimate that 100,000 more Iraqis died than would have been expected had the invasion not occurred. Eighty-four percent of the violent deaths were reported to be caused by the actions of Coalition forces and 95 percent of those deaths were due to air strikes and artillery.

The full, updated study of 2006 which covered March 2003 through June 2006 concluded that 654,965 more Iraqis died (excess deaths) than if the US invasion had not occurred.  Of the excess deaths, it estimated that 601,027 were caused by violence. That translates to 91% of excess deaths caused by violence (for the full 3-year, 4-month period).

Given the proximity of the percentages, I think it's likely that the authors of the summary intended to mean that the "violent deaths" were "excess violent deaths."

The 2006 update also raised the number of excess deaths caused during the initial 17.8-month period from 100,000 to 112,000.

Another change was the percentage of excess violent deaths attributed to US Coalition forces.  It went from 84% in the summary to 36% (for the first 14 months) of the updated text.

DaveSchmidt said:

paulsurovell said:

cramer said: Statista.com says that  12,133 civilians were killed in Iraq in 2003 and 11,736 in 2004. Its source is Iraqbodycount.org.  https://www.statista.com/statistics/269729/documented-civilian-deaths-in-iraq-war-since-2003/ https://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/

For argument's sake, I'll stipulate to the IBC counts, which average 33 for 2003 and 32 for 2004, which are more than 4 times higher than by Russia in Syria, and were presumably not the result of "US deliberately targeting Iraqi civilians."

 Your math is off again. You're assuming that all those civilians were killed by U.S. forces and none by opposing forces. Now, we could apply the percentages from the Lancet study, which would give us averages of 27 a day both years, but that'd be foolish, because percentages formulated from an epidemiological study can't be transferred to numbers tallied in a completely different way by another organization. Kind of like your comparison of civilian death tolls in two separate wars in two countries with distinct populations and battle zones.
Even 15 years after the start of the Iraq war, the death toll there, in the words of a WaPo headline, "is still murky." That should say something about contemporary calculations that get us the likes of "7.3 civilians per day."

Part 2: Actually it's possible to get an estimate on the Iraq Body Count site for the number of civilians killed by US Coalition only, using a drop-down menu and downloading a dataset.  These numbers are smaller than those cited by Cramer, but the first year total is about the same as the total over three years for Russia-in-Syria published by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR).

IBC figures for killed by US-lead coalition:

7,644 March 03 - Feb 04
2,891 March 04 - Feb 05
1,100 March 05 - Feb 06

I'm still willing to stipulate to these numbers.

DaveSchmidt said:

paulsurovell said:

If you want to quibble over using the 55% three-year estimate for violent deaths, we can recalculate the data over the 3-year period, but there wouldn't be a significant difference.

 If I wanted to quibble — and I do, because I think the reckless practice of arithmetic can be instructive when the discussion is really about the calculus of narratives and motives — I’d note that 365 is the wrong divisor, because the 2003-04 period covers March 2003 to September 2004. (And don’t forget the leap day!)

Part 3:
You didn't quibble enough because the percentage of excess deaths caused by US Coalition forces over the March 03 through June 06 period is not 55%, which is the percentage of all deaths caused by US Coalition forces. The percentage of excess deaths caused by US Coalition forces (over the entire period) is 31%.

The updated March 03-June 06 Johns Hopkins study gives us specific information and data that can be used to calculate the estimated number of Iraq civilians killed by US Coalition forces during that period, as follows:

Total Iraq civilians killed by excess violence: 601,027
Percentage killed by excess violence by US Coalition: 31% (average over the full period. see Table 4)
Total Iraq  civilians killed by US Coalition: 31% x 601,027 = 186,318
Daily average: 186,318 / 1,217 (3 years plus 4 months) = 153

If the divisor in my previous estimate for the daily average for March 03-Sept 04 had been 545 instead of 365 -- as noted by Dave -- the result would have changed from 54 to 36.

I'll update my argument, accordingly, later.

Classic Gish Gallop Gobbledeeeeeeeegook.

“So what’s the comeback, now that I set it up?”

A recommendation of “A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper,” by John Allen Paulos. 

After all these estimates, errors and efforts to compare civilian kill rates in two different wars, it would shed light on the larger point: How innumeracy runs rampant, and why an awareness of its pitfalls, rather than a compulsion to push a narrative, could explain decisions not to report SOHR updates and other soft data as if they were hard news.

paulsurovell said:

 Scott Ritter speaks truth to power. 

 Who knew, after all this time, that you were a fellow punster?

DaveSchmidt said:
“So what’s the comeback, now that I set it up?”
A recommendation of “A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper,” by John Allen Paulos. 
After all these estimates, errors and efforts to compare civilian kill rates in two different wars, it would shed light on the larger point: How innumeracy runs rampant, and why an awareness of its pitfalls, rather than a compulsion to push a narrative, could explain decisions not to report SOHR updates and other soft data as if they were hard news.

 Recommending that Mr. Surovell learn about innumeracy?  Ouch.

nohero said:

DaveSchmidt said:
“So what’s the comeback, now that I set it up?”
A recommendation of “A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper,” by John Allen Paulos. 
After all these estimates, errors and efforts to compare civilian kill rates in two different wars, it would shed light on the larger point: How innumeracy runs rampant, and why an awareness of its pitfalls, rather than a compulsion to push a narrative, could explain decisions not to report SOHR updates and other soft data as if they were hard news.

 Recommending that Mr. Surovell learn about innumeracy?  Ouch.

Double ouch.

May I also recommend a more imaginative lexicon of interjections in this discussion.