everything counts

Depending on who you ask, the civilian death toll in the first two years of the Iraq war might be 100,000, 194,000, or 1,000. The latest issue of U.S. News & World Report has an editorial (Fun With Numbers, August 1, 2005) that tries to ascertain the validity of statistics that are gathered by groups with an agenda.

The article goes on to say that the numbers vary depending on whether or not the source is anti-war. A team of Johns Hopkins University scholars conducted a survey and published their findings in the Britsh Medical Journal Lancet. This particular “non-partisan” survey found that 100,000 Iraqi civilans had been killed, but before you swallow that figure like oprah swallows cake, know that the report was issued just before the election and it was conducted by an anti-war group. Greenpeace had the numbers closer to 15,000 dead, while the American Friends Service Committee/Red Crescent claimed the number was actually closer to 300,000 civilian deaths. Later a Foreign Policy Magazine report fixed the number at closer to 1,000. Whose telling the truth? Unless you’re out counting bodies in Iraq, any guess will do apparently.

Any statistical figures released by any non-profit organization that counts on public donations or government grants for the balance of their operating income should immediately be discarded without much investigation.

I guess from my perspective I’d rather know about civilian lives “saved” from various conflicts… that would be a much more telling number… for instance, if the population of a neighborhood in Tikrit on Friday was 100,000, then the US bombed some terrorist cocksuckers in Tikrit back to the stoneage on Saturday, and the population of Tikrit didn’t decline by more than 1% by sunday, that would be ok in my book.

I’m sure a few of the misguided liberals who frequent my blog might be appalled by my thinking, but so the fuck what. I for one am all for erradicating anyone who thinks that everyone should be worshipping allah or else.