Total civilians killed, 50,000 to 55,000, from US military intervention.

Total of all civilians killed, 392,979 to 942,636.
Total if all civilians injured 1.2 million.
Total Iraq troops killed 30,000, 90,000 wounded.

The total median est 717,381 people have been killed, and
1,376,559 seriously injured in both Afghanistan and Iraq. (I left off “other” coalition forces and non Iraq civilians.)

Good thing Saddam is gone but have a hard time wrapping my mind around the deaths going on now. “Stuff happens”, “War is hell” does not do it for me. Putting any happy face on it just does not sit right. I do understand the stats and appreciate them from a statistical stand point, since my degrees are in engineering. However for the Iraqi who lost a child or family member it means nothing.

I wish things had gone better, but I can’t be too comforted by this analysis. What purpose does it serve and for whom. I think the cats out the bag on the situation. Put a silk neck-tie on a pig, its still a pig. My fear is Bush thinks we can “stay the course” with his history of being overly optimistic from the start.

There are a lot of good ideas on the table now and Gates sounds like the right man, but Bush is still the “Decider”. I’m going to Pray for President Bush and the House, that they make the right decisions and for our troops safety.

Perfect war or no war. And it’d better not take longer than a year or so, either.

…yes…you’ll notice that it took about that long for the anti-war/anti-American crowd to get their fecal material in order enough to garner proper TV coverage. You have to in/out in short order, or the Party of Treason and their academic and media enablers will thrown themselves across the tracks to stop the train.

OH, for an engineer who’ll see ‘em on the tracks and high-ball through!

The bloodbath that we are about to witness, courtesy of the Iraq Surrender Group, will be unlike anything witnessed since the left inspired our withdrawal from Saigon.

Even with the war, are civilians more likely to die or be injured from battles in the street or from Saddam’s butchers?

Far, far more likely to be butchered by Saddam’s henchmen in those days than by us (U.S.) today.

Saddam killed over 500,000 people, found in mass graves as of 2004.

Those are the numbers for discovered mass gravesites. Valued estimates throughout his reign range upwards of 2.2 million. Not quite Mao/Stalin/Pol Pot territory, but Iraq never had quite as large a population to work with.

The White House should have constantly framed such issues in comparative terms to past conflicts. Not only how many of our men have died, but how many we’ve had to kill to gain occupancy of Iraq, are numbers unimaginably low in all of history.

Like it or not, our presence in Iraq saves lives daily by comparison to deaths under Saddam. He wasn’t killing insurgents or terrorists, he was killing his countrymen, all too many of them innocents.

I get incensed whenever I hear uninformed people flaming the U.S. military for our indiscriminate attacks on civilians, or for the “thousands” of collateral deaths we cause. It’s all bunk. We are so surgical about what we hit and don’t hit, it’s hard to put into words. So I won’t…

Hellfire Missile, Meet Terrorists

Maverick v. tank

AGM-130 nails target from 6 mile, 35,000 foot drop

Zarqawi attack video

I’m sure I could find a hundred more, but it’s dinner time.

Fine, as a demonstration of how we COULD fight this war, let’s put cameras all around the city of Ramadi, have 100 B-52’s carpet bomb the place and air it live on al-jizyatax TV and then say “THIS is what it would look like if we didn’t try to limit civilian casualties. Any questions?” There’s be nothing left but rubble and nobody still breathing.

Tony737 on December 6, 2006 at 8:28 PM

I think Tony737 is saying that if we just took the gloves off, we could defeat the insurgents.

It could be argued that the carpet bombings of Germany and Japan (plus two nuclear strikes) were what really convinced the civillian populations that they had well and truely been beaten.

And let’s look at what precision bombing and restrictive ROE’s has not given us. It has not garnered any thanks or appreciation, nor has it brought us victory.

So this could indicat that perhaps we should take the gloves off. After all, “War is CRUELTY, and you cannot refine it.” – General William Tecumseh Sherman.

But before we think that this is the answer to all of our problems with this and other conflicts, let’s look at two other conflicts. The Soviet Afghan War, and the Russian Chechan Wars.

I’m pretty sure the Soviets weren’t holding anything back in Afghanistan. And yet, after years of fighting and bombing, they ended up defeated by the Afghans.

In the Russian Chechan wars, again, the Russians didn’t hold much back. From what I understand, they pretty much leveled Grozny. Here the results are more ambiguous to me. The Chechans didn’t get the independence they wanted. But I don’t know how happy the Russians are with the outcome either.

Seriously, I don’t know. Did the Russians get what they wanted out of these two wars with the Chechans? I’m not sure they did.

Regardless, I’m pretty sure the Russians had a much more liberal set of ROE’s that we did, yet their results are definitely mixed.

So I’m not sure that just loosening up our ROE’s will solve our problems.

Anyway, I don’t know if I really have a solution to this problem. So I don’t wanna come off like some know-it-all who just says, “well, yeah, your idea won’t work!”

Study: U.S. surprisingly successful at avoiding civilian casualties in IraqAllahpundit And getting better all the time. That’s a cold comfort to Iraqis worried about death squads but it’s good to have on the record for when the Haditha charges are…

If the military uses all their technology to make precision strikes to keep the civilian casualty numbers down, the libs complain that wer are in a quagmire and it is taking too long.

Mallard T. Drake on December 6, 2006 at 7:37 PM

and it’s a “nintendo” war, where the poor and of color suffer our detatched aggression, unreal on our tv screens.

I just have this really bad feeling that the final punchline will be counted in the hundred of thousands of American causalities on American soil.

Perfect war or no war. And it’d better not take longer than a year or so, either.

AMEN BROTHER!! AMEN!! IF WE CAN’T FIGHT WITH OUT KILLING ANYONE, THEN WE SHOULDN’T BE FIGHTING AT ALL!!!!!

People want to feel good about their country, and they are not being given reasons to (or enough reasons to). And there are lots of stories that should be told every day about how that country is being rebuilt by Americans.

But I guess that message just isn’t good enough to be broadcasted to the American public? Nor the fact that our Troops have never lost a battle?

PinkyBigglesworth on December 6, 2006 at 7:31 PM

You are correct, sir, but that’s not enough to overcome all the political forces working against either a military or political victory in OIF. In the Vietnam War, we never lost a battle…..

The libs have a sitcom mentality: if the problem isn’t solved in “30 minutes,” something is wrong and we have to get out.

Add to that most of the time they know we are coming:

Prior to the assault, the U.S. military used radio and television messages, loudspeaker broadcasts, posters and handbills, and airdropped leaflets to encourage residents in insurgent-heavy districts to evacuate.

But I guess that message just isn’t good enough to be broadcasted to the American public? Nor the fact that our Troops have never lost a battle? Nor the numbers of terrorists that have actually been killed? Nor the number of terrorist attacks that have been thwarted?

I doubt this report will get any news coverage at all.

Some of that is mindless anti-Americanism but some of it’s born of the unrealizable expectations that come with having the world’s most technologically sophisticated military. From both sides, too: people like Mark Steyn (and I) wonder why the U.S. Marines should have such trouble defeating a bunch of Arab gangs armed with mortars and machine guns while people like Human Rights Watch wonder why the they should have such trouble not killing old ladies driving too fast at checkpoints. And as the technology advances, so will the expectations. Eventually we’ll reach the point where an errant JDAM draws the same degree of coverage as Haditha has now. Perfect war or no war. And it’d better not take longer than a year or so, either.

Throw in a lack of will and you’ve explained perfectly why we’re not winning.

It’s getting to the point where there can be no good news on Iraq any more anywhere in the media.

And it’d better not take longer than a year or so, either.

Oh, and you can’t win, either. It’s much like answering a 4 year olds questions. There’s always another “Why?” and you can never get to the end.

Saddam killed over 500,000 people, found in mass graves as of 2004.

Study: U.S. surprisingly successful at avoiding civilian casualties in Iraq -Hot air-     Could it be?  If you listen to the nightly news, and the democratic party, you would think that we were "Only" killing civilian…