»If kerry wins i garuntee you that the US will be attcked«

freedom fighters

so its freedom fighters that sawed off margret hassans head with a knife?

Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator who had NUCULAR WEAPONS.OMG. Yes, he could've bombed Washington DC if he wanted to. So Iraq HAD to be bombed and it didn't matter if a lot of Iraqis died in the process.

Yes, 100,000 casualties is a small price to pay for Democracy.

Saddam Hussein the dictator had to be removed so the people could VOTE. The USA gave Iraqi people the right to self determination.

That's worth an average of one and a half limbs per person. And also hundreds of mostly innocent prisoners tortured brutally and in an inhuman manner.

Of course you wouldn't say or might not even think consciously "Heh 9/11 scared the crap out of me and now I'll blindly support whatever ridiculous scheme my prez comes up with."

Yeah, it's impossible that invading a country will generate any kind of insurgent activity from the citizens.

Yes yes I was talking about them! How did you know?

Suppose a foreign army invades your country. You fight them and try to throw them out. What is the common term people would use to describe you? But of course, if they fight the Divinely Ordained Coalition then ALL of them MUST be some kind of evil oppressors left over from Saddam regime. Yeah, it's impossible that invading a country will generate any kind of insurgent activity from the citizens.

and A LOT MORE IRAQIS DIED IN THE PROCESS than have in the war

When death certificates were not available, there were good reasons, say the authors. "We think it is unlikely that deaths were falsely recorded. Interviewers also believed that in the Iraqi culture it was unlikely for respondents to fabricate deaths," they write.

The study itself is actually much more statistically sound than many commentators (including some in these pages) have suggested, and it certainly suggests that the mortality rate is worse in the unstable insurgency-ridden Iraq after the ouster of Saddam’s regime than during the last days of his tyranny.

stop the hatred of the US long enough to see saddam for what he was and did...

my first thoughts on fighting back wouldnt be "lets grab their window cleaners and dish washers and saw their heads off and post it on the internet"...nor would it be "lets go down to the hospital and kidnapp an immigrant nurse who has lived in britain for 30 years and saw her head,arms and legs off with a machette"

Choose one reason and stick to that. Don't keep changing from democracy to WMDs to the War on Terror.

And sure we all agree Saddam had to go

just that there were better ways than killing 100000 innocents.

The Lancet study's headline figure of "100,000" excess deaths is a probabilistic projection from a small number of reported deaths - most of them from aerial weaponry - in a sample of 988 households to the entire Iraqi population. Only those actual, war-related deaths could be included in our count. Because the researchers did not ask relatives whether the male deaths were military or civilian the civilian proportion in the sample is unknown (despite the Lancet website's front-page headline "100,000 excess civilian deaths after Iraq invasion", the authors clearly state that "many" of the dead in their sample may have been combatants [P.7]). Iraq Body Count only includes reports where there are feasible methods of distinguishing military from civilian deaths (most of the uncertainty that remains in our own count - the difference between our reported Minimum and Maximum - arises from this issue). Our count is purely a civilian count

Civilians reported killed by military intervention in Iraq
Min Max
14770 16965

The study itself is actually much more statistically sound than many commentators (including some in these pages) have suggested, and it certainly suggests that the mortality rate is worse in the unstable insurgency-ridden Iraq after the ouster of Saddam’s regime than during the last days of his tyranny.

The study itself describes the deaths from small arms fire:

only three of 61 incidents (5%) involved coalition soldiers (all reported to be American by the respondents) killing Iraqis with small arms fire. In one of the three cases, the 56-year-old man killed might have been a combatant. In a second case, a 72-year-old man was shot at a checkpoint. In the third, an armed guard was mistaken for a combatant and shot during a skirmish. In the latter two cases, American soldiers apologised to the families of the decedents for the killings, indicating a clear understanding of the adverse consequences of their use of force.

At most two (one from small arms, one adult male from bombing) of the deaths outside Falluja were combatants. In other words, 95% or more of the 100,000 excess deaths were civilians, so it is not wrong to describe the findings as “about 100,000 civilian deaths”.

debate statistical theory in another thread

We are not a news organization ourselves and like everyone else can only base our information on what has been reported so far. What we are attempting to provide is a credible compilation of civilian deaths that have been reported by recognized sources. Our maximum therefore refers to reported deaths - which can only be a sample of true deaths unless one assumes that every civilian death has been reported. It is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media. That is the sad nature of war.

It may already be noted, however, that Iraq Body Count, like the Lancet study, doesn't simply report all deaths in Iraq (people obviously die from various causes all the time) but excess deaths that can be associated directly with the military intervention and occupation of the country. In doing this, and via different paths, both studies have arrived at one conclusion which is not up for serious debate: the number of deaths from violence has skyrocketed since the war was launched (see IBC Press Release September 23rd 2003; also AP 24th May 2004 .

So they consider only deaths reported by the media. The military-influenced media. The reporters who owe 'embedding' favours to the military. How incredibly accurate.

We don’t do body counts”
General Tommy Franks, US Central Command

Change the channel”
- Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt's advice to Iraqis who see TV images of innocent civilians killed by coalition troops.
[NYT 12th April 2004]

This is why the claim that the Iraq war actually helped the Iraqis in some way is utter tripe. PLEASE DO NOT SAY OR IMPLY THAT AGAIN.

so the ousting of saddam was good, but didn't help the iraqis?

2. The Iraq war resulted in a lot more casualites than Saddam's regime.

The country has been almost totally wrecked, the law and order situation is in shambles, and so on.

Those kids died for your SUVs.