Robert Farley raises the politically awkward point that Pentagon calculations of deaths in Iraq don't count up how many Iraqis are being killed by the American military. Nor, one assumes, are whatever contractor-inflicted casualties that occur being counted. It seems unlikely that General Petraeus has eliminated all human and mechanical error from the war-fighting process.
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An Inconvenient Question
05 Sep 2007 01:00 pm
Comments (3)
In 2006, I tried to figure out how many bullets our military is shooting in combat annually. I came up with somewhere around 100,000,000 or about 10,000 per hour.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2006/10/number-of-bullets-fired-in-iraq.html
That could cause a bit of collateral damage.
The estimates done by Lancet are pretty clear, and their methodology was validated by just about everyone except right wingnuts.
The US military has killed probably 30% of the Iraqi civilian casualties resulting from the war, if I remember the figure correctly. Based on estimates of the extension of those figures through 2007, this means the US military has killed somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000 Iraqi civilians.
Much of this is from aerial and artillery bombardment of places such as Fallujah. The rest are probably the result of the usual US military response to an ambush: shoot everything on the street, as well as the usual response to a car that doesn't stop on a dime: kill everybody in the car. And the usual response to a shot fired from the vicinity of a house: bomb the house or kill everybody in it with a hail of fire.
I mean, the US military is expending a billion bullets a year. Anybody who knows the least bit about firearms knows: all bullets go somewhere.
The US is expending TWO HUNDRED FIFTY THOUSAND BULLETS FOR EVERY INSURGENT KILLED! Read that again! This is probably the worst record in US military history!
Nobody bothers to mention that the stupid US military tactic of having checkpoints (an utterly useless tactic against guerrillas) makes them fixed targets for car bombs, snipers and the like.
Followed up by the stupid US tactic of having convoys rolling around with signs on them saying, "Stupid Americans on board! Blow us up!"
Or the equally stupid tactic of having patrols and individual soldiers standing around at various locations "providing security" with signs on them that say, "Stupid American moron! Shoot me!"
It's a wonder US casualties aren't ten times higher than they are. And it's a wonder any Iraqis are still alive.
BTW, this isn't "politically awkward" - except in the sense that Hermann Goering in the dock at Nuremburg was "politically awkward" for him.
Comments closed September 19, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
It seems unlikely that General Petraeus has eliminated all human and mechanical error from the war-fighting process.
That's just an uninformed conjecture by an Ivy League elitist.
In any case the objective of the surger was never to minimize Iraqi civilian deaths at the hands of the military.
The surge was aimed primarily to convince the American public that defatocrats deserve to be shunned, that irrespective of charts and data and statistics we are winning as we always do and as we always should, and that doing anything else will disturb the balance in the forces of nature.
Posted by gregor | September 5, 2007 1:20 PM