"It was a war," he said. "This is the price of liberty."

[Gonz]

AP tallies on civilian deaths.

By NIKO PRICE, Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq - At least 3,240 civilians died across Iraq during a month of war, including 1,896 in Baghdad, according to a five-week Associated Press investigation.

The AP count was based on records from 60 of Iraq's 124 hospitals — including almost all of the large ones — and covers the period between March 20, when the war began, and April 20, when fighting was dying down and coalition forces announced they would soon declare major combat over.

Lt. Col. Jim Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman said an accurate count of civilian casualties among the population of 24 million would be impossible, in part because Iraqi paramilitaries fought wearing civilian clothes and because of "the regime's use of civilian shields, and unaimed antiaircraft fire falling back to earth."

In the 1991 Gulf War an estimated 2,278 civilians were killed, according to Iraqi civil defense authorities. No U.S. or independent count is known to have been made. That war consisted of seven weeks of bombing and 100 hours of ground war, and did not take U.S. forces into any Iraqi cities.

This time it was very different. In a war in which the Iraqi soldiery melted away into crowded cities, changed into plainclothes or wore no uniform to begin with, separating civilian and military casualties is often impossible.

Witnesses say Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s fighters attacked from ambulances and taxis and donned women's chadors or Bedouin robes, creating an atmosphere in which U.S. troops couldn't be sure who their enemy was.

Adding to the civilian toll was the regime's tactic of parking its troops and weapons in residential neighborhoods, creating targets for U.S. bombs that increased the casualties among noncombatants.

And while the great majority of civilian deaths appear to have been caused by American U.S. and British attacks, witnesses say some — even a rough estimate is impossible — were caused by the Iraqis themselves: by exploding Iraqi ammunition stored in residential neighborhoods, by falling Iraqi anti-aircraft rounds aimed at U.S. warplanes, or by Iraqi fire directed at American troops.

The United States said its sophisticated weaponry minimized the toll, and around the country are sites that, to look at them, bolster the claim: missiles that tore deep into government buildings but left the surrounding houses untouched.

"Did the Americans bomb civilians? Yes. But one should be realistic," said Dr. Hameed Hussein al-Aaraji, the new director of Baghdad's al-Kindi Hospital. "Saddam ran a dirty war. He put weapons inside schools, inside mosques. What could they do?"

There is little agreement about whether being freed from Saddam's tyranny was worth the cost in lives.

"If they didn't want to kill civilians, why did they fire into civilian areas?" asked Ayad Jassim Ibrahim, a 32-year-old Basra fireman who said his brother Alaa was killed by shrapnel from a U.S. missile that tore into his living room.

Al-Aaraji, at al-Kindi hospital in Baghdad, saw things differently.

"It was a war," he said. "This is the price of liberty."

Yahoo

 

[Squiggy]

Lets see...They initially told us 50 were killed when they went after Noriega. Turned out to be 500+, if I recall correctly. Wonder where this count is going to settle...

 

[flavio]

This one is going to settle right on Bush's head for misleading the public into thinking it was necessary.

 

[Gato_Solo]

Lets see...They initially told us 50 were killed when they went after Noriega. Turned out to be 500+, if I recall correctly. Wonder where this count is going to settle...

Still...you'd think 30,000+ dead civilians would've been better reported...especially in the Arabic press...and not much seems to pan that out.

 

[Gonz]

This one is going to settle right on Bush's head for misleading the public into thinking it was necessary.

Time may change things but right now, the American public doesn't much care. They saw the attrocities & said that was reason enough.

 

[Gato_Solo]

The greatest weapon of mass destruction has been destroyed by the Iraq war.

It was Saddam Hussein's (search) regime — history’s biggest killer of Muslims, with upwards of 1,000,000 in the wars he launched, plus 300,000 (and counting) in the mass graves being uncovered daily around Iraq.

The spectacle of Islamic leaders grumbling at us for a war which ended the biggest killing spree of Muslims ever shows that Islamic leaders will grumble at us for anything. And do.

For self-styled “peace advocates” to remain bitter at President Bush for liberating Iraq shows their acceptance of the peace of the dead above human life.

Hundreds of children — eight, nine, 10, 11 years old — languished in Saddam’s prisons before being freed by coalition forces. I’d like these “peace advocates” and sundry Muslim leaders to meet in a room with these kids 10 years from now and explain why they should have remained in Saddam’s dungeons instead of living their lives.

The third wave of blasting Bush is underway — now gleefully piling on the lack of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) yet found in Iraq.

The first wave attempted to block Bush’s launching the liberation. Its key weapon was rampant fear-mongering. For instance, Brookings Institution (search) analysts Philip H. Gordon and Michael E. O'Hanlon concluded, among many other dire warnings, that "the United States could lose thousands of troops" in a war in Iraq.

Other commentators were yet scarier. Attempting regime change would trigger Scud and other missile attacks to obliterate Israel and U.S. troops stationed in the region; provoke the igniting of thousands of Iraqi oil fields; prompt a wave of terrorism across America; impel mobs into the Arab street to foment revolution against friendly regimes; cause flooding across Iraqi plains; induce Saddam Hussein to attack us and his own people with chemical and biological weapons.

This fear-mongering list could go on (and usually did!).

Taking first prize among the many frightful forecasters was the respected former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft (search). His influential Wall Street Journal piece of Aug. 15, 2002, said Israel "would have to expect to be the first casualty," which could easily cause that country "to respond, perhaps with nuclear weapons, unleashing an Armageddon in the Middle East."

While we in the liberate-Iraq camp have been castigated for exaggeration, nothing any of us said, or even suggested, can match that.

The second wave of Bush-blasting came during the war, with some retired U.S. generals — virtually “embedded” in television studios, as Vice President Cheney quipped — lamenting that there were too few coalition troops and too much Iraqi resistance. Quick as a flash, The New York Times rolled into its reflex action of trotting out the Q word. Another quagmire; another Vietnam.

Just as the “this is no cakewalk” cliché was gaining traction, U.S. Marines cakewalked into Baghdad in half the time with half the casualties of the initial Gulf War (which was often acknowledged to be a cakewalk).

The third wave is more promising at this point. At least, it’s not been totally disproved yet.

It holds that Bush launched the war merely over Saddam’s maintaining and developing gobs of weapons of mass destruction and having ties to international terrorist networks.

I’ll admit that I’m surprised we haven’t found gobs of weapons of mass destruction yet. Surely the impression given of their size and proximity to the battlefield front was greater than we found them to be.

Yet if Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction program, why would he pretend he had?

Why would he give 15 out of the 15 members of the U.N. Security Council (including Syria) reason to find him in “material breach” of previous U.N. resolutions that mandated that he end any weapons of mass destruction program?

And why would he forgo some $180 billion worth of income — the estimate from 12 years of U.N. imposed sanctions — rather than come clean and show that his actions justified lifting the embargo?

Saddam was evil, but wasn’t that stupid.

Confessions by top Iraqis and discoveries by top U.S. weapons investigators will reveal his ties to the weapons of mass destruction and international terrorists. The third wave will get disproved.

Yet by then, a fourth wave of Bush-blasting will likely have begun.

More gasoline for the fire...

Source...

 

[Gato_Solo]

Just to show both sides of the fence...

Some war critics can barely contain their glee about the missing Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (search). But they may be setting themselves up for a fall. As the Bush administration constantly reminds us, Iraq is a big country, and the weapons may yet turn up. If they do, does that mean the administration is vindicated?

Hardly. The focus on missing weapons threatens to obscure the larger point: that with or without chemical and biological weapons, Iraq was never a national security threat to the United States.

The proposition that Saddam Hussein (search) was willing to hand over weapons of mass destruction to terrorists appears to have been based on sheer speculation, and implausible speculation at that. Despite over 20 years of supporting terror against Israel, Saddam never turned over chemical or biological weapons to Palestinian terror groups (search), reasoning, correctly, that such action would provoke massive retaliation. Still less was he likely to hand over such weapons to Al Qaeda, a group that has long opposed his "socialist infidel" rule and could not be trusted to keep the deal secret.

Moreover, Al Qaeda's behavior suggests that they never expected Saddam to give them chemical or biological weapons. Computer hard drives and paper documents seized in the March 1 capture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, a top-level Al Qaeda operative, reveal that the terror group had extensive plans to produce chemical and biological agents on its own.

As the Washington Post reported on March 23, the documents show that Al Qaeda had recruited competent scientists and extensively mapped out its plans for anthrax production. If access to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was a real possibility, why would Al Qaeda go to such lengths to produce its own?

And even if one believed the administration's assertions that Saddam might risk destroying his regime by giving Al Qaeda weapons of mass destruction, it was obvious that a war aimed at overthrowing Saddam would greatly increase the chances of those weapons ending up in Al Qaeda's hands.

What possible disincentive could the Iraqi dictator have to transferring his arsenal to terrorists, once regime change was underway and he had nothing left to lose? How could the administration ensure that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction would not be "privatized" and sold to the highest bidder in the chaos accompanying the collapse of the Baathist regime?

In fact, components for a "dirty bomb" may already be in the wrong hands. A large nuclear-material storage facility at Al Tuwaitha, south of Baghdad, was looted in the days following the war, and International Atomic Energy Agency officials fear that terrorists could make radiological bombs with the isotopes that have gone missing. What other dangerous materials or proscribed weapons have we lost track of in a "country the size of California"?

Sometime in the coming months, U.S. forces may well happen upon some VX canisters or anthrax stockpiles, and the administration will breathe a sigh of relief. Such a discovery may change the media's focus, but it can't change the facts: This war did not avert a serious threat to the United States. Instead, it may have created new ones.

Source...

 

[flavio]

right now, the American public doesn't much care.

People do care. I see people who were supportive of this thing at first are getting angry now.

...and if people don't care that their president mislead them to get support for an invasion that costs thousands of lives then they are pathetic. Being lied to about an issue of this importance is unacceptable.

But I think the outrage is starting to build up some steam.

 

[JohnB1000]

The ones who see finally Bush lied and now are mad my hats off to them!

 

[outside looking in]

I care that I was lied to. I care that information was fabricated (apparently).

I'm still glad we went to war. No conflict here.

 

[Gonz]

Re: "It was a war," he said. "This is the price of liberty."

I care that information was fabricated (apparently).

I'm still unconvinced that it was fabricated. Incorrect, possible. Misguided, probable. We're not even done with the fighting & he had 14+ months to hide/dismantle/give away/whatever.

 

[Squiggy]

Re: "It was a war," he said. "This is the price of liberty."

I'm still unconvinced that it was fabricated.

You're kidding....Right?

 

[Shadowfax]

Re: "It was a war," he said. "This is the price of liberty."

As the Bush administration constantly reminds us, Iraq is a big country, and the weapons may yet turn up. If they do, does that mean the administration is vindicated?

that really wonders me...because before the war started the Bush administration knew there were wmd's, and they knew where they were. hell, they even photographed mobile laboratories and they had visual confirmation of all kinds of weapons.

and now, all of the sudden, they come with the excuse that iraq is a big country and they can't find them yet. makes the intelligence agencies look pretty dumb, to put it mildly.

 

[Gonz]

Re: "It was a war," he said. "This is the price of liberty.&a

You're kidding....Right?

No, but it does put one hell of a damper of future intel reports.

 

[Squiggy]

Re: "It was a war," he said. "This is the price of liberty."

that really wonders me...because before the war started the Bush administration knew there were wmd's, and they knew where they were. hell, they even photographed mobile laboratories and they had visual confirmation of all kinds of weapons.

and now, all of the sudden, they come with the excuse that iraq is a big country and they can't find them yet. makes the intelligence agencies look pretty dumb, to put it mildly.

I seem to remember someone uncovering that those photos, or at least some of them, were from the early 90s too...

 

[Gato_Solo]

Re: "It was a war," he said. "This is the price of liberty."

I seem to remember someone uncovering that those photos, or at least some of them, were from the early 90s too...

They most likely were. It still shows an active program, though, as do the mobile labs that were found...

 

[ris]

Re: "It was a war," he said. "This is the price of liberty.&a

yet to see confirmation of mobile lab discovery.

 

[outside looking in]

There were some pretty bizarre findings in Iraq. Not condemning, just bizarre. Like a very, very expensive gene sequencer/biotech machine that is only found in a handful of the most well equipped and cutting edge American universities. What did the Iraqi's claim they were using it for? Invitro fertilazation research for sterile goats, so they claim.

First of all, you don't cure a sterile goat. There are no goat fertility problems in Iraq. When one can't breed there, you eat it.

Second, having that machine to do invitro research is like having a NASA shuttle for your daily commute.

 

[freako104]

take anything a politcian says with a grain of salt. and im quite angry he wasnt honest in the first place myself.

 

[a13antichrist]

Time may change things but right now, the American public doesn't much care. They saw the attrocities & said that was reason enough.

I wonder whether the American public would see things the same way if it were 3000+ American rather than Iraqi lies that were lost. I doubt it.