Number gut. Shannon Love writes about estimates of dead in the Iraq war.
For example, during WWII the Japanese mainland suffered the most extensive aerial bombardment in history. Every major urban area save one (Kyoto) was burned to the ground. On march 10th, 1945 the great Tokyo fire raid burned down a third of the city and killed 100,000 people. Two major cities were nuked. Japan at the time had a population of 78 million, so 1% of the population would have been around 780,000. Now, what is your guess as to the number of Japanese killed on the Japanese mainland?
Did you guess around 500,000? Under 1%? Well, that is in fact the number (note: that's only dead, not dead-and-wounded).
So, with the Falluja cluster included, LIMS asks us to believe that Iraq has suffered a worse proportional aerial bombardment than did Japan during WWII. Common sense compels us to ask: does Iraq look like it suffered such a fate? Where are the mass graves? Where are the leveled cities? Where are the hundreds of thousands of walking wounded? Where are the millions of refugees that such intense fighting must have inevitably produced?
Worse still, given the known geographical areas where the fighting occurred, most of the deaths would have had to be concentrated in an area of 100 klicks or so from Baghdad, which would have meant an even higher percentage of the local population killed and the physical evidence even more obvious. (After the recent publication of the ILCS, it also means that the deaths would have to been compressed in time as well. The ILCS reported only 24,000 war related deaths up until May 25, 2004. For the LIMS to be true, the additional 200,000 deaths would have to have occurred between then and early Sept 2004 when LIMS was conducted. That comes out to roughly 2,000 deaths per day.)
posted by Natalie at 6:01 AM
