COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

...from Knight Ridder.

Operations by U.S. and multinational forces and Iraqi police are killing twice as many Iraqis - most of them civilians - as attacks by insurgents, according to statistics compiled by the Iraqi Health Ministry and obtained exclusively by Knight Ridder.

If true...and I don't really have an independent sense whether it's true or not...then it's an important story which ought to be told.

I don't mean to denigrate the story, because I think the reporter did a pretty good job.

But a couple of things strike me as, well, cute:

According to the ministry, the interim Iraqi government recorded 3,487 Iraqi deaths in 15 of the country's 18 provinces from April 5 - when the ministry began compiling the data - until Sept. 19. Of those, 328 were women and children. Another 13,720 Iraqis were injured, the ministry said.

Let's see...if excessive US firepower--say, air strikes, are to blame for the civilian deaths, then you would expect to see women and children make up more than 50% of the total number of deaths, or 1,744 deaths.

But the number of women and children killed is less than a third of that number.

Further, you need to back out the number of women and children known killed by car bombs and other known terror incidents. The resultant number, multiplied by two, would give you an approximate number of Iraqis killed by random fragmentation and gunfire.

The others cannot be assumed to have been noncombatants. Maybe a good deal of them were. But a good deal of them surely were not. The data fails to account for the marked anomaly. The data simply does not support this reporters' hypothesis.

While most of the dead are believed to be civilians, the data include an unknown number of police and Iraqi national guardsmen.

Hmmm. Yeah, that's it. American forces spend money, blood, and treasure arming, equipping, and training Iraqi National Guard forces, so we can go out and kill them when we're done. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Well, obviously, we aren't the ones out there targeting Iraqi Police and ING's.

Well, if the number of IP's and INGs among the dead is unknown, well, gee...doesn't that make it a little hard to tell that the US is killing more Iraqi civilians than the insurgents are?

Many Iraqi deaths, especially of insurgents, are never reported, so the actual number of Iraqis killed in fighting could be significantly higher.

To the extent that its insurgents and terrorists whose deaths are underreported, I certainly hope so.

Boylan said the military conducted intelligence to determine whether a home housed insurgents before striking it. While damage would happen, the airstrikes were "extremely precise,"

For any given piece of ordnance and method of delivery, (And some other factors, like the gun-target line relative to the observer) observers memorize a "danger close" range, expressed in meters.

That range is the distance within which observers are advised to ask themselves "do I feel lucky?"

Any time a zoomie tells you a fixed-wing airstrike is "extremely precise," ask him what the doctrinal "danger close" figure is.

Then figure out how close together Iraqi houses are in Fallujah.

The situation isn't as bad as the raw numbers alone would tell you. But the ordnance is far from surgical.

The Health Ministry statistics indicate that more children have been killed around Ramadi and Fallujah than in Baghdad, though those cities together have only one-fifth of the Iraqi capital's population.

Yes. And do you know why that is? Because the insurgency in Fallujah was making use of children as young as ten to run ammunition and water to the fighters. And there are assholes in Ramadi who, on at least one occasion known to me (in July of 2003) hand grenades to children and encouraged them to throw them over the fence at our troops garrisoning the Ar Ramadi Government center. All while hiding in the back of a crowd. Our own riflemen saw this with their own eyes. The guy doing it got away with it. Our troops did not fire at him, as they couldn't get a clear shot.

Many Iraqis said they thought the numbers showed that the multinational forces disregarded their lives.


"The Americans do not care about the Iraqis. They don't care if they get killed, because they don't care about the citizens," said Abu Mohammed, 50, who was a major general in Saddam Hussein's army in Baghdad.

Ooh, now THERE'S a disinterested party. Now, ask yourself how one demonstrates enough loyalty to Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath Party to attain the rank of Major General.

At least they reveal the bias of their source, though. At least there's some transperency, "Kenneth."

Iraqi officials said about two-thirds of the Iraqi deaths were caused by multinational forces and police; the remaining third died from insurgent attacks. The ministry began separating attacks by multinational and police forces and insurgents June 10.

That's actually interesting. The thing is, if we're winning, the statistics would show the same thing. The ratio would even probably increase, as insurgents' capabilities to conduct offensive operations decline, while coalition forces are able to step up operations against them. So be careful how you use these metrics.

The ministry is convinced that nearly all of those reported dead are civilians, not insurgents.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!

Most often, a family member wouldn't report it if his or her relative died fighting for rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia or another insurgent force, and the relative would be buried immediately, said Dr. Shihab Ahmed Jassim, another member of the ministry's operations section.


"People who participate in the conflict don't come to the hospital. Their families are afraid they will be punished," said Dr. Yasin Mustaf, the assistant manager of al Kimdi Hospital near Baghdad's poor Sadr City neighborhood. "Usually, the innocent people come to the hospital. That is what the numbers show."

Riiiiiight. Just ask them.

Because the same dynamic that causes families to bury their insurgent dead privately is also at work causing mortally wounded and family members to falsely claim their innocence at the hospital. And when they do, they're counted as civilians. No matter how much explosive residue is on their hands from firing RPGs.

So, I'm glad the reporter is telling the story. Because the shedding of innocent blood is something we need to work constantly to minimize. And where troops are scared and pissed off all the time and see Iraqis killing their buddies or standing by while others do so, the tendency--especially among combat arms soldiers-- is to get a little callous.

So managing and focusing that firepower, and maintaining the restraint and professionalism of soldiers is a constant leadership challenge at all levels of command, right down to that fire team leader or command major specialist with a head on his shoulders.

But you can't take anything...ANYTHING...from Iraq at face value.

Splash, out

Jason

[CLICK HERE TO ENTER THE NET] posted by Jason : 18:32 EST, Saturday, September 25, 2004 18 transmissions this net