9Driver on the Iraqi POW Deathcount
From Roachblog’s 9Driver comes this very interesting observation on the sudden jump in acknowledged fatalities among Iraqis unfortunate enough to have been taken into custody by the US military: Oh, my goodness.
It seems we’ve managed to kill 108 Iraqi POWs so far, compared to 118 US POWs killed by the vicious Commie North Vietnamese during the entire course of the Vietnam War.
This is the part of the post where I’d normally observe that this state of affairs is the direct result of the stunted moral development of a certain President G. W. McFucktard. But you knew that already, so I guess I won’t bother.
March 30th, 2005 at 9:35 am
McFucktard – lmao!!
Pretty interesting indeed. I wonder what TeacherVet will have to say about this considering he so often talks about how brutal and vicious the North Vietnamese were.
Which they indeed were. However, it looks like the US is quickly becoming a brutal and vicous state as well. Believe me, that is now how you are being viewed by most of the world. Lies, torture, reckless aggression… sounds like some pretty good reasons for regime change…
March 30th, 2005 at 11:49 am
My initial reaction was that the statistic might include badly wounded Iraqis, and thus might be inflated by the deaths of the badly wounded after they were taken into custody. Unfortunately, the article linked indicated otherwise.
A USAF veteran friend has long asserted that the only reason other nations follow the Geneva Conventions with regard to U.S. soldiers is because they’re afraid of us. We adhere to them voluntarily.
March 30th, 2005 at 9:26 pm
Once again, this is one of those things thats regardless of what I feel about the subject smells like bullshit. First of all it’s not just Iraqi prisoners in the 108, its Iraqi and Afgani. But fuck it, lets just look at the Iraqis and the North Vietnamese. Bear in mind that this is about 10 minutes worth of internet research and I’m mildly dyscalculic, so if I’m dead fucking wrong about these numbers I’ll take my lumps. Total American POWs in the Vietnam War is something like 801 (although 1205 is tossed around) and 118 of them died. Thats 14.7%. Ok, so the total Iraqi (just Iraqi not Iraqi and Afgani prisoners) that we had captured at one point was 65,000 and we give a death credit of 108 still thats .16%. If we say out of 6500-7500 (still Iraqi only) prisoners in custody and still use the 108 death toll, thats 1.4-1.6%
So whats you fucking point dude you ask? Just this: I was opposed to the war, I wasn’t in favor of it at all. I voted for John Kerry this time around because I thought President Bush wasn’t doing a good job. I live in a blue county in a red state, but it was close really fucking close and I never really viewed it as this sweeping moral victory of an us vs. them conflict. This harkens to debate that jbc frequently have in another venue, which is to say repeating “George Bush is teh gay!” over and over again doesn’t really do much in the way of convincing the “red state people” that maybe they voted for the wrong guy.
The other thing that really fucking disturbs me is this parallax view of the state of affairs. Grotesquely distorted statistics don’t really make for any kind of reasonable conclusion. I mean, you can’t say American soldiers are as vicious as the North Veitnamese until 13.1% of 6500 Iraqi POWs die. At some point this type of anti-Bush ‘arguement’ becomes a “Do you know what the queers are doing to the soil?” (to quote an old Dead Milkmen song) conspiracy rant.
I don’t want to beat up on jbc, because he is my friend, but this really wasn’t an interesting observation so much as another expression of how much he hates GW and thats fine. McFucktard did make me chuckle too.
April 1st, 2005 at 5:08 pm
J.A.Y.S.O.N, your point seems to come to, “sure, we haven’t killed quite as many soldiers as the North Vietnamese did, but we’ve imprisoned several thousand extra to make up for it!”
Watering down the more extreme cruelty with vast quantities of slightly more moderate cruelty should not be counted as a point in our favor.
April 1st, 2005 at 5:47 pm
Thats not my point at all. My basic point is about faulty statistics. In the larger view my point is that we have hard data on on North Vietnamese prisoner abuse. We also have this for Iraqi prisoner abuse. However what we do not have is enough evidence to draw a solid conclusion that the largest cause of death of Iraqi POWs is due to intentional cruelty, which was fair to say of the North Vietnamese.
The other main point being that based on the statistical sample, we cannot reasonably conclude that there is a new uniformity of cruelty based on ‘stunted moral development’ as matter of course based on the influence of our President as compared to say, the policies of Nazi Germany or the Stalinist Soviet Union.
Is more moderate cruelty better than severe cruelty? Thats seems in the realm of abstract moral thought and not really my consideration or point of contention in this thread. However there really isn’t any kind of ‘cruelty quotient’ that I’m trying to borrow from captured for killed, I’m just trying to represent the facts as the pertain to the post and the conclusions drawn. It seems that if we were to assign a relative number to cruelty, the equation I get results in North Vietnamese POW cruelty > American POW cruelty, relative to the respective conflicts discussed based on number of prisoners taken vs. number of prisoners that died in custody.
There are a number of sadists and dumb fucks in the population of our Armed Forces, as you would find in any cross section of any society, however I cannot see any reason to indulge in universal recrimination.