This is worth reading: Andy Olmsted.
If there is any hope for the long term success of democracy, it will be if people agree to listen to and try to understand their political opponents rather than simply seeking to crush them.
Here are the updated graphs for June through September. Apologies for being lax with the updates. As always, I’m comparing the US military casualties in Iraq to those from the Vietnam war at a similar point in each war’s political lifetime (which some have charged is misleading; see disclaimer below). The data come from the advanced search tool at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund site, and from Lunaville’s page on Iraq coalition casualties. The figures are for the number of US dead per month, without regard to whether the deaths were combat-related.
The first graph shows the comparison for the extent of the Iraq war to-date. (Click on any image for a larger version.)
Next, the chart that gives the US death toll for the entire Vietnam war:
Disclaimer: I’ve been accused of comparing apples to oranges in these graphs. For the record, here’s what I am not arguing:
I was just curious how the “death profile” of the two wars compared, and how those deaths played out in terms of their political impact inside the US. For that reason, I chose as the starting point for each graph the first fatality that a US president acknowledged (belatedly, in the case of the Vietnam graph, since US involvement in the war “began” under Kennedy, but the acknowledgement was made only later by Johnson) as having resulted from the war in question.
As ever, you are free to draw your own conclusions. And for that matter, you’re free to draw your own graphs, if you have a way of presenting the information that you believe would be better. In that case, feel free to post a comment with a URL to your own version. Thanks.
Here are the updated graphs for January. As you can see, we’ve entered the part of the Vietnam War where Johnson was dramatically increasing troop levels; from here on out, barring something really horrible, I’d expect the Vietnam numbers to exceed the Iraq numbers.
As always, I’m comparing the US military casualties in Iraq to those from the Vietnam war at a similar point in each war’s political lifetime (which some have charged is misleading; see disclaimer below). The data come from the advanced search tool at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund site, and from Lunaville’s page on Iraq coalition casualties. The figures are for the number of US dead per month, without regard to whether the deaths were combat-related.
The first graph shows the first 48 months of the comparison. (Click on any image for a larger version.)
Next, the chart that gives the US death toll for the entire Vietnam war:
Disclaimer: I’ve been accused of comparing apples to oranges in these graphs. For the record, here’s what I am not arguing:
I was just curious how the “death profile” of the two wars compared, and how those deaths played out in terms of their political impact inside the US. For that reason, I chose as the starting point for each graph the first fatality that a US president acknowledged (belatedly, in the case of the Vietnam graph, since US involvement in the war “began” under Kennedy, but the acknowledgement was made only later by Johnson) as having resulted from the war in question.
As ever, you are free to draw your own conclusions. And for that matter, you’re free to draw your own graphs, if you have a way of presenting the information that you believe would be better. In that case, feel free to post a comment with a URL to your own version. Thanks.
The march of historic parallels with Vietnam continues, with the following headline greeting me in this morning’s LA Times: Photos indicate civilians slain execution-style.
WASHINGTON — Photographs taken by a Marine intelligence team have convinced investigators that a Marine unit killed as many as 24 unarmed Iraqis, some of them “execution-style,” in the insurgent stronghold of Haditha after a roadside bomb killed an American in November, officials close to the investigation said Friday.
The pictures are said to show wounds to the upper bodies of the victims, who included several women and six children. Some were shot in the head and some in the back, congressional and defense officials said.
One government official said the pictures showed that infantry Marines from Camp Pendleton “suffered a total breakdown in morality and leadership, with tragic results.”
No, it’s not exactly like My Lai, which saw more deaths, more official complicity, and more of a cover-up.
It’s not exactly like My Lai. It’s just horrible beyond description in the same way My Lai was.
That’s all.
More details:
I also found this piece from blogger Polimom interesting: War is hell. Seriously.
Just two days before this incident apparently occurred in November, I wrote a rare rant. At the time, I was ticked off about reports coming out of Iraq about the use of white phosphorous in Fallujah, and stories of torture. I said:
[quote]
Bad enough that the American public was “dismayed” and “disturbed” when our little Janeys and Johnnys were discovered torturing their prisoners (remember Abu Ghraib?). Now, we’re hearing about lions, too. (LIONS????)
Folks, if you think our sons and daughters are being sent to a war with anything less than a targeted, focused hatred for the “enemy”, you are clueless. In basic training, they are given bayonets, with which they charge, screaming vicious epithets, at a straw dummy. Years ago, that straw dummy was a “Red” named Ivan. Any guesses what names they use today to dehumanize their “targets”?
War cannot be waged without virulent hate. It is not an academic exercise.
[unquote]
To kill, as we’ve asked our children to do in Iraq, requires hate, and whatever comes of the investigation in Haditha, we cannot forget that along with all the other losses and deaths, this is also the price we pay to wage war.
We sent them into hell, and the devil is running free. Surely we didn’t expect something different… did we?
Nope.
Joshua Rosenau of the Thoughts from Kansas weblog, who apparently knows something about statistics, takes my side in the wee disagreement I had with Dean Esmay a while back regarding the trend of US military deaths in Iraq: Armistice Day thoughts on Iraq.
An occasional criticism of my monthly posting of US fatalities in the Iraq war is that the numbers belie the larger number of innocent Iraqis who also are dying. It’s a good point; my main defense is that it’s harder to get those numbers. But not impossible. See this item from Discourse.net, describing a new study from Iraq Body Count and the Oxford Research Group: Iraq body count.
The people at the Iraq Body Count project and the Oxford Research Group have released what appears to be a quite careful and judicious report counting and analyzing Iraqi civilian casualties since the beginning of the war. They count 24,865 civilians (just civilians, not soldiers or recruits or insurgents) killed in Iraq in the two years stretching from March 20, 2003 to March 19, 2005, and they estimate that there have been more than three injuries for every death. Nearly half of the reported deaths were in Baghdad (likely that proportion is so high in part because Baghdad is the best-reported of Iraq’s conflict-ridden areas, and because of the good quality of mortuary data there); about one in every 500 Baghdad civilians has been killed violently since March 2003. Baghdad didn’t have the highest number of civilian deaths per capita, though; that honor, among the larger cities, went to Fallujah, where the number rose to 1 in 136.
About 37% of those folks were killed by U.S. forces. Just under 11% were killed by insurgent forces, and about 5% were caught in cross-fire in which both groups participated. That leaves 36% killed in the continuing wave of violent crime that followed the war, enabled by the absence of police and the easy availability of weapons (this is an “excess” figure, subtracting out the average number of pre-war killings over a two-year period), and 11% who could not be classified.
The vast bulk of the 9,270 civilian killings by U.S.-led forces took place either in March 20-April 30 2003 (6882 reported civilian deaths, or 164 per day), or in April-November 2004 (2038 civilian deaths, or between eight and nine per day for the eight-month period). During other calendar periods, U.S.-led forces have killed, on average, fewer than one Iraqi civilian per day.
Counting dead bodies, reducing the lost lives to ticks on a piece of paper, is a lousy way to get at the reality of what’s going on in Iraq. But I think it may be at least slightly less lousy than not even giving those deaths that much attention. In any event, I think these numbers are significant, and are worth thinking about.
Here’s a very compelling graphical treatment of my favorite depressing data. From Tim Klimowicz of obleek.com: Iraq War Fatalities.
Besides being impressed by the overall presentation of the information, I was also impressed by the following sentiment expressed on the “about” screen:
Although I originally set out to create something as objective and apolitical as I possibly can, this project has raised a few questions in my mind concerning the government’s role in controlling information during wartime, and how that might sway the public’s perception of reality. In addition, it also made me question the notion of objectivity itself, as I found myself having to omit so much information, both voluntarily and involuntarily, in the process of creating this. Though my intent was to be objective, how objective can it really be when something as profound as a human death — which, in itself can have infinite interpretations — is represented with little more than a tiny black dot on a computer monitor? In the end, I suppose, my goal to encompass the entire war in a single animation instead ended up showing just a tiny sliver of the much larger reality — an unavoidable attribute inherent to all forms of communication, even those that are meant to be “objective”.
Janus/Onan pointed this out to me. It’s a blog entry on the death of a serial killer, and the mixed feelings it inspired in the person blogging about it, one Chris Clarke of Creek Running North: Life and death. Be sure to skim the comments that follow for some really interesting interaction between the author and various fundamentalist Christians seeking to challenge his questioning of the killer’s deathbed conversion.
I’m normally all about the quirky, offbeat, absurd news - but not today, this is important:
“The myth is that once you signed up to be a donor at the Department of Motor Vehicles, your name and data went into a central registry. Not so. There never was such a registry, making it uncertain that such preferences were noticed or honored. Donor networks say less than 10 percent of the driver’s licenses with dots are produced when needed. Often the person dying doesn’t have a license along when brought to a hospital, and relatives don’t always know that the individual signed up to donate organs.“
Starting today, there is an official Organ and Tissue Donor Registry for the state of California. This is a really great program, the kind of program that can really save lives — too bad bureaucratic shit prevented it from going into effect 4 years ago.
If you live in California please consider registering, and if you ever get a chance thank Sen. Jackie Speier.
I’m forced (in this case, the term seems more apt than usual) to wonder if Terri Schiavo’s death this morning means there will be no more entries added to the darkly funny (albeit horrible) Terri Schiavo’s blog.
(Thanks — I think — to valued lies.com contributor Sven for the latter link.)
On a more serious note, I’m also forced to wonder if the public aftertaste from this will, in fact, benefit Bush and the rest of the Culture of Life panderers. The fact that they “lost,” on the surface, doesn’t necessarily mean they won’t benefit politically. This may well have been a no-lose scenario from the get-go for them, just as it was a no-win scenario for those who actually cared about Terri Schiavo’s welfare.
Anyway, clean up the elephant poop and bring on the next act. This part of the circus is over.
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.
Valued lies.com reader Rise Against commented this morning on how one can find all kinds of graphic video on p2p networks showing “US soldiers doing some pretty repulsive things to wounded and dead Iraqis.” That reminded me of this story I saw in the LA Times yesterday (login required, cypherpunk98/cypherpunk works, link subject to early-onset linkrot thanks to the Times’ bait-and-switch model of online revenue generation): Extreme cinema verite.
McCullough was surprised that his favorite video was disturbing to his loved ones back in Texas.
“You find out just how weird it is when you take it home,” said McCullough, whose screensaver is far more benign, showing him on his wedding day.
Brandi McCullough, then his fiancee and now his wife, said she had walked in as he was showing the videos to friends who were “whooping and hollering.”
The 18-year-old was shocked by images of “body parts missing, bombs going off and people getting shot.”
“They’re terrifying,” she said by phone from Texas. “Chase never talked about anything over there, and I watch the news, but not all the time. I didn’t realize there was that much” violence.
She also wondered why anyone would record it.
“I thought it was odd — a home video,” she said. “People getting shot and someone sitting there with a camera.”
McCullough said his father, a naval reserve captain, had told him, “You know, this isn’t normal.”
Well, it didn’t use to be normal. It’s the new normal, and it will be with us long after the war itself is over. The effects will linger in the lives and memories of those doing the fighting, who are being turned into different people than they otherwise would have been. It’s no mystery; we’ve been there, done that, before. And now we’re doing it again.
Update: Jeanne at Body and Soul was also struck by this article, and quoted from it more extensively than I did in her commentary: War-porn nation.
I glanced at this headline over my cereal, but didn’t bother to read the article. But then my better half left it in the bathroom, where I was forced to read it, and found the numbers it contains to actually be kind of surprising. From the LA Times: Death row often means a long life.
According to state and federal records obtained by The Times, maintaining the California death penalty system costs taxpayers more than $114 million a year beyond the cost of simply keeping the convicts locked up for life and not counting the millions more in court costs needed to prosecute capital cases and hold post-conviction hearings in state and federal courts.
With 11 executions spread over 27 years, on a per-execution basis, California and federal taxpayers have paid more than a quarter of a billion dollars for each life taken at state hands.
Now, I realize that those numbers are skewed by the history of the Rose Bird court, when no executions at all were conducted for a long time, even though the law provided for them. But even so, $250 million per execution is an awful lot of money to be spending, don’t you think?
There are certain things in this world that I just assume are illegal without anyone ever explicitly telling me so. Apparently I assume too much, because last week, if you worked in a California morturary and had sex with corpses you weren’t breaking any laws. But not this week — this week it’s a felony.
(I can NOT believe we haven’t mentioned this story on lies.com before)
Armin Meiwes was found guilty of manslaughter in a German court this week, and sentenced to 8.5 years in prison. Armin recieved this sentance for castrating his victim, eating his flesh while the victim bleed to death, and then butchering and freezing his body to eat over the course of several months — all of which he recorded on video for later sexual gratification.
Now brace yourself — none of that is the bizarre part.
The bizarre part is that the victim was a willing participant in the whole experience — and even choose to eat some of his own flesh before dying. (I know, it sounds like i’m plagiarizing “Hannibal” but I’m not.) Like Meiwes, his victim “Bernd-Juergen Brandes” was a cannibalism fetishist, with a Hansel and Gretel obsession, who prepared a very detailed will, and sold most of his property before going to Meiwes’s house and asked to be eaten. The two met had met online, when Brandes responded Meiwes’s Internet chat room post: “Gay male seeks hunks 18-30 to slaughter.”
This all happened back in 1995. Meiwes wasn’t arrested until December of 2002 when police were tiped off by chat room users after Meiwes posted again, looking for another victim.
The German news organization “DW World” seems to have the most comprehensive coverage, so Here’s a breif timeline of their articles…
(That last video link includes a great straight faced delivery by the News anchor asking the reporter why legal experts are saying that this case is so “unique”).
By Tad Friend, here’s a really good article from The New Yorker on people who commit suicide by leaping from the Golden Gate Bridge: Jumpers.
The rock band Hell of Earth is planning to allow an onstage suicide “live” at their next show in St. Petersburg, Florida. As you would expect, this has caused quite a bit of controversy, but my favorite part of the whole thing, is that the city council needed to pass a special law, making it illegal to: “conduct a suicide for commercial or entertainment purposes, and to host, promote and sell tickets for such an event.” Apparently, they had to pass the special law, becuase otherwise they had no legal grounds to try and stop the show — no one in the band is planning to “assist” this anonymous individual, they’re just going to let him come on stage and do his thing.
The show must go on however, the lead singer promises that the show will happen at an undisclosed location within city limits, in front of a select few die-hard fans (pun intended) and it will be broadcast live on their website.
While the Bullshit-Artist-in-Chief is laying out new and improved rationales for why we invaded Iraq, and soberly telling us about the sacrifices we Americans will have to make to salvage his failed policies, Riverbend offers another powerful story about the price that the people of Baghdad are already paying: Under the palm leaves.
From presidential press conference snub-ee Helen Thomas: Who’s counting the dead in Iraq? Who indeed.
Another post, another woman talking about memories of dead people. From Baghdad Burning: Have you forgotten?
I like Wendy McClure’s weblog, Pound, a lot. She mentioned having written an item that appeared in Gapers Block recently, so I went and read it, and it’s pretty cool: Elephants and accidents: The truth about Showmen’s Rest.
Our Gun toting friends in Utah are gearing up for a Firing squad double header. Utah is the only State in the Union that still executes death row inmates via Firing squad when requested, as it should be, and it appears they are looking to increase the ratings by stacking them up back to back so that they can better compete with American Idol.
Personally, I would prefer they would return to the days of the Old West, when once someone has been found guilty, and sentenced to die, that they should just hang them immediately and save the taxpayers a little grief.
I don’t even know what to say about this, it speaks for itself. From afterlifetelegrams.com: For a fee of $5.00 per word (5 word minimum), our customers can have telegrams delivered to people who have passed away. This is done with the help of terminally Ill volunteers who memorize the telegrams before passing away, and then deliver the telegrams after they have passed away. (Emphasis is that of the site, not mine). The FAQ is highly illuminating.
from the human-scarifice dept.
Amazingly enough, human scarifice to the goddess Kali still takes place in India. Kali worship and scarfice seem to be on the rise as a means of keeping up with the jones’.
from the get-your-obituaries-here dept.
From The Observer comes a review of Who’s Who in Hell, journalist Robert Chalmers’ new novel that focuses on the adventures of newspaper obituary writers. Or something like that; I got a bit lost part way through the review. But it still sounds fun.