From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Tue Oct 24 2006 - 12:08:05 EDT
The NYT quotes Zalmay Khalilzad, the United States ambassador to Iraq, at a news conference today in Baghdad: "Iraq's people are the principle victim of this war." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/24/world/middleeast/24text-baghdad.html?_r=1&oref=login The spelling error makes the point. It is obviously unlikely that the foreign troops will leave anytime soon, but it is just as unlikely that the violence will stop anytime soon. For one thing, there are just too many privately held firearms and explosives in Iraq. Even if you persuade 95 out of a 100 people not to take violent action, it takes only 5 individuals to continue it. Even with the best intentions and resources, Casey most probably cannot stop it. Meantime, Dr David Rush, a professor and epidemiologist at Tufts University in Boston,] speaking at a meeting in Los Angeles on the medical consequences of the Iraq war, said that the relatively small size of the sample in the new Lancet study - 1,849 households - widened the confidence limits, hence the large range of the estimated excess deaths on either side of the median. In addition, Rush claimed response bias would tend to undercount, rather than inflate, the number of deaths (?) Michael Intriligator, professor of economics at the University of California at Los Angeles, also backed the finding. "I think this is an extremely credible study," he said. In addition to violence, death rates in Iraq are on the rise because of threats to public health, including poorly equipped hospitals, said activist Dr Dahlia Wasfi. Jonathan Parfrey, executive director of the Los Angeles chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, said: "The effects on the civilian population of the war in Iraq have been grossly underestimated." A quote from Dahlia Wasfi: "The ones missing in action are the American people. As I've already described, in a country of... 300 million, we have only 2 political parties, neither one of which represents the people. They work for mega-corporate interests, who as we and the rest of the world know are continually profiting from the devastation of war." http://www.coloradopeace.org/2004/DahliaWasfi-2004dec04.html A capital investment is a capital investment, and you obviously don't let go of the prize so easily... J.
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