Pharyngula::As requested, my statement on the Iraqi elections

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Monday, January 31, 2005

As requested, my statement on the Iraqi elections

PZ Myers • 86 Comments (last page)

I am being berated in the comments for not speaking out about the Iraqi elections. Strange Doctrines is noticing the same phenomenon. I guess some right-wingers feel the need for some appreciation for their great victory, and my silence has put a pall over their triumph.

I am very, very sorry, Mr Wingnut. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings.

I'm actually happy to see the Iraqis get a chance to vote. After all, GW Bush initially opposed letting the Iraqis elect their own leaders, preferring to see his devious little puppet Chalabi appointed to run the country, and the elections yesterday were actually at the behest of the UN…so the event was really a bit of a poke in the eye to ol' George.

I also think it's only fair. We blew up their country, wrecked their infrastructure, tortured their citizens, killed many tens of thousands, have occupied the nation and are still bombing and killing them, and have fueled generations of hatred, and to pay them back, we let them vote. Yay us. Can we call it even now?

And look at what we've accomplished! We've spent hundreds of billions of dollars, lost over 1400 men and women, had over 10,000 wounded, alienated our allies, bled the treasury, taught our citizens to mistrust the promises of the military…and we're still not done. Our government is talking about expanding our investment of blood and treasure in Iraq. Hell, yeah, I'm glad they got an election—when I sink that much cash into the midway, I want my kewpie doll.

So, sure, it's a good thing Iraq had an election.

The real question is whether it was worth it. I do not think so. The right-wingers may also want others to affirm that this election vindicates their immoral war, their criminal policies, the waste and destruction and grief it has brought us and Iraq. But no, it does not.

Crooked Timber is getting the same strange demands, as are many other lefty sites. Weird. Aren't the wingnuts getting tired of putting up the same old "Mission Accomplished" sign over and over again, and pointing to it in triumph?

I'm also a bit dismayed to see our vote-or-starve policy in Iraq. That rather undercuts the great turnout results, I would think. I wonder if the Republicans will propose similar conditions on welfare for our next election?

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Comments:

#15203: — 02/03 at 12:45 PM
Y'all made my point. You're just guessing and 100L deaths is hysteria.

The Lancet study discredited itself. 95% confidence with a spread like that? You're better off throwing darts.

#15206: — 02/03 at 12:57 PM
KW: The number of foreign "professional jihadists" is steeply on the rise compared to local insurgents. Wahabis, mostly from Saudi Arabia, are the majority. Armed in (mostly) Syria, they make there way through Anbar province and into the cities. The Haifa Street district in Bagdad was referred to as "getting distinctly Old-Westy".
Kudos to your news service. Also, on the subject of WWII, one should always be very respectful of the Danes. Denmark held down more German Divisions per population than any other country, protected your Jewish citizens and maintained your social institutions. Thanks also for your country's assistance in rebuilding Iraq. It's nice to know there are friends out there regardless of our blunders.
Fret not the typos. We all make mistakes.

#15208: — 02/03 at 01:24 PM

The Lancet study discredited itself. 95% confidence with a spread like that? You’re better off throwing darts.

Harry, I think you need to read up a little on statistics. Tim Lambert, at Deltoid, have made some good posts on the subject - you might want to go check those out.

#15216: — 02/03 at 03:25 PM
Aside from the fact that the methodology was suspect and the sample seems to have included an outlier big enough to bias the results, I know enough statistics to know that if the spread is 8K-194K, you don't get to split the difference and say that's the figure.

#15218: Jan Theodore Galkowski — 02/03 at 03:54 PM
W, BushCo, or, as he is being called in some circles, George II is getting a brain, or has co-opted one, apparently.

#15219: PZ Myers — 02/03 at 04:12 PM
Um, no. The methodology was sound and they excluded a potential outlier.

PZ Myers
Division of Science and Math
University of Minnesota, Morris

#15222: — 02/03 at 06:17 PM
For years, the military of the US and other countries put a tremendous amount of stock in the immediate post-battle research conducted by SLA Marshall. During the Big One, he had assembled companies fresh out of battle and asked them questions, with an assistant counting the number of raised hands. In the 1980s Marshall's work reached an apex of popularity and he was accorded guru status, especially in the Marine Corps. Then men who had been in his sessions started coming forward. They confessed that the troops were so pissed off at being kept from sleep and food that they didn't raise their hands for anything, which invalidated the whole study.
If the current "how many babies did you kill, trooper?" study interviewed men from a line company, and that unit had cleaned out a bazaar, then the data would be completely weirded from, say, a rear-echelon bulldozer repair company. Also, what was the excluded outlier?

#15237: — 02/04 at 12:46 AM
Richard, why do you keep focusing on that study, which only Alon has mentioned? We are currently talking about the Lancet study. As to yo question, Fallujah was excluded from the Lanct study as an outlier.

I know enough statistics to know that if the spread is 8K-194K, you don’t get to split the difference and say that’s the figure.

This we agree on, but it wasn't the people behind the study which have done that, it was the people who wrote the headline in the Lance which did that. However, having said that, even if the spread is 8K-194K, the most likely numbers are in the middle - the futher you get away from it, the less likely the numbers are.

The Chronicle of Higher Learning has a great article about the study.

#15243: — 02/04 at 06:36 AM
Richard, snipers are in the minority. More likely are engagements in which a few troops kill many people. Even with snipers, a single sniper may shoot at several people. As for civilians, what troop will call an armed militia not in uniform a civilian, especially when it's clear to everyone that it's a guerilla war?

I’m wondering why no one is making anything out of the huge mass burial sites left over from Saddam’s heyday.

If it's an attack on the commenters, I presume it's because this is not the topic of this discussion. Besides, per annum the USA's outkilling Saddam several times over. Finally, while the Holocaust was a deliberate attempt to destroy an entire ethnic group, Saddam's killings were mostly piecemeal thuggery, with an emphasis on mostly. Just note how the most notorious killing method of the Holocaust is the gas chambers, with less emphasis on the einsatzgruppen, which made groups of Jews dig trenches and stand in front of them, and then shot them down. And finally, 6 million people over 4 years is a lot more menacing than 400,000 over 35.

#15253: isabel — 02/04 at 10:07 AM
Chris and A, thanks for the guinea pig info. I'd actually come across two of the sites you mention and will check out the third. My main misgiving is that I have four cats and wonder how that would be for the guinea pigs. Obviously, they would always be separated, but I wonder if just living in the same household as cats would be stressful for the guines pigs.

#15435: — 02/07 at 09:52 AM
A lot of people have both cats and guinea pigs. cavycages.com has info on making large cat-proof cages; some cats don't care about the pigs, but with four, you're likely to have someone dangerous. Pigs generally ignore or threaten anything they're used to and know they're safe from. Usually, they're more stressed out by humans being five minutes late with their veggie dinners than by the presence of cats.

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Monday, January 31, 2005

As requested, my statement on the Iraqi elections

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