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😂😂 except in the countries we invade...
Source: old enough to remember Iraq and Afghanistan as an adult and have a parent that went to Vietnam.
Yeah, I remember Iraq and Afghanistan too. I followed both very closely. Our civilian casualty ratios were far from Israel's currently claimed 50-50 (as opposed to what it actually probably is, ie 80%+ civilians).
Fuck, even in Vietnam the ratio wasn't 50 fucking 50.
Iraq may have had a civilian casualty ratio of up to 77%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio#Iraq_War
A Pentagon leak for 2004-2009 put the number at 66,000 civilians out of 109,000 total fatalities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War_documents_leak#Civilian_casualties
The Wikipedia source on the first link doesn't say what the citation claims it does, if you follow it.
On the second, that count would require, what, 80% of civilian deaths to be caused by the US? Assuming the extrapolations it reaches are correct. For a 50-50 combatant-civilian split.
If you want to argue that as a matter of moral responsibility, fine, but the point raised above is quite clearly about military efforts to distinguish civilians from combatants in operations.
I followed the link to the report and it's not clear whether the 39k number is total combatant casualties, but you can just calculate from the civilian deaths where the estimate is at least 112k-122k civilian casualties out of 174k total, which is ~70%. You're acting like that 7% difference is a big gotcha.
And I don't know why you're acting like the US being responsible for 80% of casualties in Iraq is a wild idea. We massively overpowered the limited Iraqi capabilities. They had much fewer combatants and didn't even have the ability to drop bombs. The CCR isn't about a particular side though, since you'll always get into muddy questions of who was responsible for a particular death. It certainly wasn't the case that we were mostly just killing terrorists.
That's uh... For a couple decades.
A better way of looking at it would be to extrapolate an average casualty rate per month.
Using their most up to date numbers 208k through June 2020. That's about 1,000 deaths a month. If we do the same with their 2005 estimate, because casualties are massively front loaded... We get 2,000 deaths a month.
Then we need to talk about their methodology. They include local news reporting which routinely lied about casualties being fighters or civilians. For reference I remember our translator reading us an article that said our night vision goggles were X-ray vision.
You... do realize that 'massively overpowered' =/= 'hit as many civilians as we can', right? Accusing the US military of having a worse civilian death ratio by a significant margin in Iraq than in Vietnam or WW2 is absolutely a wild idea.
70% civilian deaths by all sources, not 70% by Coalition forces. That's the difference.
Again, if we are discussing this not as a matter of moral responsibility for the war as a whole, but for "Military operations which killed civilians", we very much were killing mostly enemy combatants. Coalition forces were responsible for relatively few civilian casualties from the start, and proportionally fewer as the war went on and criticism of civilian casualties became harsher. The vast majority of civilian casualties were caused by insurgents or the security forces of the Iraqi government.
Massively overpower means you have the means and weaponry to cause significantly more collateral damage. This fantasy that the US has surgical precision with its strikes is just wishful thinking. The Pentagon document leak has specific examples of classifying civilians as enemy combatants and widespread abuse. You're motivated enough to follow sources and question casualty claims on minutiae and then just claim it was all someone else without even a passing inclination to support your statement with data.
Man, because I've argued with people like you before. Again, going back to the raw numbers, your claim would have to attribute some 80%+ of civilian casualties in the Iraq War to Coalition forces and only 20% to Insurgents and Iraqi Security Forces combined in order to reach an even 50-50 proportion of combatants and civilians killed by Coalition Forces. Is that your claim?
The idea of "Power is big boom" is horribly antiquated WW2 style thinking.
Having done something before should make it easier for you to find sources this time to support your minimizations. And to be clear 50-50 is TERRIBLE and means any more serious operation we initiate is likely to kill a lot of innocent people. We're not Israel, we only kill one innocent person for every enemy fighter, is not the reassuring statement you think it is.
You have a fantasy where precision guided bombs dropped from 10,000 feet punch cleanly through buildings to destroy terrorist heads and terrorist heads alone with no collateral damage to nearby people or buildings. Power is also having the ability to just shoot up a car because it might be getting too close to your check point, knowing that your overriding priority is maintaining control and protecting your allies and you'll never suffer consequences for being a little overeager and making an oopsie.
Are you going to answer the question or not? Is your claim that Coalition forces were responsible for 80%+ of the civilian casualties in the Iraq War, and that anti-government insurgents and pro-government security forces combined were only responsible for ~20%? Because that's the only way the math works out in favor of 50-50 (and not the 77%-23% you initially claimed)
Your math is wrong because if you're not looking at overall civilian casualty rate then you need to remove the allied combatants from the denominator. The Pentagon leaks have a break down that has both civilian casualty numbers and enemy forces. 66,081 civilians were killed compared to 23,984 enemy forces. If the US killed 36% of all the civilians they'd be at 1-1. Which is roughly the rate the Iraq Body Count attributes to them.
I am looking at the overall civilian casualty rate for deaths by violence.
The Iraq Body Count project puts Coalition forces as responsible for ~40% of civilian deaths during the invasion and the immediate aftermath, when Coalition civilian casualties were highest. After '03, by the Iraqi Body Count Project's own estimates, Coalition-inflicted civilian casualties drop sharply both as an absolute number and as a proportion.
All of this is a fucking insane detour from what started this - that America is more interested in preventing civilian casualties than Israel is, which is pretty fucking apparent from the outset and the attempt to dispute it with claims of 77% Coalition-inflicted casualties in Iraq is fucking nonsense.
Then it's the original numbers you've been falling all over yourself to deny. You're trying to pick apart these statistics to divide blame, but that's an entirely different statistic, and that one very much cares who is dying. We don't get an extra buffer on civilian deaths because one of our allies died as well.
When deciding to start a war, the overall CCR rate is the appropriate statistic. It doesn't matter to the civilians which side kills them, just that they're dead because we started a war. And Israel being extremely bad doesn't make war by less bad actors no big deal. You've been minimizing the cost of war throughout this, picking at a percentage here or there based on some unsupported faith in the restraint of the US war machine.
This all started from you claiming "Our civilian casualty ratios were far from Israel’s currently claimed 50-50 (as opposed to what it actually probably is, ie 80%+ civilians)." CCRs are general measures for combats as a whole, but if you wanted to calculate a civilians killed divided by enemy killed, the US ratio in Iraq was right at that 50-50 ratio you thought was far beyond what the US would ever do.
So when I explicitly noted that I was making that distinction and that the broader moral issue of being responsible for deaths as part of starting the war was a different discussion, you ignored it. Great. Good to know you wasted both of our time with this. Fucking fantastic.
" Great. Good to know you wasted both of our time with this. Fucking fantastic."
Nah it was just you spinning in circles trying to justify and rationalize your morally bankrupt bullshit. And I for own appreciate the other person taking the time to debunk it for us readers.
"Morally bankrupt bullshit"
Is that what you call noting that US military operations are more careful than the current bullshit undertaken by Israel?
I explicitly noted I wasn't addressing the overall morality of the Iraq War or the responsibility for the deaths caused by the war as a whole - only that in military operations, the US is more careful about civilian casualties than israel's current farce. Would you care to elaborate on how that's "morally bankrupt bullshit"?