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"the death estimate was revised to 1,033,000 with a given range of 946,000 to 1,120,000." - ORB survey
The Lancet survey (two years old I think) had the number around 600,000
The US government has the number a little over 100,000
Freedom is relative. Freedom is a state of mind, not a reality. Freedom for one individual can be enslavement to another. If you tell a society they are free enough times over a long enough period of time (generations), they will eventually believe they are free. Even if they are not.
All governments and societies eventually fail or change. For better or for worse. The likes of the current world order will change someday. When, we cannot say. How, we cannot be certain.. but it will. The balance of power can never remain stationary. Societies are as malleable as the water we drink, the land which we live upon, and the artificial borders which we isolate ourselves within.
(sarcasm!)
Seems war, like any other human endeavor, just gets more efficient over time.
WWI was largely fought along static lines: trench warefare. Civilians fled the battle areas, and were largely "safe" once they departed. Both sides largely respected the non-combatant lives.
WWII was more dynamic, with armies on the move coming into contact with civilians more frequently. Aerial bombing campaigns were conducted on a massive scale, with accuracy often measured in miles. Naturally more civilans could become casualties.
Viet Nam involved ever more ill-defined battle lines: communist insurgency tactics and deliberate siting of resources among civilians. This was done as a deliberate strategy to attempt to place these assets beyond our reach. Even with vast increases in arial weapon accuracy, there was inevitable and tragic collateral damage.
The current war in Iraq has involved similar tactics, but employed more ruthlessly by an enemy not burdened by our Western sense of morality. Suicide bombing, deliberate targeting of civilians, use of human shields. The Islamic insurgency bears the burden of the casualty ratio. US and coalition forces have unfailingly striven to minimize loss of innocent lives, where possible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties
Total military casualties: 9,720,453
Total civilian casualties: 8,869,248 = 44.86% of total
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
Total military casualties: 25,193,700
Total civilian casualties: 41,815,400 = 62.40% of total (not including the holocaust)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_war
Total military casualties: 1,463,277
Total civilian casualties: 2,331,000 = 61.43% of total
OK, so the Iraq war isn't over yet, and there seems to be quite a bit of controversy over the actual number of iraqi deaths, but upon a skimming of this article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
The article lists 16,500 insurgent deaths, and maybe(?) 10,800 iraqi armed forces casualties. Add those to 4228 coalition deaths and we arrive at
31,528 military casualties.
I'm going to choose to use the figure of 92,414 for civilian deaths. This is quite arguable though, apparently.
This is a civilian casualties at 74.56% of total. It seems like you can pick just about any number you like for those figures and have some source that says you're right.
So anyway, yeah war sucks. But why fudge the numbers to make that point?
Well here's some figures on the Iraq war anyhow. I can't find a number of Iraqi combatants killed so it's hard to create a percentage, but I think, given the numbers 90% is a pretty low guesstimate, it looks more like 95-98% if you exclude the official US count (which I think is pretty safe because they've been playing games with those numbers since the war started).
"the death estimate was revised to 1,033,000 with a given range of 946,000 to 1,120,000." - ORB survey
The Lancet survey (two years old I think) had the number around 600,000
The US government has the number a little over 100,000
Do you have links for those figures? I was looking on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War and didn't see anything like 1,120,000 deaths.... oh actually... here at the top it says 1,033,000.
OK, so that means that if there are 31,528 military casualties then the civilian casualties top out at 97.04% of total. But harder to say with any certainty.
Still, why bother with made up numbers?
Which, I think, is interesting, because it seems that ever since WWI there has been a tendency to fight a war with as little body bags coming home as possible (which is actually a serious theory about why the atomic bomb was created).
And, somehow, the numbers are important. I mean, if the US want revenge for the 3,500 people killed at 9/11 -- sorry, want to stop the terrorist threat-- it would be interesting to know what the current exchange rate between New York/Washington office employees and anonymous people at the other end of the world, --sorry, the acceptable “collateral damage” risk -- is.