[lit-ideas] Lancet article discussed in Chroncle of Higher Ed
- From: Eternitytime1@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 6 Feb 2006 01:35:56 EST
Hi,
Another analysis of the Lancet article appears in The Chronicle of Higher
Education of 1/27/2005 and the article is here:
_http://chronicle.com/free/2005/01/2005012701n.htm_
(http://chronicle.com/free/2005/01/2005012701n.htm)
Here is the part which made me wonder, if the strikes that are being done
are so accurate, and so few civilians are being killed by our military, the
government is not keeping track. (oh, wait...we don't really have a government
which does things on its own any longer--we outsource as much as we can...from
guards at West Point and other military bases to hiring mercenaries and
security companies to train the Iraqi soldiers instead of doing it
ourselves... so
never mind. Obviously--if they can just discredit the independent agencies
which are not spouting off the rhetoric that those in charge want to hear--why
should they keep track with the rank and file statistical types who work all
the way through the government?)
anyway, here is that desire pointed out in the article:
Best,
Marlena in Missouri
"Mr. Garlasco, of Human Rights Watch, is mystified that the Defense
Department is not publicly interested in such studies. "Civilian casualties can
be a
bellwether for the actual conduct of the war-fighting," says Mr. Garlasco,
who was an intelligence officer at the Pentagon until 2003. "They're using all
these precision weapons, so one would expect that if you're striving to
minimize casualties, you'd have very low casualties. In Iraq we've seen the
exact
opposite, so one has to wonder why."
Besides, he says, counting civilian deaths could actually be useful for the
Pentagon's public image. "I truly believe when the U.S. military says we're
not there to kill civilians, it's absolutely true," he says. "The problem is,
though, there are many people who don't accept their reasoning. The only way
they'll change their minds is if the U.S. military shows they take civilian
casualties seriously enough that they quantify them and attempt to minimize
casualties in the future."
In the Lancet article, Mr. Roberts and his colleagues write, "It seems
difficult to understand how a military force could monitor the extent to which
civilians are protected without systematically doing body counts or at least
looking at the kinds of casualties they induce."
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