Thoughts on the Middle East, History, and Religion
Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute
Congressional Briefing on Iraq Casualties
The authors of the Lancet report on Iraq casualties, along with this ephemeral servant, will be testifying before a bipartisan group in Congress on Monday, December 11 from 10-12 am. My understanding is that it will be carried by C-Span.
posted by Juan Cole @ 12/11/2006 12:31:00 AM
|Tip Jar for IC
|Cole @ Macmillan Speakers|
|Global Affairs Blog|
 Facebook | | |  | | |  |
|---|
| | |  |
|---|
Muslim Denunciations of al-Qaeda and Terrorism
Suggested Books about the Middle East
Michigan War Studies Review. Many excellent resources.
Individual items can be linked to through the permalink in the time of posting at the end.
Write your political representatives via Congress.org.
ARCHIVES
The feed address is http://www.juancole.com/ rss.xml
Awards
Winner, October 5, 2007, Scott Nearing Award for Courageous Scholarship (Awarded by the Graduate Students of the Political Science Department, University of Pennsylvania).
Winner, 2005 James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, Hunter College.
Winner, 2004 Koufax Award for Best Expert Blog
Winner, 2004 Koufax Award for Best
Posting
11 Comments:
If the Lancet study is right, American casualties have been very, very few compared to Iraq's, but each death of a US serviceperson in Iraq is a disaster.
Greg Mitchell provides "a cross-section of how just a few of the deaths were reported locally just since Thursday."
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003495372
If such cross-sections were published nationally every day, and for Iraqi victims, too - the girls, the boys, the women and the men - this war might end more quickly.
If You Are Looking for a Better Strategy....
One could do worse than to take the Chief Joseph Pledge:
"I will fight no more forever."
Juan,
Good for you. Do not pull any punches. I look forward to seeing this on CSPAN.
Before anyone testifies anywhere, it would seem helpful if a series of playing cards (or even just flash cards for quick review) as to which Iraqi is whom with connections to which organization with connections to which foreign powers and/or quick history of that group, including attacks on American targets.
Last night, I listened to Glenn Beck, having dropped the remote, for a few minutes to hear him suggest that Maliki should step down and we should throw all our weight behind al Hakim in order to offset al Sadr's influence as well as our getting serious about winning in Iraq.
Given comments he has made about our controlling and forcing Iran to back down, I cannot believe that he has more than a cursory knowledge of the issues, if that, and pulls his information out of the headlines with little or no research.
However, this is CNN, supposedly a news source and one which many Americans rely on for their understanding of current events.
watching c-span1 now. thank you for the heads up. and many, many thanks for giving public voice to a genuine concern for the iraqi people. may your voice be heard.
Dr. Cole, I just saw your panel this morning on C-Span on the Lancet Report. It was shocking but I suspected 200,000 was the tip of the iceberg. I commend you and C-Span and the other panelists and Rep. Dennis K. for airing this. Of course, with numbers like this, it must be obvious to the Admin. that it is true, but they don't want us to know, so they can keep troops in Iraq and eventually risk their lives in Iran as well. If a country such as ours (who gave the world the Internet, did the most medical researches and breakthroughs) ostensibly NOT a dictatorship has an administration that acts like a dictatorship, then what hope do we have to stop this genocide? It is a miracle that the researchers could even go to the cluster neighborhoods and they each deserve a medal.
Dr. Cole,
You made such a significant contribution to the panel this morning or Iraq casualties. I hope that this event will get broad coverage in the coming days. It was sad to see so few reporters in attendance, but good to know that your expertise is recognized.
Thank you for your coverage of what has been going on in Iraq all these many months.
As I tried to find a video link to the panel discussion I happened to notice that CSPAN's "Featured Link" to the Lancet study is actually a link to Iraq Body Count's list of complaints about the study. Classic.
I still haven't found a link to the panel discussion so if someone could provide it as soon as it becomes available I sure would appreciate it!
Excellent testimony from you today, Dr. Cole, and excellent leadership from Rep. Kucinich from Ohio and Ron Paul from Texas on this issue. I like the idea of a cabinet level "Department of Peace" for the 21st century to help prevent these kind of wars from happening again so that innocent people would not get caught in the crossfire or even "direct" fire, (although to tell you the truth diplomacy and seeking peace should be the policy of the State Department). I love the point you made about how the people there in Baquba would not follow us back here. They have no "beef" with us! They just don't want us to occupy their land. Thank you so much for your efforts in bringing reason and knowledge to people.
Dr. Cole, living somewhat south of CONUS I could unfortunately not follow the CSPAN discussions. I found this comment on the methodology of the study both readable and informative.
http://mobile.alertnet.org/thefacts/reliefresources/116066724942.htm
Francesco Checchi, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, looks at the lambasting a new report on Iraq deaths has got from hostile governments. He has worked on mortality surveys in Angola, Darfur, Thailand and Uganda, and written a publication "Interpreting and using mortality data in humanitarian emergencies" for the Humanitarian Practice Network.
He concludes: Of course, no study is perfect, all the more so when conducted in the most insecure country on Earth - so insecure, in fact, that carrying around a harmless GPS unit so as to randomly select households to be interviewed places one at risk of being mistaken for a bomb detonator, as Burnham et al. point out.
[...]
Indeed, coalition powers should, in the interest of public accountability and the very success of their mission in Iraq, promote and facilitate more accurate and transparent monitoring of all humanitarian law violations, and of the true effects of violence on Iraqi civilian health.
missed your advanced notice, but caught most of your talk while flipping through the channels during an evening rerun.
One of the Lancet study co-authors talked about how we ought to have a national sense of remorse (not his words) at the harm we've done. Fat chance. In June 2006, I offered to create a panel for the State Department to -at a minimum - take reports of losses sustained directly or indirectly as consequences of our occupation. I lined up a couple prominent academics to participate. I believe I invited you, but didn't hear back. The point was to acknowledge the losses, show some respect. Anyway, 4 months later, a bureaucrat in the purchasing office responded that such a sensitive activity could not be delegated to someone outside the Department. That's it.
A couple nights ago, a light went on when listening to Glenn Beck. It turns out that there's no such thing as a "Palestinian." The folks that are referred to as such are really Syrians, he explained. So I guess they have no legitimate right to the land they lived on before being run off; they had plopped down in the wrong country and the Zionists who pushed them off were really doing them a favor.
And to think that one of your readers slandered Glenn as not knowing about the region. He knows stuff that experts and historians don't.
Post a Comment
<< Home