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From: Anwar.Mohammed@cs.cmu.edu
Newsgroups: talk.politics.mideast
Subject: Re: Saudi clergy and their western supporters vs Human rights.
Date: Mon, 17 May 1993 09:40:48 -0400
Organization: Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA
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Ilyess sez: 
  >So how would have *you* defended Saudi Arabia and rolled 
  >back the Iraqi invasion, were you in charge of Saudi Arabia??? 
  
  All Muslims knew that the whole thing was set up to destroy Iraq, not 
  to "Liberate Kuwait", The people who were killed by the invasion are 
  more (many many more), than the ones that were killed by the Iraqis 
  in their smaller invasion. I lived in the west, and I have seen how 
  your media prepared you (helpless naive Americans) for a war against 
                                                    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 
No doubt you plan on exploiting "helpless naive Americans" for your own
purposes. Hmm...let's see: 

  Iraq even before the artificial conflict between Iraq and Kuwait that 
  led to the invasion, as the CIA correctly predicted (and pretended to 
  be surprised not to know). 
  It just happened that Saddam was so predictible and so arrogant and stupid. 

  What would I have done: Most Muslims would choose 300 dead Kuwaitis   over 
  200,000 dead Iraqis and 1000 dead Kuwaitis. The first case would happen 
  if no western intervention happened, and the second case was a direct 
  or indirect result of western envolvement. 

Possibly, if 200,000 Iraqis had indeed died, but this number is based on
Greenpeace estimates.  Greenpeace had compromised its alleged
impartiality during the war by condemning the potential environmental
consequences of Allied miiltary action, while initially *completely*
ignoring Iraq's horrible environmental crimes, starting with the dumping
of millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf at Ahmadi to the blowing of
over 700 oil wells.  What is the real number?  There has been a lot of
work on this in the last two years, none of it reported as the
Greenpeace figure seems to get continuously bandied about.  The real
number seems to be around 10,000, on the same order as the number of
Kuwaitis killed, tortured and kidnapped during the occupation.  I've
included an article I recently posted below, but this is really old
news.  Independent Television News reported a figure around 15,000 only
a few months after the war, but it was hardly reported. 

For the Allies to have killed 200,000 Iraqis, they would have had to
kill twice the *total* number of Iraqis in Kuwait. 

The favored image of the hysterics is the last battle of the war at
Mutla'.  This was yet another example of the American and European media
playing into the hands of Iraq and its de facto allies.     The
destruction of the Iraqi convoy at Mutla' was portrayed as an all-out
slaughter.  This is simply not true.  The head and tail of the convoy
was bombed initially, resulting in a lot of casualties at these points. 
 Before bombers came back, most of the rest of the Iraqi soldiers fled
on foot. 

Furthermore, your estimates of Kuwaiti war dead if Allies hadn't invaded
is completely ridiculous.  You have acknowledged (certainly implicitly) 
 that Saddam is a barbarous brute.  You have acknowledged the hundreds
of thousands he has been responible for killing *in his own country*. 
You *know* that the man he appointed as governor of Kuwait,  Ali Majid,
was his most brutal henchman, presiding over the near genocide of the
Kurds  in the late 80's and, more recently, the Shi'a.    Yet, when it
comes to his treatment of Kuwaitis, he is an angel.  In your estimate,
he would've killed *fewer* than he already had when the war started. 
What a joke! 


APn  03/09 0006  Iraq War Dead 

Copyright, 1993. The Associated Press. All rights reserved. 

By NICK LUDINGTON 
 Associated Press Writer 
   WASHINGTON (AP) -- After the Persian Gulf War ended, the world was
told that 
as many as 100,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed. At one point, even Baghdad put 
the toll that high, as did the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency in private. 
   But U.S. officials have been backpedaling ever since, even though the 
Pentagon has yet to settle on an official estimate to release to the public. 
Now, one former DIA analyst says the number of Iraqi troops killed may
have been 
as low as 1,500. 
   That conclusion by John Heidenrich, writing in the current issue of the 
quarterly magazine Foreign Policy, represents the lowest estimate yet
from U.S. 
defense sources. 
   The revisions suggesting a less devastating Iraqi toll fit a pattern of 
vastly moderated U.S. military claims in the months after the war ended.
Claims 
for a number of U.S. weapons also were scaled down. 
   Despite the dramatic videotapes of successful weaponry or the shocking 
pictures of Iraq's disastrous retreat from Kuwait, arguments have continued 
unabated about what really happened in the Gulf War. 
   Heidenrich is not the first to question the Iraqi death toll numbers that 
originally were aired. More that a year ago, Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles
Horner, 
the commander of the air campaign in the Gulf War, said he believed the Iraqi 
military death toll was fewer than 10,000 for the entire war. 
   The Pentagon itself still refuses to provide an estimate of the number of 
Iraqis who died in the 42-day war against the U.S.-led coalition in
January and 
February 1991. On Monday, Pentagon spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Joe Gradisher
reiterated 
past statements that "there just isn't a number," that is credible. 
   But some current internal estimates range from 8,000 to 25,000 Iraqi troops 
killed, said one analyst, speaking on condition of anonymity, who is familiar 
with the Pentagon's reports. 
   Allied deaths were put at 146 Americans, 35 by friendly fire; 24 British, 9 
by American fire; 2 Frenchmen, 1 Italian and 39 among various Arab allies. 
   Of the postwar reassessments, the most widely publicized was the Army's 
reluctant acknowledgement, months later, that its touted Patriot air defense 
system was nowhere near so effective as claimed against Iraq's Scud missiles. 
The Bush administration initially claimed an almost perfect record for the 
Patriot; last spring it revised the hit ratio to 60 percent. 
   The success record of the Navy's Tomahawk high-tech cruise missile used 
against targets in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq also turned out to be more 
modest than initially indicated by the Pentagon. 
   The first Iraqi casualty figures to surface after the war came in a
May 1991 
report by the environmental group Greenpeace, which said 100,000 to 120,000 
Iraqi soldiers were killed. It estimated that 5,000 to 15,000 Iraqi civilians 
were also killed. 
   The same month, published reports said the Defense Intelligence Agency 
estimated 100,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed and 300,000 wounded in the
air and 
ground campaigns -- although the agency qualified that by saying the estimate 
could be off by as much as 50 percent in either direction. 
   But as more information became available, those figures gradually were 
revised downward. 
   The House Armed Services Committee staff estimated 9,000 dead and 17,000 
wounded after a review last year. 
   But Heidenrich, writing in the current issue of the quarterly Foreign
Policy, 
estimated the total death toll from both the air and ground offensives
as low as 
1,500 -- with about 3,000 wounded. 
   Heidenrich based the conclusion in his article on the number of
bodies found 
and buried by U.S. troops -- 577 -- and on prisoner of war interviews.
He noted 
that only about 2,000 of 69,000 Iraqi prisoners of war were wounded. 
   Based on the calculation that about half as many wounded escaped as were 
captured, he put the number of wounded at about 3,000. Using a conservative 
ratio of one dead to two wounded, applicable to Third World armies like
Iraq, he 
set battlefield deaths at 1,500. 
   "Maybe the figures are too low," he wrote. "Maybe the real death toll
on the 
battlefield was 2,000 or 3,000 or even 6,000. Even then, the evidence
suggests a 
death toll of well below 100,000 -- or even 10,000." 
   In an interview, he said the 100,000 figure was obviously off base
because it 
would mean that virtually all the Iraqi soldiers in the Kuwait theater of 
operations were casualties. 
   He said today's bloodiest wars were not those fought with high technology, 
but rather the drawn-out conflicts such as those in Yugoslavia and Somalia. 



 
