Antiwar.com Blog

There have been a quite a few reports in the news the past day on the higher survival rate of US soldiers due to superior body armor and trauma care based on the report in the New England Journal of Medicine, Casualties of War — Military Care for the Wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan

Each Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Defense provides an online update of American military casualties (the number of wounded or dead) from Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom.1 According to this update, as of November 16, 2004, a total of 10,726 service members had suffered war injuries. Of these, 1361 died, 1004 of them killed in action; 5174 were wounded in action and could not return to duty; and 4191 were less severely wounded and returned to duty within 72 hours. No reliable estimates of the number of Iraqis, Afghanis, or American civilians injured are available. Nonetheless, these figures represent, by a considerable margin, the largest burden of casualties our military medical personnel have had to cope with since the Vietnam War.

Read the rest here. The accompanying pictures, Caring for the Wounded in Iraq — A Photo Essay,(warning…they are very graphic) are also available here.

UPDATE: Here’s an interesting point made in an email to me from AntiWar reader Jim Jensen:

I think mention should be made that the New England Journal article made three important observations. The first was that fewer soldiers are now dying. The second is relative to the first observation: More soldiers are left wounded than before. Third, homicide rates in the U.S. have been dramatically reduced. The NEJ says that all of these items are a direct result of the advanced made in medicine over the years, something that I don’t think is being stated in the mainstream press.

AFP is reporting that Moqtada al-Sadr is not on the list assembled by Ayatollah al-Sistani’s United Iraqi Alliance.

The United Iraqi Alliance, backed by highly revered Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, includes the Dawa party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, Dawa’s Ali Adib said.

But Moqtada al-Sadr, whose militia battled US-led forces in Baghdad and Najaf before calling a truce, “is not on the list” after not registering his movement for the elections, said Hussein Shahrastani, a member of the coalition’s organising committee.

Oddly, several reports still claim that the Sadrists are on the list.

Spencer Ackerman has the whole transcript of Rumsfeld’s Kuwait Roasting, in addition to the armor issue the US media focussed on. A sample:

Q: Yes, sir. I was wanting to know why I cannot enlist as a single parent in the regular Army, but I can enlist in the National Guard and be deployed?

…

Q: Specialist Skarwin (Sp?) HHD 42nd Engineer Brigade. Mr. Secretary [Cheers] my question is with the current mission of the National Guard and Reserves being the same as our active duty counterparts, when are more of our benefits going to line up to the same as theirs, for example, retirement? [Cheers] [Applause]

…

Q: Good morning, sir. Staff Sergeant Latazinsky (sp) 1st COSCOM (sp), Fort Bragg, [Cheers] North Carolina. Yes, sir. My husband and myself, we both joined a volunteer Army. Currently, I’m serving under the Stop Loss Program. I would like to know how much longer do you foresee the military using this program?

Read the rest…

LATER: Hey, Rumsfeld, you disgusting, pitiful excuse for a human being, at least you can’t lie to Spc. Cody Wentz of Williston, N.D. anymore.

Chris Albritton critiques one of George Paine’s Warblogging posts which analyzes the authoritarian utopia planned for Fallujah

A comparison to the Warsaw Ghetto is tempting, but is perhaps a bit too extreme. We can only hope and assume that the residents of Fallujah, under their new American police state, will enjoy sustenance and somewhat adequate medical care. I think that the more appropriate analogy may be to a massive 300,000-strong Miami-sized prison camp.

The American occupation authorities in Iraq are creating a massive city-sized prison camp for Fallujah. They realize that they can’t arrest every resident of Fallujah because they don’t have enough space in Saddam’s old prisons. So instead, being the problem solvers that they are, they have decided to turn the entire city into one big prison. With this prison being a “model”, the other cities of Iraq can’t be far behind.

This is the liberation of Iraq?

Continue reading “Fallujah – a US Prison Camp?”

Oh no. Perish the thought! He’s running with that Yushchenko poisoning "confirmed" story from the London Times – many hours after it’s been thoroughly debunked by the Associated Press, which reports:

"The cause of the illness that has left Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko’s face pockmarked is still not known, the director of the hospital that treated him said Wednesday, rejecting a report that the presidential candidate was poisoned.

"…Doctors are still running tests to try to determine what caused the illness, said Dr. Michael Zimpfer, the Rudolfinerhaus director.

"…Zimpfer rejected as ‘entirely untrue’ a story in the Wednesday edition of the London daily The Times, which quoted Dr. Nikolai Korpan – the Rudolfinerhaus physician who oversaw Yushchenko’s treatment – as saying that Yushchenko had been poisoned and the intention was to kill the candidate.

"Korpan also was quoted as denying making the remarks."

You mean the news media is – yikes! – biased??? The Times was … lying? Omigod, say it isn’t so!

Glenn was even busy implicating Vladimir Putin as the culprit. Evidence? Who needs evidence? Certainly not a professor of law….

To those of us with built-in BS-detectors, however, it wasn’t hard to anticipate this particular debunking. The Times story claims that the poisoning has been "confirmed," but somehow neglects to name the mysterious substance that supposedly disfigured Yushchenko’s once-handsome visage. Oh, and, even though the "poisoning" diagnosis is "confirmed," there’s just one minor complication:

"We need to check him again here in Vienna. If we received him today, we could finish the whole investigation in two or three days."

Unfortunately, however, according to the Times’s Jeremy Page — "reporting" from Kiev — "a spokeswoman said [Yushchenko] had no plans to travel to Vienna." Gee, so I guess that means the "mystery" wouldn’t be cleared up until … after the election. How convenient.

The key tip off, however, that the whole story was bogus from beginning to end is that the Cato Institute’s resident neocon and Karen Kean Lopez of National Review both believed it – and no doubt still do. Ideology trumps reality every time.

Once again Ron Paul is totally on the mark re the lurid, uncivil possibilities posed by the potential imposition of a US ID card – and called to mind the battle already going on in Japan over Juki Net, launched in 2003, and causing a ruckus there (e.g, Japanese Government Bans Security Researcher’s Speech.) God knowswhat we in the US would do if an ID card were implemented, lots of chaos, civil actions, law suits, breakdown of much we currently hold dear – privacy, freedom, liberty of our persons!