Talk:Gulf War

An event mentioned in this article is a August 2 selected anniversary

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See also: Talk:Gulf War/Archive 1

Moved this page and the parent page from Talk:Gulf War and Gulf War, respectively.

Name change from "Gulf War" to "Persian Gulf War"

The page was changed to "Persian Gulf War". This is POV, even though most people are not aware of it. Persians and Arabs dispute whether the Gulf is the "Arabian Gulf" or the "Persian Gulf". To call the war the "Persian Gulf War" instead of the "Gulf War" transforms the neutral title into one that adopts the Iranian/Persian POV. It is telling that the user who appears to have done the move, Mani1, is from Iran.

Please note that this Gulf naming issue is so controversial that wikipedia even has a page devoted to the controversy! Dispute over the name of the Persian Gulf Why allow the nasty fighting over the Persian Gulf page to spill over onto this one? The best thing to do is restore the NPOV "Gulf War" title.

Kaltes

Casualties (dispute)

In 8 Casualties, I beg to dispute the official numbers cited as arab casualties; the Arab contingents had about 40 killed, and France lost 2 men. I was told by (Arab)people at the time that State Controlled Arab media downplayed the number of casualties to avoid public backlash. If it is impossible to verify the actual count may I suggest that it could be mentioned that the numbers are disputed due to lack of media accuracy? --The Brain 06:53, Jan 24, 2005 (UTC)

Sure, if you can present some sources discussiong the issue the text will be modified. - SimonP 07:33, Jan 24, 2005 (UTC)

The following segments, in the casualties segment, is absolutely wrong, and POV:

1. 1. "Iraqi casualty numbers are highly disputed. Some claim as low as 1,500 military killed, some 200,000. Many scholars now believe a number around 25,000 to 75,000."

We have reliable evidence on casualties now. This information was posted and the source given credit. Posting up outdated speculation is wrong for 2 reasons: (1) it distracts the reader from the facts by claiming that 'many scholars' continue to believe a laughably high, false, extremely inflated casualty estimate, and (2) this information is extremely POV, since inflation of Iraqi casualties was a tool by war opponents to condemn the Coalition for overkill and needless murder. In other words: the inflated statistics are propoganda coming from questionable sources. Lastly, ambiguous claims such as "many scholars now believe" need to be backed up with evidence. I was unable to find any sources to verify this claim, and I think this claim is just more propaganda coming from anti-war types. Wikipedia has no credibility is it is allowed to be used as a tool for those who seek to revise and distort history.

If there is (non-debunked) evidence (and I strongly doubt there is) backing up the POV claim above, provide it. Otherwise stop inserting this POV fiction into the article.

1. 2. "The number of military wounded is equally unknown. 71,000 Iraqis were taken as prisoners of war by US troops. Estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths range from just 100 persons to 200,000 excess deaths as a result of the war."

Any number for civilian deaths given that exceeds the number put forth by Sadaam's government, 2,300, is not credible. The Iraqi government's own number is a celing, not a floor. Don't even mention bogus 'estimates' unless they can be verified and cited. Otherwise you could just be making up anything.

1. 3. "In addition, the aftermath of the war led to conditions that produced many more deaths in Iraq. For instance, Iraq was bombed with over 300 tons of depleted uranium, a heavy metal that some believe increases the risk of cancer (although this is hotly disputed). The rate of cancer Iraqi children after the war increased four-fold. The sanctions that were imposed after the war have led to roughly two million deaths, half of them children. And U.S. and British jets continued to bomb targets in and around the no-fly zones in Iraq on roughly a monthly basis from the end of the first Gulf war right up to the second."

So the editor was telling us how disputed and controversial casualties were in order to insert wildly inflated 'estimates' then in the next paragraph, the DU issue, which is VERY controversial and in fact has very little support, is presented as the gospel truth. No one sees the obvious POV agenda behind this? Who was in control of statistics regarding Iraqi children post-war? The Sadaam government. Who was doing everything possible, including waging a ceaseless propaganda campaign, to defeat the sanctions? The Sadaam government. Yet this paragraph is absolutely silent of the glaring credibility issues behind the supposed 'facts' it references.

Also, there needs to be some citation for dubious, controversial statements like "sanctions that were imposed after the war have led to roughly two million deaths". Not only is this exactly the Sadaam propaganda I mentioned earlier, it is provided here as facts without any citation or reference to the source. That is sloppy heresay. provide the sources AND the counter-arguments, or drop it altogether and stick with the neutral source I provided.

The DU issue should be on a seperate page, and the supposed Iraqi civilian deaths from sanctions should be on the sanctions page, NOT the war page. Kaltes 04:42, Jan 30, 2005 (UTC)

I've long felt the casualties are one of the weaknesses on this page, being extremely poorly sourced. So, toward that end, I'm going to start gathering some sources:

Human Rights Watch says:

"we are reasonably confident that the total number of civilians killed directly by allied attacks did not exceed several thousand, with an upper limit of perhaps between 2,500 and 3,000 Iraqi dead. These numbers, we note, do not include the substantially larger number of deaths that can be attributed to malnutrition, disease and lack of medical care caused by a combination of the U.N.-mandated embargo and the allies' destruction of Iraq's electrical system, with its severe secondary effects (see Chapter Four)."

It should be noted that HRW says that the Iraqi government gave higher figures (though roughly in the same order of magnitude) for directly killed than Kaltes says.

This is only a small start; we should really do much better in documenting casualty figures. Regarding indirect deaths: this information is important, too, but we should be careful to label what each measurement means (is it direct or indirect, over what period, compared to what, etc.) DanKeshet 05:10, Jan 31, 2005 (UTC)

I agree with you DanKeshet that there is some dispute with the numbers, although within a far more reasonable range than was found in the article before my edits. Your source falls within this reasonable range. Thus far I have found the PBS Frontline web site on the Gulf War to be the most comprehensive information source on the subject, especially since most of the information there is more up to date, and consequently is more reliable than what people thought back in the early 1990s. The casualty statistics are a perfect example of this, because there was a lot of unsupported speculation about casualties both before and after the war. I recall a prediction that the Coalition would suffer ~50,000 casualties, which was made before the war, to be a good illustration of the magnitude of the error of these speculations. Of course we all know how inaccurate that prediction was, but many people continue to falsely believe that the Gulf War was an Iraqi bloodbath, which is simply not true.

Of course I do not think that PBS Frontline is a perfect source, and I would love to see the addition of more sources. I do think PBS Frontline is perhaps one of the most neutral sources on this particular issue. I do not know why they would be in error given the Sadaam government's casualty figures. Perhaps these figures were revised downward? This excerpt from your link sheds a great deal of light on the civilian casualties issue:

"In contrast to the statistics issued during the war by government officials, Iraqi doctors provided more modest figures in post-war interviews with visitors and journalists about the number of civilian casualties treated during the war, shedding some light on the extent of injuries from the bombing in Baghdad, though not in other parts of the country. Doctors at Yarmuk Hospital, Baghdad's second largest hospital and a major surgical facility, reported that approximately 600 "war victims" were treated at the hospital. The director of Yarmuk Hospital told members of a visiting U.S. group that, in addition to those injured in the bombing of the Ameriyya air raid shelter in Baghdad, about 1,000 civilians were treated during the war and that between 150 and 200 of them died. According to one member of the U.S. group, the doctor later revised his estimate downward to between 100 and 150 dead. In a subsequent interview with The Washington Post in June, he said that he was not allowed to release statistics about the number of people who had died at the hospital during the air war."

The Depleted Uranium issue is another example. I have yet to see a single shred of evidence backing up these claims. Even the most basic understanding of radiation and DU are all that is needed to understand that claims of extensive radiation damage from DU are essentially fictitious. In fact, DU (and all heavy metals) would be more dangerous chemically if ingested/inhaled. Given the science, I am highly skeptical of these claims and I would like to see something solid to back it up. Perhaps someone could provide such a source. If not, and if people want this information included, the sources should be identified and the flaws in their reasoning (the other side of the story) should be pointed out.

Finally, I don't have a problem with including the "aftermath" casualty information, as long as both sides of the story are told. After the war, Sadaam focused on defeating the sanctions regime and the Iraqi government released a lot of propaganda to further this goal. Civilian hardship, particularly children, was the centerpiece of this campaign. The problem with such statistics are twofold: First, the numbers themselves are very much in doubt, and Second, actual attribution of these deaths to "sanctions" is speculative at best. Sadaam routinely killed large numbers of his own people, so are we really supposed to believe that when large numbers of Iraqis died at the same time Sadaam was spending many billions rebuilding his military, and many billions building a network of extravagant mosques and palaces, that these civilians died because Sadaam couldn't easily sell Iraq's oil?

Kaltes 23:10, Jan 31, 2005 (UTC)

My understanding is also that Uranium, in natural or depleted forms, is far more dangerous due to toxicity than radioactivity. Unexploded shells and bombs are a more serious threat to civilians than residual DU, I would estimate. Nvinen 10:41, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

"Uranium-238 becomes DU, which is 0.7 times as radioactive as natural uranium. Since DU has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, there is very little decay of those DU materials." [1]. That's a long half-life. You could probably live in a house made of DU, with furniture made of DU, and not have any measurably higher risk of illness than anyone else, as long as you don't gnaw at it or lick it. Nvinen 11:15, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

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Why the hell did someone feel it necessary to include "holla at yo boy" in the article? I can't edit it out for some reason.

Because they're dumb. Someone else fixed it already, apparently. Nvinen 10:38, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)