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> (Direct civilian losses by the hands of the invading force were less than 4,000.) I can see that, in terms of direct civilian losses, the first gulf war was mild. However, I don't think it's in any way reasonable to only count direct deaths in a war that was devastating to civilian infrastructure. While the effect of the war itself was muddied by the sanctions regime (which killed an enormous number of people), bombing civilian infrastructure obviously has a negative effect on civilian life expectancy. Academic treatments tend to push the numbers a lot higher (hundreds of thousands) due to the increases in child mortality, excess deaths, etc in post-war Iraq. As for the DUP stuff, I don't have any particularly complex opinion. It seems somewhat obvious to me that heavy metals are typically poisonous, alpha-particle emitters are extremely poisonous, so my tendency would be to assume that spraying depleted uranium about is going to cause negative health outcomes, probably including cancer. Personally, I think there is some merit to the idea of the first gulf war as a well-executed war, and if I was living in Iraq, I would probably rather live through that war than the 2003 invasion, or any number of other wars in the 20th century. That said, if you compare two similar wars in terms of direct civilian casualty counts (Gulf war (3,664), Russo-Ukrainian war (3,393 so far)), the narrative could not be more different. What's interesting about the first gulf war to me is not really the casualty counts (fairly typical, on all scales, to conflicts of a similar duration and intensity) but rather the success of the new model (embedded reporters, 24/7 news coverage) in controlling the media narrative. |