Wednesday, October 11, 2006

News out of Iraq just gets better: New study says 600,000 dead Iraqis since we invaded in '03


As if things weren't bad enough in Iraq, we now have a US ammunitions base blowing up in Baghdad: "It was not clear whether the depot at Forward Operating Base Falcon was hit by an attack, and the cause of the fire was not immediately known. Explosions from detonating tank and artillery ordnance and small-arms ammunition stored at the site went off for hrs after the fire broke out, and the Pentagon is claiming that there are no casualities." OK, if there are no casualties, that is great news... but how much of our ammunition and urgently needed supplies simply went up in smoke? And what kind of toxic air from those burning weapons is now floating around that base and the immediate Iraqi neighborhoods? Add to that news this absolutely unspeakable horrific news: "A new Johns Hopkins study, published in The Lancet and compiled by a team of American and Iraqi public health researchers, has estimated that 600,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003 US invasion." Now according to CBS News: "One of the most commonly cited numbers for those killed by Saddam Hussein seems to be 300,000." As horrifying as that number is, please keep in mind that it took 23 yrs of Saddam's dictatorship to reach that bloody total. Even if the 600K number is 50% wrong, that would make the number killed since we've invaded as equal to the number Saddam has killed. And yet we still wonder why the Iraqis despise us and want to toss dynamite at us instead of chocolates, flowers, and fuzzy bunnies? The mortality rate before the American invasion in '03 was about 5.5 people per 1000 per yr. What is that mortality rate now? It has risen to 19.8 deaths per 1000 people in the yr ending in June. And in case anyone wants to question the methods used to collect the data in the study, here is a quick yet detailed explanation of how the 1st study (published in Oct 2004) was conducted that came to the conclusion that 100,000 Iraqis had been killed. How will the War Fans explain away this 600K number? With a nifty lil catch phrase like this: 'We Had to Kill Them to Save Them from that Murderous Saddam' ? How will Bush explain away this 600K number? Think he'll smack his empty head and say: "Uhhh... when I talked about that comma thingy, I really meant the comma in the number 600,000." As awful as the nearly 3000 US troop dead total is (video here), 600K is beyond the pale of horror. Put it in proportion to Iraqi population vs US population: There are 26 million Iraqis. 600K have been killed. There are 300 million Americans. If this were happening to the US at the hands of a foreign invader and occupiers, there would have to be nearly 7 million of us dead for the impact to be equivalent. How many 9/11's would have to happen to equal 7 million dead? May God somehow forgive us for what we've unleashed on the Iraqi people.
Posted by Tina :: 12:27 AM :: 11 Comments:

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