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Sunday, November 05, 2006

Big Fucking Surprise
Posted by Jill | 7:52 AM
Gee. Saddam Hussein has been convicted and sentenced to death by hanging. Now, who could have seen THAT coming?

Estimates of the number of Iraqis killed by Saddam Hussein during his 23 years as Iraqi president range from 150,000 - 300,000. Even without the recent Lancet study claiming 600,000 Iraqi civilian casualties since the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2002, if we want to take the Iraq Body Count estimate of between 45,354 and 50,321 civilian casualties, that's horrifying enough. So what does that make us, only 1/6 as brutal as Saddam Hussein? But it's worse than that. Hussein took 23 years to kill all of these people. His "kill rate" was just over 13,000/year. We have been in Iraq for 4-1/2 years. If we take the lower figure of 45,354 documented casualties, George W. Bush's kill rate of Iraqi civilians is 10,076. I hardly think that being able to say "We're killing 2,024 fewer Iraqis annually than Saddam Hussein because we're in Iraq" gives us any kind of moral high ground.

As IBC says in its refutation of the Lancet study:

Do the American people need to believe that 600,000 Iraqis have been killed before they can turn to their leaders and say "enough is enough"? The number of certain civilian deaths that has been documented to a basic standard of corroboration by "passive surveillance methods" surely already provides all the necessary evidence to deem this invasion and occupation an utter failure at all levels.

On 9/11 3,000 people were violently killed in attacks on the USA. Those events etched themselves into the soul of every American, and reverberated around the world. In December 2005 President George Bush acknowledged 30,000 known Iraqi violent deaths in a country one tenth the size of the USA. That is already a death toll 100 times greater in its impact on the Iraqi nation than 9/11 was on the USA. That there are more deaths that have not yet come to light is certain, but if a change in policy is needed, the catastrophic roll-call of the already known dead is more than ample justification for that change.


As I've often said, how many Iraqis have to die at our hand -- citizens of a country that had ZERO involvement with the 9/11/01 attacks -- before the lunatic who runs our country decides we're somehow "even"?
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