(noon – promoted by ek hornbeck)
Starting last week, many newspapers and Web sites began publishing their five-year Iraq war anniversary pieces. You’ve probably read quite a few of these already. The New York Times ran nine Op-Eds on the subject Sunday, which John Cole at Balloon Juice did a masterful job of condensing here .
Perhaps you are thinking about writing your own analysis on this horrendous anniversary.
If you are, can I make a recommendation? On the cusp of the sixth year since the invasion, the tally of dead Americans in uniform as a consequence of the war and occupation of Iraq is just a handful short of 4000. More than two a day since March 19, 2003. It’s easy to forget that this number, terrible as it is, is overwhelmed by some other numbers, the 308 non-American coalition numbers who have lost their lives in Iraq, the tens of thousands of Americans and coalition members who have been wounded – some of them maimed for life, some of them so badly injured that they and their families probably wish they were dead – the tens of thousands who have been mentally traumatized.
Most of all, it’s easy to forget the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have lost their lives because of the invasion. No good statistics exist. Depending on which source you trust, the ratio of Americans who have lost their lives to Iraqis who have lost theirs is anywhere from 1:37 to 1:300 – 150,000 to 1.2 million dead. There’s no point to arguing over the accuracy. Any way you count, the numbers are awful.
We know the names of all the Americans who have lost their lives in Iraq. With a little effort we can track down their stories, something the IGTNT Diaries at Daily Kos do, unfortunately, almost every day.
But we will never know the names of more than a handful of the Iraqis who have died because of the invasion. Dead because of a war whose rationale was concocted by the liars who still occupy the highest positions of power in our government: unimpeached and untried, still lying just as they have done without stopping since the events of September 11 gave them the excuse they so avidly hoped for before President George W. Bush was a gleam in Dick Cheney’s eye.
So, when you’re writing your anniversary Diary, or making your comment on somebody else’s, or talking with co-workers, school chums, your family or your neighbors, or grieving quietly for the dead Americans, don’t forget the dead Iraqis. All those dead – Americans, Iraqis and others – were put in the ground for lies, for greed, for the ideology of empire. That, too, is something we should not, must not, ever forget.
23 comments
Skip to comment form
I
argue aboutdiscuss this with members of my family often and their response is, “So What?”This Jingoistic thinking makes me so mad! As if only Americans count.
Thank You MB.
Meteor. there’s no separation or classification in my mind between the dead. and another part of this… the Iraqi refugees.
The first year I didn’t give them much thought after watching the initial bombings and wondering how many innocent people were being taken out. I don’t know and didn’t know any of them though personally. How I know of them though are the wounds that the soldiers I know carry whether that wound is from killing someone who got in the way, or harming someone they would not have harmed if they weren’t so fearful, or being fired upon by a child and wondering what the hell are we doing here, or being wounded in a fire fight or just trying to complete the mission of whatever that is today and keep as many people breathing by nightfall that were breathing at dawn.
I appreciate very much what you say about the death and mayhem perpetrated in Iraq to Iraqis by Bush. You are
absolutely 100% spot-on.
He’s just know spoken at the Pentagon about “unspeakable
horrors” from which the Iraqis were, ahem, “liberated”. Gad. He is, indeed, a sociopath.
I appreciate our emails, yours and mine, back and forth, from a week/10 days ago. I want to believe that things will get better over there. But it is, indeed, like a wearying thing discarded to not beat one’s head against the wall over it.
Kind regards,
. . .
We will soon mark the 4000th American death, but there may already have been the one millionth Iraqi death. We don’t even try to count.
See Why we count the casualties.
this war. Their are no images on the TV, none in the papers. We don’t hear about the atrocities, there white washed. Were spoon fed stories about the surge working and were told that the casualties are ‘insurgents’ or terrorists or it’s a civil war. The coverage is so biased that this morning in a story of the protests I read this bit of propaganda from AP.
“The Iraq war has been unpopular both abroad and in the United States, although an Associated Press-Ipsos poll in December showed that growing numbers think the U.S. is making progress and will eventually be able to claim some success in Iraq.”
Winning or losing is how we view this not who is the enemy or the reality that the enemy is the Iraq people, or that this is a invasion and occupation. Watching John Adams, I kept thinking that as a people who were the insurgents, against another Empire with another mad king George, we have surely lost our way.
for those of us in the diaspora, on the strike, discouraged – whatever. It’s great to be able to read your essays again.
On today’s topic – so true. The dead are dead whatever country. And we are responsible for so many of the dead in that war who aren’t from our country…
Good to see everyone.