The 40% Solution Bush Considers His Legacy

(noon. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Something leaped from an internet page today, it was about Bush and his legacy, what he wants it to be or the grand delusion.

“I’d like to be a president (known) as somebody who liberated 50 million people and helped achieve peace;

I diary about Iraq off and on with disappointing results which seems to plague all of us who try to report what is happening there. Many people don’t believe the numbers as evidenced by comments on on another poster’s Iraq diary earlier this week. People actually believe the Surge has worked to the benefit of Iraqis and there is no genocide. For all of you who do not believe the numbers, remember, what you know of Iraq is filtered through the sociopathic delusions of George W. Bush. We don’t do body counts. Why would he mention dead and maimed Iraqis, the very fact we do not count tells you how trivial their lives are in the greater scheme of all things GWB.  George W. Bush has the deranged wish to be remembered for liberating Iraq from the grip of Saddam? Let him and all of us remember this …  

On the eve of our invasion, March 19, 2003 as been estimated at between 22 and 25 million men, women and children. The number aid agencies quote is just under 24 million. The numbers, the facts you will be reading about are gathered from UNICEF, the United Nations, WHO, various medical journals, relief organizations, governments of Syria and Jordan and eye witness reports on the ground. Whenever possible they have been verified with muiltiple sources. You can tell yourself they aren’t true, but the unfortunate reality is if anything they are under reported.

On March 19, 2003 this sovereign nation of 24 million had already endured the punishing bombings that destroyed much of the infrastructure and 12 years of an equally punishing embargo. An embargo that cost the lives of at least 2 million Iraqis from disease and malnutrition, 40% were children. Not only was Iraq no threat to us, they were being systematically reduced to a third world nation.

U.S. forces plan to drop more than 1,500 bombs and missiles across Iraq in the first 24 hours of its “shock and awe” campaign that began Friday, Pentagon officials said.

The initial bombings, Shock and Awe, the march to Baghdad, our smart bombs directed with surgical precision at military and government targets only. The Lancet reported their estimate of 100,000 dead in the early days of the war, many others have placed the estimate as high as 285,000. Thank god we used precision guided bombs targeting ONLY military and government facilities. 2,000 pound bombs designed to limit collateral damage in urban areas in deed. You can’t believe those numbers and yet there are thousands of pictures of civilian structures leveled, destroyed apartment buildings and whole blocks of homes leveled in virtually every city of any size in Iraq. Hospitals and emergency services were overwhelmed, bodies were routinely buried in trenches.

The civilian death toll is now estimated at 1.3 million and climbing. Oh the Surge you say has stopped all the violence directed at the civilian population, well not exactly. Not three months after the start of the Surge Sectarian Violence started increasing. Sectarian Violence is the polite word for ethnic cleansing, genocide. The talk is about how calm the neighborhoods in Baghdad, but a study of nighttime satellite images shows many of those neighborhoods are vacant. the occupants either killed or run off. Almost every place violence is down is because those areas are empty, or those still populated have already been cleansed of ethnic undesirables before the Surge started. Since the Surge we have been building more walls to isolate more neighborhoods in cities from Baghdad to Falluja. We have also increased our unmanned drones and missile attacks. In the past whole cities have been told to evacuate, this means literally going into the hills, it has contributed greatly to the numbers of displaced in country. All those left in the city are considered enemy combatants and killed on sight, women and children, the elderly, it matters not.  Now the Surge enables ethnic cleansing with more walled off neighborhoods. The insurgency is forced out, the neighborhood left defenseless and the Iraqi military or ethnic militia, ethnic vigilantes clean up ridding it of undesirables. The Surge has made Iraq safer for our troops but done little to improve safety or security for the average citizen.

There are tons of unexploded ordinance many with a failure rate as high as 40%. These pose a huge danger to the civilian population along with the 800 or more metric tons of DU weapons and waste dotting the landscape. Du will kill and maim millions more, generation after generations until the virtual end of time. Cancer rates and birth defects are already up dramatically. I point you to this excellent diary It Was Done in Your Name by clammyc. There are only two countries using DU weapons with impunity, the USA and UK.

We are the occupying nation and as such we have internationally recognized and well defined obligations to the citizens of Iraq, we have failed miserably in that duty. The condition of the infrastructure and services is substantially worse than when the war started.  We have allowed their women to be raped and murdered, their sacred sites destroyed and defiled, their antiquities plundered and robbed them of their future.

Today 3.5 Iraqis have fled the country to Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Iran, Lebanon and other European countries. We have taken less than 6,000 over 5 years. There are another 3 million homeless in Iraq, 2.6 million of them are children, many will not survive. 1.6 million maimed and burned and broken. This represents 40% of the population of Iraq and Bush’s real legacy.