Monday, April 13, 2015

Dar Jamail — Report Shows US Invasion, Occupation of Iraq Left 1 Million Dead

A recently published report has revealed that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq was responsible for the deaths of approximately 1 million Iraqis, which is 5 percent of the total population of the country. The report also tallies hundreds of thousands of casualties in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Authors of the report, titled "Body Count: Casualty Figures After 10 Years of the 'War on Terror,'" have told Truthout that other casualty reports, like the often-quoted Iraq Body Count (IBC), which has a high-end estimate at the time of this writing of 154,563, are far too low in their estimates, and that the real numbers reach "genocidal dimensions."
Truthout


Their fanatics versus our true believers. Can you tell the difference?

Air Force F-15 Wing Commander to Subordinates: USA Is "Doing the Lord's Work" in the Middle East
Mikey Weinstein, AlterNet

3 comments:

John said...

Apparently, the number could be as high as 2.7 million.

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2015/03/30/middle-east-holocaust-paul-craig-roberts/

"Their fanatics" are less murderous than our noble "true believers".

Unless you're a "new atheist" (that is, a useful idiot or an undercover neoconservative), a cheerleading nationalist goon interminably shouting "USA, USA, USA..." or "WE'RE NUMBER ONE!", you'll have realised that throwing numerous countries against a wall has the all too predictable effect of unleashing some very unpleasant reactionary forces, in this case religious reactionary madness.

Having tortured and murdered millions of people, in the alleged cause of tracking down a few mass murderers (Bin Laden and his gang of apocalyptic psychopaths), sanctimonious hypocrites and closet fascists in Europe and the US inform us that Muslims are barbarians, have alien beliefs rooted in the seventh century and can never be as civilised as us, oh so conveniently overlooking their own countries role in opening the gates of hell.



Matt Franko said...

FTR both the Lord and Paul had run-ins with soldiers/warriors and never told any of them to quit the military and join the peace movement. .

Tom Hickey said...

That's nonsense. Of course, I was outraged by Saddam and his regime and glad to see them go. Did I think that the US should invade Iraq to remove Saddam.

I am not naïve. The US does not go to war other than for it own interests. There is always a some quid pro quo. This was made clear to me as a military officer regarding Vietnam. Yes the US was "making the world safe for democracy," but really the issue was the domino theory and access to vital resources in the region that must be secured and denied to the enemy (Russia and China). This was not just some altruistic exercise in protecting the South Vietnamese from communism, although that's the way that it was represented to the public and the enlisted people.

At the time, I was a gung-ho officer who believed the BS. But after reading up on Vietnam and examining the realities, I got radicalized as I became aware of what was really happening, and it wasn't making the world safe for democracy. It was making the world safe for US business.

Anyone who couldn't see that the whole involvement of the US in the Middle East was about oil was blind to the obvious.

Although I was aware of the realities of war from Vietnam, I would have been OK with the US taking out Saddam surgically and just leaving. But of course, no one in their right mind thought that was going to happen, for several reasons.

First, the US couldn't just take out Saddam and leave without a replacement government and Iraq was hopelessly divided between a Shiite majority and Sunni minority. The Shiites would naturally align with Shiite Iran, as US enemy. So that would have to be prevented.

Secondly, the Iraqi oil deposits were estimated to be worth about 15 trillion on the market at that time. No way that the US was going to just walk away from that. What happened is well documented. When US troops marched into Baghdad, the first thing they did was to secure the oil ministry where the maps and records were kept.

I am not against liberalism — social, political and economic. I am against using liberalism as cover for illiberalism. I am also against trying to impose a US version of liberalism on others.

Now with over a million dead Iraqis, many more wounded and displaced, and the whole region in an uproar, the US failed to get the oil, Iran's influence in Iraq is greater than before, and militancy is growing and spreading. The US could just break Vietnam and leave, but it can't do that in the Middle East because of the geostrategic importance of the region.

The Iraq war was wrong ethically and it was a failure both militarily in failing to secure the territory and politically based on realpolitik, unless the objective is continued destabilization of the region in US interests —if we can't own it, then break it so no one can.