600.000 Iraqis Dead Due To Invasion

According to a recent study, more than 600,000 people in Iraq have been killed since the U.S. invaded in 2003 to lead Iraqis to peace and democracy.

That’s 20 times higher than the figure the White House has bandied about.

Many of the dead, say the team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists who conducted the study, would likely be alive today if the invasion had not occurred.

The researchers point the finger at post-Saddam violence as the cause of the deaths, according to news accounts.

Such a toll strikes home because the stunning number rivals Seattle’s population, 570,000.

But hey, oil prices just dropped, what, 30%?

Source

Iraqi Elections

Yesterday, the 30th of January, the first Iraqi election was held.

From the Kurdish north to the largely Shiite south, at thousands of polling stations, voters delivered a similar message: The elections represented their moment not only to seize the future, but also to reject a legacy of dictatorship and the bloodshed and hardship that have followed the U.S. invasion. – Source

My sincere congratulations to Iraq and it’s peoples. Whether or not this could have been done otherwise, I do not know. Regardless, it is positive to see such enthusiasm among the Iraqis. I hope the future is brighter from now on.

The Cost of War

Cost of War

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

– President Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 16, 1953

The cost of war shows the cost of the second Iraq war in numbers, estimated from Congressional appropriations. Seeing the counter tick away tax payers money, makes me wonder whether the war was really necessary. Well, not really no – I decided on that a while ago.

I vividly remember the day Iraq was invaded, I wrote this in my journal:

[...] The result, will be a new age of terror in the western world—a macro scale guerilla war against an enemy that believes in “preventive wars”. – Journal Entry, March 18th 2003 – “So it has come to this…”

I truly, honestly hoped I would be proven wrong.

Just recently, a sad record was set in Iraq; more than 1000 coalition military casualties. Estimates at Iraqi casualties tenfold this number.

Casualties, precision strikes gone awry, post-war security miscalculations, kidnappings. When seeing the news, I think to myself—what is wrong with this world? How could someone like Bush be elected? Oh wait, he wasn’t.

Now the latest US election polls show a dead race between Bush and The Other Guy. Am I missing something here? Isn’t this the man who just ordered thousands of young men and women to their deaths, not to mention tens of thousands of Iraqis?

What will happen if he gets a second term, and how would you be explain this to your children?