War is Peace

Most of y'all have probably either seen this article itself or at least linked to a post by one of the big time bloggers:

Operations by U.S. and multinational forces and Iraqi police are killing twice as many Iraqis - most of them civilians - as attacks by insurgents, according to statistics compiled by the Iraqi Health Ministry and obtained exclusively by Knight Ridder.

This could go a long way in explaining why our efforts in Iraq have met with so little support from the people we're ostensibly liberating. Since April, when George the Witless insisted "heads must roll," our efforts have done just that--killing roughly 3,500 Iraqi civilians, and injuring another 13,000 or so. Unfortunately, the dead and wounded in this count AREN'T insurgents. Think about that.

In real numbers, we've produced a 9/11 in Iraq since April. Proportionally, this would be the equivalent of almost a dozen 9/11's. And this figure does NOT include deaths in Iraq prior to April of 2004 (note: the link is inclusive). And these are likely conservative estimates.

This is a country that will have elections in four months?

And when Iraqi citizens aren't dodging democratic shells, they're forced to dodge plain old criminal bullets: homicides have dramatically increased in Baghdad over the course of the last year or so. Compare the number of gunshot deaths in Baghdad this year--3,000--with the number in Chicago in 2003--598 (more than any other US city, according to this website). Remember when Rumsfeld, and his lackeys in the media like Brit Hume suggested that Iraq was somehow safer than the United States? Funny how that's no longer touted.

Meanwhile, Dubya acts more like a cheerleader than a real leader--last week's Q and A with the press being example front and center. Check out Riverbend's take on Bush's claim that electricity has now been restored to prewar levels--or head back to Juan Cole's site for the truth about the UN election monitors and Iraqi police/security forces.

It's one thing to hope for the best. It's quite another thing to ignore the collapsing building that Iraq has become--and no amount of high handed rhetoric from the Bush campaign can take away from the fact that in Iraq we are hanging on by our fingernails.

Sure, we could opt for the genocide approach, and already there are rumblings that suggest this option is being considered. However, the question then becomes "how many are we willing to kill? Ten million? Twenty-five million? Neither Hitler nor Stalin was that bloodthirsty, and Saddam Hussein was a piker compared to them.

Thing would have to improve at this point if you even wanted to call Iraq a quagmire.