Today's Grim Tally

Starting at Today in Iraq, I see today's death toll for Iraqi civilians was at least 18, i.e., just a normal day in a conflict that, according to the "Geneva based Graduate Institute of International Studies" has killed upwards of 39,000 individuals. Matt also points out an interesting item in one Reuters story--quotes around the term "terrorist," implying an update to the old slogan "if they're dead, they're VC." In this case, there's the possibility that, in order to justify the action, the new operative term is "if they're dead, they're terrorist." Why am I not surprised?

Afghanistan isn't exactly looking good--but compared to Operation How Long Can We Keep Halliburton's Share Price Up, it's still a picnic in the park. Numbers like 39,000--or 25,000, according to the more conservative Iraq Body Count--or 100,000 "extra deaths," according to The Lancet (that figure includes crime victims, deaths due to insufficient hospital space, etc.) demonstrate quite clearly that "The New Iraq" is no better--and, indeed, quite a bit worse--than the old version. Or, as James Kunstler writes:

Under Saddam Hussein, Iraqis didn't dare voice opinions lest a gang of Baathist goons appeared at their doors in the dark of night to take them away for torture and execution. Under the current system, Iraqis don't dare cooperate with the government (or worse, their US military sponsors) lest a gang of Jihadi (or Sunni or former Baathist) goons show up at their door and drag them off to execution.

Last week, as I was leaving for vacation, I missed Riverbend's latest, but it underscores this point nicely:

E., a younger cousin, and I were sitting around in the living room, sprawled on the relatively cool tiled floor. The electricity had been out for 3 hours and we couldn’t turn on the air conditioner with the generator electricity we were getting...

We did not have Al-Qaeda in Iraq prior to the war. We didn’t know that sort of extremism. We didn’t have beheadings or the abduction of foreigners or religious intolerance. We actually pitied America and Americans when the Twin Towers went down and when news began leaking out about it being Muslim fundamentalists- possibly Arabs- we were outraged.

Now 9/11 is getting old. Now, 100,000+ Iraqi lives and 1700+ American lives later, it’s becoming difficult to summon up the same sort of sympathy as before...

Don’t Americans know that this vast wasteland of terror and terrorists otherwise known as ‘Abroad’ was home to the first civilizations and is home now to some of the most sophisticated, educated people in the region?

Don’t Americans realize that ‘abroad’ is a country full of people- men, women and children who are dying hourly? ‘Abroad’ is home for millions of us. It’s the place we were raised and the place we hope to raise our children- your field of war and terror.

The war was brought to us here, and now we have to watch the country disintegrate before our very eyes. We watch as towns are bombed and gunned down and evacuated of their people. We watch as friends and loved ones are detained, or killed or pressured out of the country with fear and intimidation...

Three decades of tyranny isn’t what bombed and burned buildings to the ground. It isn’t three decades of tyranny that destroyed the infrastructure with such things as “Shock and Awe” and various other tactics...prior to the war, we didn’t have sewage overflowing in the streets like we do now, and water cut off for days and days at a time. We certainly had more than the 8 hours of electricity daily. In several areas they aren’t even getting that much...

We’re so free, we often find ourselves prisoners of our homes, with roads cut off indefinitely and complete areas made inaccessible. We are so free to assemble that people now fear having gatherings because a large number of friends or family members may attract too much attention and provoke a raid by American or Iraqi forces.

As to Iraqi forces…There was too much to quote on the new Iraqi forces. He failed to mention that many of their members were formerly part of militias, and that many of them contributed to the looting and burning that swept over Iraq after the war and continued for weeks...

The forte of the new Iraqi National Guard? Raids and mass detentions. They have been learning well from the coalition. They sweep into areas, kick down doors, steal money, valuables, harass the females in the household and detain the men. The Iraqi security forces are so effective that a few weeks ago, they managed to kill a high-ranking police major in Falluja when he ran a red light, shooting him in the head as his car drove away.

Billmon, once again, delivers his own indispensible interpretation of recent events in the aptly titled post "The Devil's Flypaper"--where he rightly shreds professional morons like Fran Townsend (I've been trying to make the same point in any number of recent posts, but his style is a lot better than mine):

...what the flypaper theory reveals is the true attitude of our would-be liberators towards their Iraqi test subjects.

The Iraqi people may matter in the abstract -- that is, if they can be made to serve as symbols of the majestic benevolence of American power, or used as living props in the next White House photo op. But their actual suffering matters not a whit, not if it gets in the way of the increasingly absurd attempts of the Cheney administration and its supporters to rationalize the criminal mistakes that have brought us to this point.

Of course, the "Cheney administration's" rationalizations are why we're losing the war in the first place--Iraqis aren't stupid, and they're getting sick and tired of the kind of clusterfuck that is quite inconceivable here in the West, 9/11, Madrid, and London notwithstanding (for more on this, here's another Arthur Silber post from today--he recalled Juan Cole's post from last September reminding us of what things WOULD be like if the situation in Iraq was somehow transplanted here). The duplicity with which we treat the country--and its people--is a classic example of the thought processes behind at least some of the neocons (I'm thinking here of the pond scum populating sites like LGF, or the ongoing clown show at Powerline). They're the sorts of people who will INSIST that the world really, REALLY wants nothing more than an ice cold Coca-Cola--yet, they insist on conking people in the head over and over with the bottle in an attempt to prove that the soft drink actually IS cool and refreshing.

Which isn't exactly a good sales pitch to those on the conked end (although the one doing the conking might buy an extra bottle or two, both to replace the ones shattered--AND to relieve a powerful thirst that comes from such an exertion). In the end, though, you're left with not much more than a pile of shattered glass, and lots of angry folks...folks who might well decide that the problem is you, and simply want you to get the fuck out of there, no matter HOW good hearted you may be--and, to be perfectly honest, I've got my doubts about the good heartedness of the principles who authorized "the mission." "Good-heartedness" and "illegal invasion of a country to satisfy a politicized blood lust ritual" don't exactly go hand in hand.