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Tuesday, September 9, 2008

The Iraqi Death Count

The number is shocking and sobering. I have recently included the small toll on the right column on this blog. I urge you to take the time to learn more through this organization on the horrors that the Repubican's have put this country, and our country through on this illegal invasion of this sovereign country.

For the accountability that Bush has continued to campaign for throughout his reign as ruler of this country, he and his cronies should be held accountable for the murders of these innocent Iraqi people, as well as, the murders of the Americans that went to fight in this illegal invasion. His premeditated actions should be prosecuted to the full extent of our laws as outlined in the book by Vincent Bugliosi, "The Prosecution of George W Bush for Murder".

It is at least 10 times greater than most estimates cited in the US media, yet it is based on a scientific study of violent Iraqi deaths caused by the U.S.-led invasion of March 2003.

That study, published in prestigious medical journal The Lancet, estimated that over 600,000 Iraqis had been killed as a result of the invasion as of July 2006. Iraqis have continued to be killed since then. The graphic above provides a rough daily update of this number based on a rate of increase derived from the Iraq Body Count. (See the complete explanation.)

The estimate that over a million Iraqis have died received independent confirmation from a prestigious British polling agency in September 2007. Opinion Research Business estimated that 1.2 million Iraqis have been killed violently since the US invasion.

This devastating human toll demands greater recognition. It eclipses the Rwandan genocide and our leaders are directly responsible. Little wonder they do not publicly cite it. Here is simple HTML code to post the counter to your website and help spread the word.



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The following comes from the mission statement of this organization:

...We have seen through the Iraq war that unnecessary military actions can undermine civil liberties and democracy at home, and can be used to remove pressing domestic issues from the political agenda to the detriment of the great majority.

During the Cold War, the United States spent trillions of dollars on an arms race with the USSR, as well as wars such as Korea and Vietnam. Yet we were able to create Medicare, Medicaid, and enact large enough increases in Social Security to drive the poverty rate among the elderly down from 35 percent in 1959 to less than 12 percent by the end of the era. But for a number of reasons—fiscal, economic, and political—our current circumstances are very different.

For example, at the height of the Vietnam War in 1968, the U.S. gross federal debt was 43.5 percent of our economy and falling. Today it is over 67 percent and rising. Maintaining our current foreign and military policy and possible large increases in military spending (for example if we have an arms race with China, whose economy will be larger than ours within a decade) will lead to serious declines in U.S. living standards.

U.S. foreign policy therefore threatens to impede—perhaps as never before—the country's economic and social progress. It has become extremely important to the lives of all Americans, and we cannot afford to leave it in the hands of the "experts" without influence from the public.

Eventually the United States must move towards a more multilateral approach to foreign relations—one that relies less on raw U.S. military and economic power and more on international law and treaties, co-operation, and diplomacy. Our goal is to accelerate this transition through education, organization, and mobilization of concerned citizens.

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