Thursday, October 12, 2006

655,000

655,000 more Iraqis have died since the invasion in March 2003 than would have died had the US not invaded. That's saying a hell of a lot. 655,000 people would be alive if Saddam Hussein were still in power. Saddam Hussein. He wasn't known in that part of the world for being a particularly nice guy, but 655,000 people would not be overcrowding the morgues (or lying buried in ditches) if he had not been deposed by this arrogant adminstration.

What's all this bullshit about bringing "freedom" to the Iraqi people? What kind of freedom is it when you have a damn good chance of dying either at the hands of American soldiers or at the hands of one of the many religious militias now roaming Iraq. It's definitely worth mentioning that there didn't used to be fundamentalist militias walking around in Baghdad chopping off heads.

And those Iraqis who are lucky enough not to be among the 655,000 (a far larger number than the 30,000 usually cited by the adminstration and their cohorts in the mainstream media) aren't much better off. The central government is weak. Maliki controls about as much of Iraq as Karzai does of Afghanistan. The electrical grid isn't reliable for more than a few hours every day. Many cities have no running water (I wonder just how much of that water is contaminated by all the depleted uranium shot into the air). The Interior Ministry is rife with corruption (guess where all those death squads are coming from).

And the US military is planning to stay there until 2010.

You Know You Live in DC When...

Last night I was watching Platoon during the last battle scene heard explosions coming from the TV and, I thought, from outside. I opened the curtain and looked outside. No smoke. No burning buildings. No destruction at all. I didn't expect anything to have happened at all, but it seems to be instinctual, even among generally level-headed people like myself who aren't preoccupied with terrorist attacks, to be hyper alert.

A few minutes later the rain began, accompanied by several more thunderclap "explosions". Good freaking God on a stick.