I could not help it. Tears welled up in my eyes as I read and viewed stories and photos of the first snow fall in living memory in Baghdad. I saw pics of Iraqi adults and children with smiles as they witnessed the “white cotton” falling like rain over their war scape that is their city and land. I thought, we have brought these people so much hardship, so much death (151,000 according to the World Health Organization) and destruction and forced refugees in the millions, prisoner abuse (as the only American officer who was convicted of the abuse at Abu Graib scandal had it overturned), that here nature was creating one large White Zone, unifying all Iraqis for a moment. I couldn’t help it. I felt joy and tremendous sadness all at once for these people. We’ve got to get our troops out of there. Very, very, very, very soon.
If Hillary Clinton can have tears well up in explaining how the campaign is “personal”, I can have tears well up to show how personal the war and occupation in Iraq is for me, and for the rest of us.
[To see snow in Baghdad, go here.]
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m with ya Frank, I did the same thing.
I’m with you too Frank.
I teared up reading your words.
The figure I used for Iraqi deaths above is woefully short of other estimates, such as the estimated post-invasion death toll by 2006 at about 655,000 by John Hopkins researchers and published in the prestigious medical publication, Lancet.
See our post by Alexander Cockburn on that very issue, here, from January 13, 2008.
Over A Million Dead
The numbers are shocking and sobering, whether we accept the conservative 150,000 or 650,000 thousand dead estimate of the study by John Hopkins University. And those figurres are estimations of numbers dead up to 2006. Two more years of killing and bombing has JUST FOREIGN POLICY claiming that the current toll is well over a million Iraqis dead (based upon the John Hopkins study ) as a result of the war.
The John Hopkins study, published in prestigious medical journal “The Lancet, ” estimated that 650,000 Iraqis had been killed as a result of the invasion as of July 2006. And Iraqis have continued to be killed since then.
The JUST FOREIGN POLICY 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.