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2 Billboarding the Iraq
disaster By Anthony Arnove
As you read this, we're four years from
the moment the administration of US President
George W Bush launched its shock-and-awe assault
on Iraq, beginning 48 months of remarkable,
non-stop destruction of that country - and still
counting. It's an important moment for taking
stock of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Here is
a short rundown of some of what Bush's war and
occupation has wrought.
Nowhere on Earth
is there a worse refugee crisis than in Iraq
today. According to the
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees,
some 2 million Iraqis have fled their country and
are now scattered across everywhere from Jordan,
Syria, Turkey and Iran to London and Paris.
(Almost none have made it to the United States,
which has done nothing to address the refugee
crisis it created.)
Another 1.9 million
are estimated to be internally displaced persons,
driven from their homes and neighborhoods by the
US occupation and the vicious civil war it has
sparked. Add those figures up - and they're
getting worse by the day - and you have close to
16% of the Iraqi population uprooted. Add the dead
to the displaced, and that figure rises to nearly
one in five Iraqis. Let that sink in for a moment.
Basic foods and necessities, which even
Saddam Hussein's brutal regime managed to provide,
are now increasingly beyond the reach of ordinary
Iraqis, thanks to soaring inflation unleashed by
the occupation's destruction of the already shaky
Iraqi economy, cuts to state subsidies encouraged
by the International Monetary Fund and the
Coalition Provisional Authority, and the
disruption of the oil industry.
Prices of
vegetables, eggs, tea, cooking and heating oil,
gasoline and electricity have skyrocketed.
Unemployment is regularly estimated at somewhere
between 50% and 70%. One measure of the impact of
all this has been a significant rise in child
malnutrition, registered by the United Nations and
other organizations. Not surprisingly, access to
safe water and regular electricity remain well
below pre-invasion levels, which were already
disastrous after more than a decade of
comprehensive sanctions against, and periodic
bombing of, a country staggered by a catastrophic
war with Iran in the 1980s and the first Gulf War.
In an ongoing crisis, in which hundred of
thousands of Iraqis have already died, the past
few months have proved some of the bloodiest on
record. In October alone, more than 6,000
civilians were killed in Iraq, most in Baghdad,
where thousands of additional US troops had been
sent in August (in the first official "surge")
with the claim that they would restore order and
stability in the city.
In the end, they
only fueled more violence. These figures - and
they are generally considered undercounts - are
more than double the 2005 rate. Other things have
more or less doubled in the past years, including,
to name just two, the number of daily attacks on
US troops and the overall number of US soldiers
killed and wounded. United Nations special
investigator Manfred Nowak also notes that torture
"is totally out of hand" in Iraq: "The situation
is so bad many people say it is worse than it has
been in the times of Saddam Hussein."
Given the disaster that Iraq is today, you
could keep listing terrible numbers until your
mind was numb. But here's another way of putting
the past four years in context. In that same
period, there have in fact been a large number of
deaths in a distant land on the minds of many
people in the United States: Darfur. Since 2003,
according to UN estimates, some 200,000 have been
killed in the Darfur region of Sudan in a brutal
ethnic-cleansing campaign, and another 2 million
have been turned into refugees.
How would
you know this? Well, if you lived in New York
City, at least, you could hardly take a subway
ride without seeing an ad that reads: "400,000
dead. Millions uniting to save Darfur." The New
York Times has also regularly featured full-page
ads describing the "genocide" in Darfur and
calling for intervention there under "a chain of
command allowing necessary and timely military
action without approval from distant political or
civilian personnel".
In those same years,
according to the best estimate available, the
British medical journal The Lancet's door-to-door
study of Iraqi deaths, about 655,000 Iraqis had
died in war, occupation, and civil strife between
March 2003 and June 2006. (The study offers a
low-end possible figure on deaths of 392,000 and a
high-end figure of 943,000.) But you could travel
coast to coast in the United States without seeing
billboards, subway placards, full-page newspaper
ads, or the like for the Iraqi dead. And you
certainly
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