1115.org

We Americans tend to focus exclusively on ourselves. And critics of the Iraq war, both in the traditional media and in blogs, play to that sentiment. So we are reminded constantly of the number of American soldiers killed. Or the billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money that have been poured down the Iraq war drain. But what about the cost borne by Iraqis? In that recent poll, when 82% of Iraqis polled said they were “strongly opposed” to the presence of American and British troops, or when less than 1% of said they believed that American and British forces were responsible for any improvement in security, those statistics didn’t just come out of nowhere.

Forget the number of Iraqi soldiers killed in the “war” phase of the conflict. Forget the number of insurgents killed in the “post-war” phase of the conflict. As of October 25th, the Iraq Body Count Database estimated the number of civilian Iraqi deaths as:

Reported Minimum: 26,690
Reported Maximum: 30,051

With the CIA estimating the Iraqi population at 26 million, that’s 1 in every 1000 people.

Why are these numbers not in the American consciousness too?

How many Iraqi citizens do you think personally knew at least one civilian who was killed?

And that is surely the way we need to think about it. They didn’t just die. They were killed. In our name, yours and mine. And for what? Because we went to war on trumped up charges, and the Bush administration would rather kill 2,000 of ours and 26,000 of theirs than admit that?

If you were an Iraqi how would you feel about that? Really hard to imagine, isn’t it?