too many dead bodies, too sad to rant

by jackie sheeler on June 8, 2009

maybe as the murders grow the fanfare shrinks? i consider every death caused by war, whether intentionally or not, whether on target or off, whether military or civilian, to be a murder. war is nothing more than organized, government-sanctioned murder. every war.

i can clearly remember the hullaballoo made over the thousandth soldier killed in iraq, and the three thousandth.

but nary a whimper about 4k, and now we’re inching toward the 5,000 mark, with total US casualties as of this writing standing at 4,311. this excludes military casualties in afghanistan, presently at 700. maybe we’ve stopped marking the milestones because “surging” into afghanistan (where our troops should have gone, if in fact they should have gone anywhere at all, in the first place) has blurred the lines. or do we start again at zero there, ignoring the many thousands who died next door?

iraqi_medicalcombining casualties in iraq and afghanistan the US military death toll in the “war on terror” already tops 5,000.

and the acknowledged iraqi civilian death toll presently stands at just about 100,000. while other sources estimate over a million .

no one knows for sure. just as we’ll never know for sure how many people were killed in nazi concentration camps.

i can’t find an official count on afghani citizens, and in any case the country is in such disarray that nothing close to accuracy is possible. but i reviewed the news reports for this month and the total is about 200 reported civilian deaths. in one week.

if i put the 5,000 soldiers and the 3,000 world trade center workers, and the 500 non-US coalition casualties, and the 750 journalists and contractors altogether, the total still comes to less than 10% of the most conservative civilian body count. in iraq alone.

so the economy is collapsing and the globe is warming and swine flu is spreading and americans can never retire nor send their kids to college. we can’t count on anything any more and yes, it’s terrifying.

but not half as terrifying as it would be to live in iraq, surrounded by the poorly-supervised firepower of several thousand soldiers who do not speak your native tongue.

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