IRAQ WAR - LOOKING GLASS NEWS | |
American Genocide In The Middle East: Three Million and Counting |
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by David Goodner CommonDreams.org Entered into the database on Thursday, August 09th, 2007 @ 19:58:28 MST |
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That brings the U.S. caused death count in the Middle East to over three million
people, and that’s not even counting fatalities in Afghanistan or Palestine. The Just Foreign Policy report is an update to two controversial studies published
by the prestigious British medical journal the Lancet. In 2003, the Lancet reported
over 100,000 excess deaths in Iraq were attributal to the U.S. invasion. That
study may be read here. In 2006, the Lancet updated their study and found over 600,000 excess deaths
in Iraq since the U.S. invasion. That study may be read here. The killing of Iraqis since the U.S. invasion includes violence caused by the
overwhelming air and ground power of U.S. military forces, mortalities caused
by the destruction of civilian infrastructure, and disappearances and murders
caused by sectarian conflict and internal power struggles among different Iraqi
factions. The report’s methodology is controversial because it bypasses the normal
model of death verification - which requires documenting each and every individual
body tallied by governments, hospitals, and morgues - and instead uses a model
first developed to estimate deaths caused by earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes,
and other natural disasters, where bodies are often never found. Many defenders of the occupation of Iraq claim that a withdrawal of U.S. forces
from Iraq would spark a genocide as sectarian conflict and civil war escalated
out of control. Indeed, violence may increase temporarily in the short term
following a U.S. withdrawal. Nature abhors a vacum and competition among Iraqi
factions for power may increase as they rush to fill the void. However, what is clear is that the U.S. invasion and continuing occupation
of Iraq in and of itself constitutes a kind of genocide. American economic sanctions
against Iraq in the 1990s killed one million civilians, according to a 2003
study by the Centre for Population Studies. And the U.S. funded both sides of
the Iran/Iraq war in the 1980’s, contributing to well over one million
Arab and Persian casualties, according to Farhang Rajaee in a 1993 article published
by the University of Florida titled The Iran-Iraq war: the politics of aggression. Now an additional 996,836 Iraqis have been killed since the U.S. invasion in
2003. The instability and sectarian conflict were stoked by this unilateral,
preemptive, and illegal invasion, and there is little hope of the internal conflict
ending while Iraq is under foreign military occupation. This situation is historically similar to the colonial period, where infighting
between African and other indigenous tribes around the globe increased because
of the havoc wreaked by colonial powers and their divide-and-conqueor strategies. Indeed, the seeds of conflict and disputes between ethnic groups, e.g. in Rwanda,
were planted by Western colonialism. People of color around the world reap what
we sow. The immediate future of Iraq looks grim, with solutions ranging from bad to
worse. Our only hope of ending the senseless violence is an unconditional and
immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq, followed by some kind of responsible
assistance by the U.N. and Arab peacekeeping forces. If the Iraqis have to go to civil war to sort out the mess that our government
has left them in, let them. It will eventually burn itself out like in Lebanon
and, without any further interference from the West besides reconstruction and
reparations, the Iraqis will be able to begin rebuilding their devastated country. |