Thanks to The Wayback Machine for helping me recover these writings.
I have reached a state of total disgust with the ongoing war in Iraq. In particular I am bothered by the fact that few people I've met understand that there have been about three times as many innocent civilian deaths in Iraq as there were on 9/11. Many of those people even fail to realise that there was no connection between the terrorist act in New York and Washington, and Iraq. Is it any surprise that much of the world considers this war to be a worse act of terrorism than the one being used as an excuse to perpetrate it? While it's too late to prevent those deaths, we should not stand for the continuation or further extension of military action, in Iraq or other targets of opportunity, by the USA and its toadies (including Australia).
I refer all readers to Iraq Body Count.
I updated this three years later to say that there was no need to update it. Again another year after that.
I'm writing this the day after 32 people at Virginia Tech were killed by a gunman. Today is also the day that 157 people died in bombings in Baghdad. 32 is about average for a day in Baghdad these days. Who knows how many people died in Darfur today? I don't know, but almost certainly more than 32.
But the news is full of the personal stories of the 32. Why? Do we somehow think that these people are more important than those in Iraq or Sudan? One news story seemed to attach importance to the fact that these were bright University students. In Iraq, there were 20,000 doctors and modern hospitals under Saddam Hussein's regime. There are less than 8,000 doctors left, many hospitals are in ruins, and people die because they can't get treated for normal things, let alone the results of violence. This is one reason for the discrepancies between the numbers of people who have died as a direct consequence of violence, versus the statistical measures showing that the death rate is much higher. What happened to the (presumably bright) doctors? Many were kidnapped for ransom, or killed outright, along with teachers, engineers, and other bright people. Most have simply fled the country.
We worry about terrorism in the US, but we don't even know what true terrorism is. Terrorism is worrying constantly that your house will be hit by an errant bomb, or a well-aimed one that was meant for someone who happens to look like your son. Terrorism is being forced out of the home you own, then being forced out of the vacant one you were squatting in because you don't own it (even though the people who were forced out of it are squatting in your home). Terrorism is seeing your husband and children killed, your daughters raped, your house burned, and knowing that they'll be back next week.
The Virginia Tech slaughter was terrible, don't get me wrong. But it was random violence by a psychopath, not terrorism. Terrorism isn't just a crime against Americans.
I'm writing this on the fifth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. The news is full of Still President George W. Bush's self-congratulatory speech about the invasion, and other articles about the cost of the war, and how the majority of Americans now feel that the invasion was a mistake.
The thing that bothers me about almost all of this reporting is the cost accounting. The articles all mention the deaths of US troops (around 4,000) and monetary cost to the US (ranging from 1-3 teradollars). There is no mention of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have directly or indirectly lost their lives, health, or homes because of this invasion, or the economic cost to Iraq's citizens and government (for which I'm unable to find a reasonable estimate).
The reported fact that people are now opposed to the war carries with it the implicit assumption that they were once in favour of it. I certainly wasn't. I believe that the invasion was illegal, immoral and unjustified, and I believed that at the time. I won't lose sight of the fact that the US and its lackeys started a war of aggression without cause, and that the real victims are not the members of the "Coalition of the Willing".
Writing just after a failed car bomb attempt in Times Square, NY.
I wish I understood the qualitative difference between a car bomb, and a Hellfire missile. On the one hand, a car bomb is an act of terrorism. A bunch of people who are innocent get blown up at a surprising (to them) time. Or, in the case in the news today, they don't actually get blown up because the terrorist in question is incompetent. But in Pakistan, seemingly every other week, some bunch of innocent and surprised people are killed from a distance, either blown up by a hellfire missile, or shredded by gatling guns, some while attempting to aid people already wounded. Why isn't this also an act of terrorism?
Why is a car bomb "a weapon of mass destruction", but a far more effective 1000lb bomb dropped from a B-one isn't?
Is it just that we're more competent at killing people in general? Or the fact that they were not thought to be innocent at the time, although we often find out later that they were?
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Greg Rose (ggr@seer-grog.net)