Riverbend writes:
“How is the situation in Falloojeh?” My father asked. We all knew the answer. It was terrible in Falloojeh and getting worse by day. They were constantly being bombarded with missiles and bombs. The city was in ruins. Families were gathering what they could and leaving. Houses were being demolished by tanks and planes. But the question had to be asked. ¹
Indeed. An estimated 100’000 Iraqis paid with their lives for a handfull of terrorists trained by a former CIA employee (Bin Laden) who killed about 3’000 Americans. Yeah, let’s ignore amputated hands, amputated legs, burned faces, screaming at night, cold sweat all the other stuff.
The survey indicated that violence accounted for most of the extra deaths seen since the invasion, and that air strikes from coalition forces caused most of the violent deaths, the researchers said.
“Most individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children,” they added. ²
Since so many Americans seem to have turned into Christian fundamentalists fighting a war nobody else understands, let me use some Christian imagery here. I wonder what God Allmighty will say when he sees all the 300 million current citizens of the United States, when he looks at the 100 million people eligible to vote, some who voted, some for Bush, some for the “other” Bush, some who didn’t care to say that they didn’t want any Bush at all. Will he say that on balance, they killed 100’000 people in violation of his explicit orders? Or will God remember his other rule about an eye for an eye, and accuse the Americans of only 97’000 people killed? How much murder per person is that? Let me get a calculator for that... For the 100 million, that will be a little less than 0.001 of a murder. How much punishment for murder? How much punishment for 0.001 of a murder? Will God forgive if you voted for Kerry? Will God forgive if you just sent the soldiers without killing anybody yourself? Will God forgive if you just pressed the button, just made weapons for a living, just trained killers back home? Was it just a job? Will it make a difference? Will the 1’000 Americans and British who died in Iraq make up for some of the deaths? So maybe God will only consider 96’000 people killed.
The problem is similar to what ClayShirky says in a paper of his:
Netiquette was a proposed set of behaviors that assumed that flaming was caused by (who else?) individual users. If you could explain to each user what was wrong with flaming, all users would stop. This mostly didn’t work. The problem was simple – the people who didn’t know netiquette needed it most. They were also the people least likely to care about the opinion of others, and thus couldn’t be easily convinced to adhere to its tenets. ³
So I guess my posts on this subject are best classified as “venting”. Sorry for the noise.
Oh, and yes I am an atheist. ;)
#Iraq