150,000 iraqi dead. I wonder how it is that we haven’t truly kept track until now. The standard word on iraq is that this is not a war on the people of iraq – only the insurgents. But if that were truly the case we would mourn each civilian death there as we mourn our soldiers here…our civilians here. To not count or mourn the civilians there is to say without words that they are our enemy… that we do not care.
It isn’t that I don’t understand the difficulty in reporting such numbers in the midst of a war that is tearing the country to shreds,
“Accurate figures on the number of people who have died in the Iraq conflict have long been the subject of debate. Police and hospitals often give widely conflicting figures of those killed in major bombings. In addition, death figures are reported through multiple channels by government agencies that function with varying efficiency.” (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061110/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq)
I think my concern is that we seem to care so little. The idea of people being killed on their way to shops, to school, to sleep…the idea that in the daily progression of life people become unspoken and unseen causalities of an unpopular war. At the very least we should want to know.
Tags: soapbox