4000 dead Americans (and two ugly ones)

Huffington Post offers this photo montage of the 4000 U.S. soldiers who have died in Iraq

Confused

Quotes from George Bush's speech today which confuse me. Two things most of all confuse me: 1. What does George Bush *mean* when he refers to the already accomplished "liberation of Iraq". and 2. Does he refer to so many crimes of Saddam which match up so perfectly well with crimes of the U.S. because he actually doesn't *see* the similarities, or does he see and ignore?

• The answers are clear to me
• The men and women who crossed into Iraq 5 years ago ... rescued millions from unspeakable horrors
• Operation Iraqi freedom was a remarkable display of military effectiveness.
• Our troops engaged in pitched battle with ... death squads that obeyed neither the conventions of war nor the dictates of conscience
• Aided by the most effective and precise air campaign in history ...
• New chapters to the story of American military heroism
• The liberation of Iraq took incredible skill and amazing courage--the speed, precision, and brilliant execution of the campaign will be studied by military historians for decades to come.
• Because we acted,
• S. H. no longer fills fields with remains of innocent men women and children
• S's torture chambers and rape rooms have been closed for good
• S's regime is no longer invading it's neighbors and attacking them with chemical weapons.
• (Hmmmm. This sounds like a list of things the U.S. has done since the invasion)

He seems to have a profoundly different understanding of Al Qaeda's strategy in Iraq than my own understanding. My understanding of their strategy was to continue to train their members on the cheap, treasure wise, while this war pushes the U.S. into a perhaps un-recoverable economic tailspin. Did I miss something?

Five years later

Today marks the five year anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq on March 19th, 2003--an invasion based on the premise that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, a premise which turned out to be false.

This blog is participating in a blogswarm against the war. See who else is participating here

Costs of the War include

• At least 4000 U.S. soldiers' lives lost
• Over a million Iraqi lives lost (how's that for proportionality)
  
• A final dollar cost to the U.S. of 3 Trillion dollars
• Oil has hit $111/barrel
• U.S. soldiers have participated in, even led, war crimes and atrocities
• Not to mention Abu Ghraib, an event which has mostly been forgotten by the U.S. populace, but which continues to receive regular media attention in the Muslim world
  
• 16% of U.S. soldiers who have served in Iraq are returning from the devastating psychological illness called Combat Related PTSD, more than the 15% rate from the Vietnam War. Although it's hard to get a handle on how many total soldiers have served in Iraq, the number is probably over a million, which means at least 160,000 soldiers suffering from PTSD
• Here's a devastating statistic: 120 Iraq and Vietnam War vets are committing suicide *every week*!
  
• World opinion of the U.S. has gone down and down

Pro's of the war include:

... well ... Bush says it's all been worth it, somehow

March 19 Iraq War Blogswarm

Make sure that you join the March 19 Blogswarm against the Iraq War. Suggestions/Ideas for writing can be found over on their site.

What your $3 Billion a week is buying you, part 259

A new study by a nobel prize winning economist says the Iraq War is costing the U.S. $12 Billion/month, with the final price tag somewhere between $1.7 Trillion and $2.7 Trillion, or more.

Meanwhile, here's what we get this week for our $3 Billion:

Last 7 days in Iraq: 384 civilians dead

But as President Bush and his friend 71 year old John McCain says "The surge is working"

(that is to say "We can successfully use violence to undermine violence")

Yesterday

Wednesday:
Bahgdad: US forces fire on minibus, kill 4,
Shaab; US patrol fires on civilian vehicles, kills 2,

I'm a bus rider myself.

Iraq: U.S. forces have killed 75 cvilians in Iraq so far in November, including 2 children.

The American populace continues to more or less not give a flying rat's ass.

Can someone please explain to me how the president of the U.S. can be attending so called "peace talks" in the middle east at the same time during which he is commander in chief of soldiers of an occupying army which is killing civilians in the middle east? I don't get that.

Weekly Iraq roundup

This is what Baghdad looks like. I'm guessing the populace is used to it, after 4 years. In fact, I'm guess these images are going to be in their heads 'til they die.

This week in U.S. occupied Iraq:

• The U.S. spent 2 Billion Dollars on our ongoing occupation.
• 237 civilians killed, including:
• Baiji: US forces kill 4 civilians inside their car. October 18.
• Diwaniya: multi-national headquarters come under mortar attack, clashes between militia and multi-national forces ensue, followed by US shelling -5 civilians killed, 2 of them children under the age of 3. October 15.
• Riyadh: 3 members of Awakening Council die in US shelling. October 14.
• Total violent civilian deaths in Baghdad this week: 68
  
  All information from Iraq Body Count

Truth is, I caught myself this week gradually making this less real. To witness: I said to myself and others at least 3 different times this week, with a grin on my face, "Hey, could be worse, we could be in Baghdad." In the interest of counteracting this tendency:

Question to consider: With whom are the 160,000 U.S. troops deployed in Iraq having sex? And what are the long term consequences of the the answers to this question?

The rate of violent deaths per capita in Iraq over the last 4 years is approximately 4 times higher than that in the United States. so what would it look like in Seattle, for instance, if we had 4 times as many violent deaths? Scary, I guess.

Note to self: Take steps to start learning Arabic. What advantage did white americans who spoke vietnamese have in the 1960/1970's have in terms of helping to end the war?

Here's a really enlightening round table discussion about Iraq, four years after invasion

Baghdad has a population of somewhere between approx. 6-7 million. Other similar sized cities: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Santiago Chile.

A couple images:
View Larger Map

what you are getting for $US 8 Billion/month

what you are getting for $US 8 Billion/month. Part 54.

From Iraq Body Count.
42 Iraqi civilians have been killed by US forces so far in October -16 of them children.
108 Iraqi civilians were killed by Americans (military and private contractors) in September -including 7 children and a 90-year-old man.
103 civilians were killed by US forces in August, including 6 children.
In July, US forces killed 179 -17 children among them.

Just in case you forgot.

This week in Iraq under American occupation

302 dead civilians.

Including:

• Diwaniya: 12-year-old son and elderly father of Mahdi army leader killed during US/Iraqi raid on their house.
• Baghdad: 2 civilians reported killed during US/Iraqi raid, one of them a 5-year-old boy
• Baquba: 3 family members shot dead in their car
• Baquba: 6-year-old boy killed by sniper fire.

Cost to U.S. taxpayers for this seven days of occupation: 1.9 Billion dollars

question: if you are living in the united states, feel relatively safe from active violence, have food to eat, have a place to sleep, use the postal service, the roads, the garbage service, have water to drink, have cash to buy an espresso drink, etc. etc., then what does justice look like in terms of your relationship with the friends and family of the 302 people mentioned above (not to mention those of the other 734,567)?

I have no idea about the answer to this question, but it strikes me that the answer is potentially rather frightening. and Rachel adds this as well

American mercenaries

Blackwater USA

Some Iraqis didn't seem to care which version was correct. For them, the
real problem is that their country is occupied by foreigners — whether soldiers
or civilians.
"Our problem is rooted in the occupation, regardless of
whether it's by security firms or foreign troops," a Baghdad resident, who have
his name only as Abu Ahmed, told Associated Press Television News. "This is one
of the grave consequences of the occupation."

This week in Iraq

Iraq body count has reinstated thier weekly roundup feature.

This last week, ending on Wednesday: 383 dead, including:

• child shot dead while riding in car with father.
• US air strike kills 7 family members in their house -Mohammed Abdul Wahad, his wife and their 5 children aged 4-8 years. According to the US military, they dropped the bomb on the house when gunmen they had been fighting ran inside.
• US shelling of two residential areas kills 7
• US air strike kills 4 policemen
• gunmen attack house, kill woman and her 5 children.

If you are American, $2 Billion of your tax dollars went to help pay for maintaining this situation last week.

Which work out to an average of ... (300 million of us ... dividing ....) $7 per person. or enough for each of us to double the wages of one of the 1 billion people in the world who are living on $1 per day or less.

Try not to think about it. Maybe it will just go away or get better by itself.

what you can buy these days for $442 Billion

Here's what $442 Billion buys

"Some progress, and some encouraging signs" ... (not to mention 731,000 dead bodies)

Oh well. Bummer

The weekly roundup in Iraq

I really think if you are American, you should oughtta read this (there, I attempted to put an oughty-should on you! Consider yourself notified). Even if you average out to every man,woman, and child, as an American you've spent nearly $1500 to help bring about this state of things in Iraq. And that's more than any single one of the lower 2 billion income earners in the world earns in 2 years.

Again, stolen from Lily Hamourtziadou

Fear

At Baghdad’s Yarmouk hospital, a man and his wife, both injured in a bomb attack that killed 15 people in Amil, were lying on stretchers in the emergency room. The man, whose right foot had been amputated, screamed at his wife, who had shrapnel wounds and was unconscious: ‘Fatima! Where are the kids, Fatima?’ (LA Times, 30 May).

Iraqis live in a fear few of us can even imagine, a fear even fewer of us will ever experience. Police and morgue officials giving information on daily casualties, do so in anonymity, fearing they could be targeted by militants. Unclaimed and unidentified bodies fill the morgues every month, their relatives too frightened to identify and claim the bodies. They join thousands of others buried in mass graves.

In May 2,770 civilians were killed in Iraq, an average of 89 a day. The violence is up from April, when there were 2,590 reported civilian deaths, an average of 86 a day; in March the toll was 2,731, an average of 88 a day.

This past week alone, 680 civilian lives were snuffed out in violent attacks.

On Monday 28 May 125 die, 100 of them in Baghdad. The dead include 14 policemen, a college student, a newspaper editor and a translator.

On Tuesday 29 May, the worst day of the week, 150 lose their lives. Two car bombs kill 49 people in Baghdad, a journalist is killed by gunmen, together with 7 members of his family near Falluja, and 78 bodies are found in Baghdad, Suwayra, Baquba, Balad, Toz and Abu Tomar.

On Wednesday 30 May over 80 civilians die. Among the dead, 2 elderly people sleeping on the roof of their homes (common in Iraq during the summer, to escape the intense heat) killed by a US helicopter during an air raid over Sadr City. Militia raids in Amil, Baghdad, kill 21 Sunni men. Iraqi TV, Al-Iraqiya, reports that Sadr City residents call upon officials to intervene to stop the raids and shelling of the city by the Multinational Forces. ‘Citizens in the city affirmed that military operations in their city cause a large number of innocent casualties…The evenings are filled with the sounds of lethal ammunitions and terrifying raids. The residents do not sleep quietly or safely. No single day passes without the Multinational Force raiding and attacking several houses and causing the martyrdom and wounding of dozens of innocent people.’ (Al-Iraqiya 1 June)

Around 90 die on Thursday 31 May. In the worst incident, a suicide bomber kills 30 in a police recruitment centre in Falluja. Gunmen kill a lecturer in Fine Arts in Basra, while an Associated Press reporter is shot dead in Baghdad. The 26-year-old cameraman leaves a wife 8-months pregnant with their first child. 45 bodies are found in 7 cities, and 14 unidentified bodies are buried in Kirkuk.

Around 75 die on Friday 1 June. The dead include 3 children (7, 9 and 11 years of age) killed as a US tank fires on suspected insurgents near Falluja. The insurgents, who were thought to be planting a bomb, escape. Another US raid on Sadr City kills 2, one of them an ambulance driver. Gunmen kill 7 at a fake checkpoint in Khalis, and 33 bodies are found in Baghdad, Baquba and Khalis.

On the quietest day of the week, Saturday 2 June, 57 civilians die. Among them an Imam and a Sheikh, shot dead in Baghdad, and 8 killed by mortars in Fadhil, Baghdad –one of them a child. Police find 40 bodies in 5 cities. More than 2,000 people march the streets of Shula, a Shiite district in Baghdad, to demand improvements in basic services like electricity and water. The demonstrators denounce the United States, Israel and the US-backed Iraqi government.

On Sunday 3 June the dead exceed 100. A car bomb kills 10 in a market in Balad Ruz, gunmen kill 5 at a fake checkpoint near Baquba, US air strikes kill 5 in Sadr City and 2 in Dhilu’iya, while gunmen shoot dead a Catholic priest, 31-year-old Father Ragheed Ganni, and 3 deacons in Mosul. Police find 64 bodies in 6 cities. Another 41 unclaimed bodies are buried in Kirkuk.

Meanwhile, General Raymond Odierno, the number 2 head of US forces in Iraq, has stated that ‘the surge is not yet fully in place, and it will take time and patience before we begin to realise its effects.’ In fact, ‘we could be in Iraq for 50 years’ according to US Defence Secretary Robert Gates. The sad truth is that the US will never leave Iraq. Despite the massive civilian death toll, despite the massive rise of terrorism, despite the rapidly increasing deaths of American soldiers.
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani has apologised for the deaths of American troops in his country. After a month when 2,770 Iraqi civilians die, the Iraqi President apologises for the deaths of 126 American soldiers. He continues: ‘Everyone in Iraq knows that…the United States saved the Iraqi people…the majority of people are for having the American Army.’ He really speaks for himself, as neither he nor anyone else in the Iraqi government would survive for one day if the US army that backs them withdrew from Iraq.

Weekly roundup of civilian deaths in Iraq under U.S. occupation

stolen from Lily.

The violence this week has caused over 600 civilian deaths.

More than 80 die on Monday 21 May. Gunmen kill 7 inside a minibus near Hibhib, one of them a child, while US forces shoot dead a civilian in Ishaqi, after their patrol is hit by a roadside bomb. In Baghdad, Falluja and Baquba, police find 51 bound and tortured bodies.

(Read more ...)

On Tuesday 22 May 125 lose their lives. In the day’s largest incident, a car bomb blows up 25 people, including 3 children, in Amil, Baghdad. Gunmen shoot dead 8 college students in Baghdad, while mortars kill another 4 students in Adhamiya, Baghdad. Near Baquba, gunmen kill 6 people, mother, father and 4 children, while US forces kill 4 civilians in two different incidents in Baghdad and Mosul. In Albu Ubaid, east of Ramadi, a suicide bomber enters a house and blows up 10 members of the same family. Police find 46 bodies in 5 cities, most of them in Baghdad.

On Wednesday 23 May 110 die, including 20 killed by a suicide bomber in a café in Mandali, 3 children killed by mortars in Khan Bani Saad, a primary school pupil killed when mortars fall on his school in Mahmudiya, and 8 policemen. 49 bodies are found in 6 cities, most of them in Baghdad.

Around 100 die on Thursday 24 May, among them 35 people who die when a car bomb explodes during a funeral in Falluja. Gunmen set up a fake checkpoint and shoot dead 11 people inside a minibus when it stops. After planting a bomb among the bodies, they blow up another 2 who come to the scene. 2 more civilians are shot dead by US forces, while a truck driver is killed by Blackwater security contractors in Baghdad. Also, 27 bodies are found, most of them in Baghdad.

On the quietest day of the week, 58 die on Friday 25 May. In an attack on Aswad village, gunmen kill 17 people, while mortars kill 2 children in Baghdad. Police find 26 bodies, mostly in Baghdad. In Kufa, Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr calls for all Iraqis to fight the occupying forces united.

Another 60 civilians are killed on Saturday 26 May. In an air raid over Sadr City, Baghdad, US planes kill up to 5 people. According to several reports and witnesses, as well as Iraqi officials, the dead are civilian drivers queuing in their cars to buy petrol. 11 cars are destroyed in the raid. During another air strike by British forces, up to 8 civilians are reported killed in Basra. Police find 27 bodies, mostly in Baghdad.

Around 75 are killed on Sunday 27 May. Among the victims, a famous Iraqi calligrapher shot dead in Baghdad, a child blown up by a car bomb in Falluja, 2 farmers, a head of council and his assistant, and 3 women and a child killed by mortars in Baghdad. In Baghdad police find 44 bodies, tortured and shot in the head.


This is what the pursuit of self-interest by a powerful state has led to: the total devastation of a country and its people. The collapse of Iraq: a country that had no terrorists before its invasion, a country that never attacked America. The goal has been achieved: the US is in Iraq and it will stay there to protect its interests. Yet too much has been lost on both sides to make this a sweet victory..

illegal t-shirts

Ran across these t-shirst on the web today--they're selling for $22 here. They actually contain a printed list on front and back of 3155 U.S. troops who had died in Iraq through February 2007.

Apparently Lousiana and Texas have enacted laws outlawing the commercial use of the names of the war dead without their families' permission, and Arizon, Florida, and Texas have similar bills close to being enacted.

The families of some of the soldiers who have died have expressed chagrin at such a use of their deceased loved ones' names.

The guy selling the shirts, Dan Frazier, says they are expensive to produce and he is using them to make a political statement about the enormous cost of the Iraq War. He says his use of the names is constitutionally protected.

Here's a recentish article about the subject

What do you think? Should governments stop the production and sale of such shirts? How does the families' chagrin over these shirts weigh up against, for instance, the weight of tens of thousands of civilians who are likely to die in Iraq over the next year under U.S. occupation? What does it mean that while legislators and the families of dead soldiers are arguing over "exploitation" of the names of Americans who have died in Iraq, with their $3 starbucks lattes firmly in hand as they drive their $30,000 SUV's from meeting to meeting, children as well as adults in Baghdad have to deal with an amazingly high sense of physical insecurity, a third of the world's population is living on $2/day or less, and 30,000 children will die today from lack of clean water and sufficient calories? Would you wear one of these? I would, except I can't afford one right at the moment =) Your thoughts?

Irony again

70023

reported civilian deaths in Iraq since U.S. invasion and occupation in 2003 (as of May 21, 2007)

Near the top of Google's headlines today was this story. It begins

Washington - The United States urged Israel Monday to avoid harming civilians as it conducts military attacks against Hamas in the Gaza Strip but stood behind the Jewish state's right to defend itself.

US State Department Sean McCormack said Israel should 'take all possible actions' to prevent civilian casualties and damage to Palestinian infrastructure and to ensure the Israeli-Palestinian peace process stays on track.

This from the nation who *coined* the euphemism "collateral damage"

A quote from Charlie Clements from April 2003--one month pre-invasion

I am a public health physician. In January I participated in a ten-day emergency mission to Iraq, sponsored by the Brooklyn-based Center for Economic and Social Rights. Our task was to assess the potential consequences to Iraqi civilians of a war on Iraq. As a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy and a Vietnam veteran, I have some understanding of the potential consequences of the air war we are about to unleash on Iraq as a prelude to an invasion by U.S. troops. The Pentagon will refer to the innocent victims of this assault as "collateral damage," but I've seen their faces, and I think they should have another name. One that occurs to me is "children," since half the population of Iraq is under 18 years old.

and from iraqbodycount

This is an ongoing human security project which maintains and updates the world’s only independent and comprehensive public database of media-reported civilian deaths in Iraq that have resulted from the 2003 military intervention by the USA and its allies. The count includes civilian deaths caused by coalition military action and by military or paramilitary responses to the coalition presence (e.g. insurgent and terrorist attacks). It also includes excess civilian deaths caused by criminal action resulting from the breakdown in law and order which followed the coalition invasion.

And this, attributed to Jesus

Love your civilian enemies, and try to avoid killing them while you are bombing your military enemies

620 Civilian deaths in Iraq under U.S. occupation this week

Stolen from Lily Hamourtziadou.

This week the nameless and faceless Iraqi civilians who died exceeded 620.

Over 80 die on Monday 14 May, half of them in Baghdad. US troops kill an Iraqi policeman in Abu Dsheer in Baghdad; US forces also kill a child when they open fire on a house near Dujail. In a gun battle between British forces and gunmen in Basra 2 students are killed, caught in the crossfire.

Over 100 die on Tuesday 15 May, including 45 killed by a suicide truck bomb in a market in Abu Saida, 7 killed by bombs in al-Tayaran square, Baghdad, and 4 by mortar fire in Ur, Baghdad. Police find 23 bodies in Baghdad, Suwayra and Baquba. In Karbala, 91 unidentified bodies are buried in a mass grave.

Around 90 die on Wednesday 16 May. Among them 9 civilians killed in clashes in Nasiriya, 2 by mortars in Baghdad’s Green Zone, while a child is shot dead by Iraqi police trying to break up a protest. In Baghdad 30 bodies are found.

On Thursday 17 May 80 civilians lose their lives, half of them in Baghdad. Among the victims 2 journalists working for ABC news, ambushed and shot dead in Baghdad, and 30 bodies found bound and tortured in Baghdad. More bodies are found in Baquba, Kirkuk, Latifiya and Karma.

On Friday 18 May the civilian death toll is 90. A US patrol, firing randomly, shoots dead 2 civilians in Baghdad, after a roadside bomb explodes next to them. Gunmen shoot dead 3 lorry drivers near Kirkuk, a suicide bomber kills 3 policemen at a checkpoint in Jarf al-Sakhr, police find 25 bodies in Baghdad, 30 in Diyala, 5 in Hilla and 5 in Kut. All tortured and shot, one of them a 12-year-old child.

Over 100 die on Saturday 19 May. In a Kurdish Shiite village gunmen shoot dead 15 men and 1 woman, 15 are killed in various incidents in Baghdad, 3 children are blown up by a bomb in Nassiriya, and police find 60 bodies in Baghdad, Mosul, Falluja, Basra, Hilla, Khalis and Muradiya.

Around 70 die on Sunday 20 May, half of them in Baghdad.

More than 60 died by violence in Iraq yesterday

Two quotes from this article

More than 60 people were killed and dozens wounded in mortar strikes, drive-by shootings, roadside explosions, suicide bombings and other violent attacks in Iraq on Thursday, as a study warned that the country was close to becoming a “failed state.”


In Washington, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has announced his retirement amid declining British support for the war in Iraq, said at the White House on Thursday that if he could do it all over again, he would still stand with President Bush and back the war. “The forces we are fighting in Iraq,” he said of al-Qaida and Iranian-backed terrorists, “are the same forces we are fighting everywhere.”

And from Jesus

Fight your enemies

God in a Foxhole?

I wrote this post for the other blog I co-host, Justiceandcompassion.com. I'm closing comments on this post and inviting you to post any comments you have over there. =)

Newsweek ran an insightful article this last week about how the war in Iraq is causing some U.S. soldiers to lose their Christian faith. The piece centers on the story of army chaplain Roger Benimoff, who shared with Newsweek the personal journal he kept through two deployments in Iraq and his current service as a chaplain at Walter Reed Medical Center. Roger has gone through what sounds like quite a wrenching of his faith, as he had to perform more memorial services than regular chapel services. He saw that the reality of war forced many soldiers to reevaluate the faith they had embraced back in the relative wealth and security of the United States.

Some quotes:

[He] begins his time in Iraq brimming with faith and a sense of devotion that carries him into a second tour. "My heart is filled with prayer and God is giving me a discerning spirit," he writes at the start of that later deployment. "The spiritual battle I am engaged in is a minute-by-minute war." He is "on fire for God."Countless soldiers—not just chaplains—have struggled with how to reconcile a God of love with a God who allows the terror of conflict. For centuries theologians and philosophers have grappled with ideas of "just war": thou shalt not kill, but under certain conditions—to prevent wider bloodshed and suffering—slaughter by armies is acceptable.

this week in U.S. occupied Iraq

It seems to me that's it's important to keep this in front of our eyes, since after all, we are spending something like US$200 million/minute to (presumably) accomplish something over there.

So last week:

• An additional 585 civilian deaths. That breaks down to 140 on Monday, 60 on Tuesday, 90 on Wednesday, 50 on Thursday 60 on Friday, 45 on Saturday, and 140 more on Sunday) (Try not to think about the fact that every one of these has a name, a father, a mother, friends, ..... etc.)
• The 585 doesn't include the 2 newborns who died in their incubators in Samarra due to a power outage and the fact that they couldn't be transferred to another hospital because security measures prevented ambulances from entering or leaving the city. (by the way, it's count discrepancies like these which account for the difference between Iraq body count's 69000 figure and John Hopkins University 690,000 figure)
• The Tuesday total includes 7 primary school children killed by a U.S. Helicopter while shelling their primary school in Al Nedawat village.

(just as an aside, how would you like to have one of these fuckers shooting at your school? Your children's school? I wonder why we don't deal with terorrist school shooters in this country by dispatching longbow apaches? When I was young, I used to thing these were kewl. Don't even pay attention to the weapons mounted on the side. The really scary one is the M230 30 mm chain gun under the fuselage. It can shoot 625 rounds per minute. But the really crazy thing is the honeywell (an evil corporation if ever there was one!) M142 IHADSS. That's for "Integrated Helmet and Display Sight System". What it boils down to is that the chain gun can be hooked up to the helmet, on the head of the pilot, in such a way that the chain gun points at what the pilot looks at. I've seen this in operation, and it's pretty freaking scary. I used to think it was kewl. I guess I grew up a little.)

• News that mortality of children under 5 has risen 150% since the original 1990 invasion, from 50/1000 to 125/1000. (Don't think too much about that, you might get depressed)

Follow the weekly roundup of Iraq's devastaion with Lily Hamourtziadou