A post on Iraq written in March, 2007. Thanks are due to Rajiv GV.
The unspeakable horror of Iraq
The whole of Iraq has been smelling of death for a long time now, but only as recently as last month did the US intelligence come out with a sensational report that said ‘elements of the conflict in Iraq’ could be described as civil war. Ayad Allawi, recruited by the CIA in 1992 and brought from UK to be made free Iraq’s first prime minister in 2003, and who promptly went back to the isles when he was replaced after two years, had asked during his regime itself: “If this is not civil war, I don’t know what is.”
The level of violence in Iraq has no historical precedent. It seems impossible to comprehend the scale of the tragedy. Researchers from the Johns Hopkins University in the US published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet last October an estimate of 654,965 civilian deaths as a consequence of the US-led invasion, the majority of them due to violence, the most common cause being gunfire. It followed a study undertaken in October 2003 that concluded about 100,000 civilians had been killed in Iraq since it was invaded in March 2003. Despite media criticism, epidemiologists in the field of conflict and public health supported the methodology and findings.
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