Current location:	Tradewinds Drive.
Current mood:	blank
Entry tags:	iraq, obama, palin, politics, war

What "victory" appearently means.
Finally did some research that I've been thinking about for a while. No one really seems to know how many Iraqi civilians have been killed since the U.S. invasion. According to Iraq Body Count, an independent estimate of civilian deaths, somewhere between 87 and 96 thousand Iraqis have been killed. The IBC admits on its website, however, that without definitive data, their estimate is most likely conservative at best. Another study conducted by Opinion Research Business suggests that the number might be as high as 1 million, 120 thousand.

So just for the sake of argument, let's take the ORB number. Add in the estimated number of Iraqis who have fled the country as refugees, according to this report at the beginning of the year by the UN Refugee Agency, as well as those Iraqis who have been "internally displaced" (or driven out of their homes into other parts of the country). The total number of Iraqis either killed or displaced by the war is then 5,120,000. In a country of 28 million people (CIA World Factbook), that means that roughly one out of every five Iraqis has been personally affected by this war.

I know I'm highballing it here, but think about it for a second. The conservatives - both inside of this administration and without - keep repeating to us that "the surge has worked," that "victory is near" - but they never answer the one key question I've been asking myself for the last several years. Imagine how you'd feel if one in five people in your life went missing. And then ask yourself - how would you feel about the nation that may not have responsible for every single death or displacement, but rather definitively started all of your troubles?

How could anyone humanly expect them to ever forgive us?