It’s impossible with words or numbers to portray with accuracy the horror that has become Iraq since our illegal March 19, 2003, attack. And this a point we have to emphasize — ours is not a war with Iraq — ours is an attack on Iraq; a country, now destroyed, that never threatened the United States.
Using Iraq percentages, let’s compare what the United States tolls would be had an external power launched a similar war and subsequent occupation on U.S. soil. We are looking at:
• 15 million dead citizens – 4 to 5 million more maimed and ruined.
• 30 million homeless – 15 million homeless living in squalid refugee camps on bordering countries
• An additional 14 million dead – 8 million of them children – if our occupation force had imposed similar homicidal sanctions on us as we had on Iraq through the ’90s.
• A destroyed infrastructure.
• Depleted uranium contamination that would cause a 300 percent spike in childhood cancers and render an area covering perhaps four states uninhabitable for eternity.
• 70 percent unemployment nationwide.
And in the midst of this unimaginable carnage our occupiers would be telling us that they are inflicting hell on Earth as a way to bring about “democracy.” The question begs answering – how would we the people respond to this kind of wholesale genocide?
The answer is simple — we’d become a force of “radical insurgents,” “enemy combatants” and “domestic terrorists” the likes of which the world had never seen. And we would not rest until the occupier had been vanquished. We need to get our troops out of Iraq.
Jim Sawyer
Edmonds
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