Geov Parrish (Working for Change): Now America Reacts

[Jack Rabbit]

From Working for Change
Dated Monday May 15

Now America reacts
Iraq didn't get us riled up -- but domestic spying did
By Geov Parrish

In October of 2001, the United Nations warned that due to a brutal combination of poverty, drought, dislocation, and long years of warfare, up to seven and a half million people were at risk of dying from starvation during Afghanistan’s coming months -- at precisely the time that the United States launched a post-9-11 war to displace the ruling Taliban. As the snows of late November approached, and with them a guaranteed death sentence for millions living in areas made impassable to aid trucks by winter snows, Washington refused to halt its bombing runs and Northern Alliance proxy war long enough for aid to resume. It was only through the serendipitous decision of the Taliban to withdraw to the mountains before winter’s onset that mass famine -- in effect, a genocidal invasion -- was averted.

Virtually nobody in America noticed the narrowly avoided holocaust.

On October 29, 2004, the British medical journal Lancet published a peer-reviewed article that made a compelling case that to date the U.S. invasion of Iraq had caused some 100,000 deaths over and above the civilian mortality that Iraq would have experienced in peacetime. Given that more time has passed since then than between the original U.S. invasion and the writing of the study, and that the insurgency has only intensified in that time, and that civil war has begun on top of it, and given the additional cumulative effects of war on public health and mortality, that number undoubtedly now exceeds 200,000 Iraqi deaths. The number continues to climb daily.

You can find the details each day, a few of them, in small type, on page A27, under “World: In Other News.”

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