Iraq Five Years Later

A truthful inside view from IRAQ 5 years later with 1.1 Million Dead Iraqi civilians and over 4,000 dead U.S. Soliders see the truth on what it is like living day to day in IRAQ that the MAINSTREAM Media does not want you to see!
http://firedoglake.com/2008/03/23/what-5-years-buy/
Or should we say 17 years as Col. Daniel Smith, U.S. Army (Ret.) reminds us this week? However we count this anniversary, we finish this week approaching the 4,000 mark for dead American soldiers. How many Iraqis have died during our invasion and subjugation of their country is unknown -- dead Iraqis are not counted by our media or our leaders. And those shown become an abstraction as Erica Bouris writes:
And yet the numbers tumble out; 81,632-1,120,000 Iraqi civilians dead. How could we be so unsure? How could we not know whether 1,038, 368 people celebrated their eighth birthdays or graduated from high school or handed their daughters off in marriage? We are a bit more confident about our estimates of Iraqi refugees, 2.2-2.4 million (it helps that other countries are trying to count them as their cities and slums swell uncomfortably). But here too we don't know whether the intended birthday trinkets were left behind, whether education was abandoned such that gutters could be swept or handouts could be taken in the streets of Damascus and Iran, or whether elderly fathers were left behind, too frail to make the trip outside Iraq.

Images of these victims are rare on the mainstream news and generally when they appear, perhaps as background snippets to a discussion of troop strategy, we cannot quite move beyond this level of Arab as abstraction. We can't quite be moved at the gut towards a glimmer that we insist is the glimmer of a shared humanity. We may call these infractions human rights violations, we may count them and track them and remember to read these numbers most days of the week, but I have only rarely seen the lurching of a human gut towards these suffering people.

One instance when I have seen this primal lurch -- and I write this with discomfort about what it says about ideologies and theories of ethnicity and kinship -- is in the body of my own husband. A Lebanese-Palestinian who has been in the United States for a decade, he is in fact very assimilated, a man whose work and day to day life are quite far removed from the politics of the Arab world. Yet one evening, many months ago, we watched (on which channel, I cannot recall) coverage of the aftermath of a bombing that had hit a civilian neighborhood. The images were as they always are; too many effects of personal life strewn about gaping concrete, too many confused and dirtied people. A few minutes into the broadcast, the newsman let the sound of a woman in the background into the clip and it was a piercing, accusatory, sad, fractured voice. She spoke in Arabic, there was no translation. But as she yelled in her hijab my husband shook slightly, teared slightly. "It sounds like my mother. Like all the women I know."

We do not hear our mother's cry in the voice of the few Iraqis we see in the media. We are told that Iraq is off the table this political season, yet a continually growing number of Iraqis have no table to bring their grievances to, nor homes to rest in.

Instead we have bought walls and destruction.