Body Count in Baghdad

Everyone with the faintest knowledge of how the Middle East worked could have predicted it. Anyone who had studied history could have seen it coming. Only the blind, right wing, conservative, cakewalk-and-dancing-in-the-streets crowd were in denial. The killing in Iraq’s streets and the massacres that have taken place in her capital have long since outstripped any of the horrors that Saddam Hussein and his henchmen brought down on that country. Mass murdering was on the agenda with rows of bodies lining the streets, as many as a 100 a day dying in Baghdad alone.

Since the so-called “Surge,” violence has decreased in Iraq as a whole. So why don’t we hear cries of victory from the top brass? According to a Newsweek article, the reason is that violence has not dropped as much as we think:

The problem—and the reason no one from U.S. commander Gen. David Petraeus on down is declaring victory yet—is that those statistics do not tell the whole story. Body hunters like Sowadi, Baghdad residents and local gunmen all say that militias are making more of an effort to disguise their grisly handiwork—burying bodies in shallow graves, dumping them in city sewers. …."Many militia groups just make people disappear,"

Whereas before, militias left the corpses, beheaded and evidently tortured on the open streets, they are now taking pains to bury them in shallow graves, with several new mass graves appearing in various parts of the city.

The sheer number of human lives this senseless war will have destroyed will surely never be known but it will certainly be in the hundreds of thousands by now. Certainly the Neocons who lusted after this war and those who supported the decision to go to war based on what the rest of us knew were lies, will never own up to having been part of the holocaust that Iraq has become.