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"On the last day of May - which ended the deadliest six-month period of the entire war, with a total of 586 American fatalities - retired Army Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey warned a National Public Radio audience that things could get worse. “The bottom line: It’s hard not to imagine the next 90 days not being a period of the most intense struggle seen yet in Iraq,” he said.
"Those are just the past, present and future American losses. The escalation has also failed to make the locals safer.
“'The evidence does not suggest that the surge is actually working, if reduction in casualties is a criterion,” Alastair Campbell, the former defense attaché at the British Embassy in Iraq, confessed upon leaving his post a few weeks ago. “The figures in April were not encouraging.”
Since the start of the war, tens of thousands of Iraqis have died, with one study putting the figure at more than 650,000, and countless others have been blinded, disfigured, lost limbs or been irrevocably wounded in some way. An estimated 4 million Iraqis are refugees in their own country or in neighboring Syria and Jordan.
"To put that into perspective, consider that Iraq’s population is about one-eleventh the size of America’s. Equivalent totals for the United States would be 7 million dead, millions permanently wounded, and 44 million displaced from their homes or disconnected from their families.
If that were the situation here, would we call it anything other than a humanitarian crisis?
SIRATYST (Stuff I Read and Thought You Should Too) -- “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.” (Calgacus, as quoted by Tacitus, Agricola 30-31)"
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