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October 13, 2007

American Ignorance About the Toll in Iraq

The ignorance of the average American about the war in Iraq is staggering. Did you know that the average American believes only 9,900 Iraqis have died in the war? As some of us know, the actual number is 100 times that - 1,200,000 human beings of Iraqi citizenship have been violently killed. That's equivalent to the utter destruction of the entire Portland, Oregon metropolitan region, or all of Salt Lake County, including Salt Lake City, UT, just to put it into perspective. Proportionally, though, it's much worse. Iraq's population is just over 27 million. If the U.S. lost the same percentage of its population, we'd be looking at a loss of around 13.5 million people. How would we react to that? Nearly one in four families in Iraq today has lost a member of their household to the violence. 40,000 unidentified bodies have been buried in Najaf alone. The war has created 500,000 new widows in Iraq. And the reaction here in the U.S. is a big yawn. The best we seem to be able to say is we're tired of the war. Just tired of it.

The question that plagues my mind is not so much why Americans don't know how many Iraqi men, women and children have been violently killed and maimed, but whether we have the ability to know and are choosing to ignore it and, if we did know, whether we would do anything about it. Or would we, in order to hold on to our precious self-image as decent, God-fearing people, convince ourselves that the Iraqis are our enemies and need to be killed, or worse yet, that we are simply acting as the hand of God, who is at long last exacting judgment for ancient Babylon's treatment of Israel thousands of years ago?

I fear we are about to reap the whirlwind. Somehow I don't believe God will help us. We simply don't deserve it.

Posted by Becky at October 13, 2007 09:44 AM