Kill Them Until They Are Free

There is no such entity as the Iraqi people. There are only individual Iraqis, with particular lives that end in particular ways. One flower from the ill-smelling bouquet of Iraqi invasion back-justifications offered by George W. Bush was this assertion:

And one thing is for certain; there won't be any more mass graves and torture rooms and rape rooms.

I won't belabor the obvious point that the Abu Ghraib scandal demonstrated that torture rooms weren't the exclusive province of Saddam Hussein. Some Americans, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, thought they were a fine idea. Another back-justification, offered in response by some to certain private boring diatribes, has been that more Iraqis are alive today than would be if Saddam Hussein were still controlling the portion of Iraq not governed by the Kurds.

There's no argument against the notion that Saddam Hussein was a oppressive thug whose forces probably accounted for 300,000 murders of Iraqis during his 24 year reign in Iraq. He racked up a shameful, criminal record during his rule, which, I am heartsick to note, the United States is striving to match:

PARIS, Oct. 28 - An estimated 100,000 civilians have died in Iraq as a direct or indirect consequence of the March 2003 United States-led invasion, according to a new study by a research team at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

100,000 Iraqis in a year and a half. Our technological and military prowess is enabling us to kill Iraqis at more than 5 TIMES THE RATE that Saddam Hussein managed while he was in power.

There is often an unspoken notion apparent in justifications for the Iraqi invasion that boils down to "to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs." 100,000 of those eggs aren't getting a better life out of the United States' invasion of Iraq. They're dead. We killed them. Combatants, non-combatants, women, children, indiscriminately victims of our "surgical" air strikes. And whether or not the rest of the surviving populace in Iraq someday gains a better life from this intervention 100,000 Iraqis are dead because our own gang of thugs in Washington D.C. couldn't be bothered to allow solutions that were working to continue to work.

God help us.