Deadly Milestones

[theknife]

US death toll in Iraq passes 1000...no surprise there, everyone saw it coming.
meanwhile, the Iraqi death toll is estimated at somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000....

Iraqi dead include not only insurgents, police and soldiers but also civilian men, women and children caught in crossfire, blown apart by explosives or shot by mistake both by fellow Iraqis or by American soldiers and their multinational allies. And they include the victims of crime that has surged in the instability that followed the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime.

i'm not sure which is the bigger tragedy - the US soldiers who became canon fodder in this mess or the thousands of dead Iraqis who never asked to be 'liberated".

U.S. officials said they didn't have the resources to track civilian deaths during the U.S.-led occupation, which ended officially June 28. Iraq's central authorities also haven't reported comprehensive figures on civilian deaths - while record-keeping was meticulous under Saddam, the interim government didn't even begin trying to keep track until five months ago.

don't ask, don't tell, eh? difficult to sort out the total Iraqi body count, let alone how many were participants and how many were innocent bystanders.

''It is difficult to establish the right number of casualties,'' said a spokeswoman for Amnesty International, Nicole Choueiry. Her London-based human rights organization estimates more than 10,000 Iraqi civilians died in the first year of the conflict alone.

However, Amnesty's figure was based in part on media reports that often simply repeated claims of American and Iraqi officials. Iraq is as large as California and much of the country is too dangerous for independent teams to investigate more than a handful of death claims.

Iraq Body Count, a private group that bases its figures in part on reports by 40 media outlets, puts the number of civilian deaths since the conflict began at between 11,793 and 13,802.

Hazem al-Radini at the Human Rights Organization in Iraq said his group estimates the toll at more than 30,000 civilian deaths. He said the group didn't have any statistics and based the figure on reports by Iraqi news media.

but by all counts, it would be safe to assume that there were at least 10,000 civilian non-combatant deaths since we invaded Iraq....so one has to wonder this: where are the pro-lifers on this subject? i can google pro-life groups and come up with thousands of pro-life websites...all of whom are bitching and moaning about abortion in China, stem cell research in the US, euthanasia in Belgium, etc. but apparently, the ongoing civilian death toll in Iraq isn't a "pro-life" isue.

make no mistake, these people do care about kids - right up until the minute they're born.

who would Jesus bomb?

http://www.boston.com/dailynews/252/...k_Omar_:.shtml