Iraq War? What Iraq War?

I have been meaning to comment here on the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq as announced by Barack Obama himself.  I am certainly not the only one who scoffs at the thought that this is actually a withdrawal or an end to the occupation of Iraq by U.S. troops.  The U.S. military is supposedly leaving behind troops (but they are not ‘combat’ troops!), large military bases and an embassy that is the size of 80 football fields and costs $1 billion a year to operate (meaning its more like a military fortress than an embassy).  Today, the U.S. maintains well over 800 military bases in something like 130+ countries (these figures are notoriously confused, see this article for example.)

Still, most commentators and pundits showing up in the mainstream media (even in Canada) go along with the charade that the Iraq War has ended and there is a lot of talk that it was, in the end, successful.  Such is the mainstream media: delusional and clearly preoccupied with other important topics such a celebrity sightings and talking up whatever reality TV program their network sponsors.  And, I suspect, the vast majority of U.S. or Western citizens have put the conflict/war/occupation out of their minds too.

So, I thought I would post a document showing just how out of touch most in the West are when it comes to the wars/conflicts/occupations that their militaries/governments are pursuing in their name (I suspect that the lack of awareness is only slightly better in the U.K. or Canada).  I had originally prepared this as a handout for a class I was teaching at the time but I did not use it in the end.  The document looks at the casualties of Iraqi citizens since the beginning of the U.S.- and U.K. led invasion of Iraq.  The interesting thing about this is that 1) we have no idea, and 2) most in the U.S. are completely clueless about how many Iraqi have died since their former President invaded that country in 2003.

It truly is sad how Westerners can be so oblivious to what their governments do in their name and to maintain their comfortable Western lifestyle.  When living in (or next to) the empire, such blissful ignorance is a very, very dangerous thing.

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PS. The document is in PDF format.  You can download Adobe’s reader here or you can download other free (and some that are open source) PDF readers here.