Iraq: the 51st state?

Having disproven the manifold myths set forth by the Bush administration as causa bellum with Iraq, a nation which never posed a threat to the United States, the real reason has been assumed generally to take the nature of bello parta cedunt reipublicæ; that is, we could "inherit" Iraq's oil as a spoil of war. After all, Bush himself and his fellow career liars can't forever keep alive fairy tales about stamping out tyranny and weapons of mass destruction, and replacing centuries of sectarianism with western democracy.

So, if the reasons we went to war in Iraq have been discredited, what is it we're doing there still, precisely?

The factions composing the country we know as Iraq, for all the ways they perceive themselves as different, have certain things in common. One is they won't pontificate in Latin legal precepts, or simply hand over the goods, no matter how much you beat them up and declare "mission accomplished." Throughout the Middle East, it's an age-old truth Bush, with his undergraduate history major, should have learned. Somehow this failure of education figures into his no child left behind program, but that is for some other long-winded screed. Besides, that isn't really more true of people in the Middle East than it is of any other people, and falls under the category of common sense.

Oil is a prize as is balance of global power absolute American supremacy, and Iraq was viewed as a worthy U.S. Air Force launch pad (and perhaps a great American winter retreat). Yeah, it was a really stupid idea, but everyone knows the futility of arguing with idiots. After figuring out Iraqis wouldn't just lie down and hand over the country, we got the news spin about fighting insurgents, al Qaeda and al Qaida (the spelling changes help confuse people) and now Iranian supplicants guest fighters provided weapons something or other. Mostly our soldiers are fighting civilians because they tend to defend themselves against invasion, but the Bush administration and their compliant, war-billboard press corps don't want to talk about that. They also don't want to talk about how, long ago, we began killing mostly civilians not involved in hostilities, as happens with all wars throughout history.

That's no accident, mistake or result of incompetence. It was the plan all along. Every war follows the same plan. Get it through your head! We weren't ever Iraqis' partners in peace. It was never about importing elevated American ideals. It was always about one thing, and only one thing, as it always is, taking a country for our own by exterminating the indigenous people.

Making this case about the war in Iraq was always easy. Never having enough troops to secure anything, disbanding Iraq's army, having no plan beyond barnstorming Baghdad, reviving John Negroponte's Central American practices of inciting sectarian battles, killing and imprisoning men of military service age—the evidence of it is an almost endless list.

Framing and disproving the premise

The more I attempt to disprove the premise that the focus of our work in Iraq is exterminating the population, considering mitigating factors, the more clear it becomes that the premise is simple, and that the arguments in support are plain and clear. The more one considers mitigating factors, the more apparent it is those factors tend to prove the premise rather than disprove it. It's a fundamental, statistical review.

One becomes suspicious and skeptical from the beginning by trying to ascertain the total Iraq population figure, in that there is wide disagreement about what it is. Admittedly, that determination can be difficult where people are injured and die in large numbers, and the population is highly mobile. The total varies by about 8 million people, from 19.9 million to the CIA's June, 2007 estimate of 27,499,638. The difference in those figures is a full third of the population! Did all those people get lost? The CIA's website and figures look pretty good, until you consider that any empirical data issued under the Bush administration is likely politicized, and that the larger the total population, the smaller percentage of it any accounting of indigenous casualties will be. The highly precise figure suggests a deliberate lie; but, it doesn't absolutely matter and we can slog ahead. Arabic German Consulting estimated 22,219,289 in 2002; CNN said 25.4 million in 2002.

Because those aren't small differences, let's assume 25 million at the start of the war. According to a BBC news story dated July 26, 2007, about two million people have been externally displaced, and two million more have been internally displaced by the war. JustForeignPolicy today estimates the number of Iraqi deaths attributable to the war is 1,009,516. That's a total of FIVE MILLION PEOPLE. I include the refugees in that total because those people are no longer viable social entities in their communities—a status which is inarguably unlikely to change.

So, in four years, the war has exterminated about 20 percent of the population. It's been sloppily done and was expensive, but the coalition was hardly able to do it faster and cheaper without announcing this knowing intention.

This cursory review omits many factors, and well it should. Those statistics are even more esoteric, and sources disagree: birth rate, death rate, infant mortality rate, migration rate (the CIA claims zero people are immigrating into Iraq). And let's not get started trying to count the number of injured Iraqis. Iraqi Body Count has some information about that, but in that their death count is one-twelfth that of the Lancet report, it's recommended you consider the comprehensive explanation of how those figures were compiled.

Other mitigating factors

With an annual extermination rate of 1,125,000 Iraqis killed or displaced, it will take another 16 years to dispose of the rest of them, assuming zero population and immigration growth—a somewhat safe assumption. We assume the war will continue; in fact, another nine or ten years if Gen. Petraeus has his way.

Nine or ten years should be more than enough time. Washington-based Refugees International warned back in December that the number of people fleeing Iraq was increasing from 80,000 a month previously to 100,000 a month. That number can be reasonably expected to increase.

According to a CNN report dated August 1, eight million Iraqis, a third of the population, need aid urgently and are without food, water, sanitation and shelter. So long as that situation persists, you can write them off as viable social entities (so they've already been exterminated):

The report found that about 43 percent of Iraq's population endure "absolute poverty," and that more than half "are now without work."

Great, that's almost one in two people. How long can they last? Meanwhile, the U.S. can do nothing right; unless, of course, you assume that exterminating the whole country was the idea from the start:

Despite U.S. claims that violence is down in the Iraqi capital, U.S. military officers are offering a bleak picture of Iraq's future, saying they've yet to see any signs of reconciliation between Sunni and Shiite Muslims despite the drop in violence.

Without reconciliation, the military officers say, any decline in violence will be temporary and bloodshed could return to previous levels as soon as the U.S. military cuts back its campaign against insurgent attacks.

That downbeat assessment comes despite a buildup of U.S. troops that began five months ago Wednesday and has seen U.S. casualties reach the highest sustained levels since the United States invaded Iraq nearly four and a half years ago.

Violence remains endemic, with truck bombs on Tuesday claiming as many as 175 lives in northern Iraq and destroying a key bridge near Baghdad, the first successful bridge attack since June.

If Congress yields to increasing pressure from unhappy voters and insists the military draw down troops—as happened with Vietnam—and the military steps up air assaults, as with Vietnam, the civilian casualty toll will skyrocket—as with Vietnam. Then, there are many other indefinite things to contribute to Iraq's civilian casualty rate:

An exodus of doctors and nurses from Iraq has caused a staffing shortage at several of the 142 medical clinics that the U.S. government spent $264 million to build around Iraq, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials.

As many as half of Iraqi doctors have left the country since the U.S. invasion in 2003, according to a recent report by Oxfam International that cited statistics from the Iraqi Medical Association. Some doctors have fled after being targeted because of their religious sect or profession. Others have sought better opportunities in Europe or elsewhere in the Middle East.

It's impossible to know what the future holds for Iraq's medical professionals or what effect it will have, but you can expect that alone to contribute to a signficant spike in civilian deaths.

Is wholesale extermination a reality?

If the war doesn't end soon, the answer is yes. And it could be achieved within a couple years, possibly, without coalition forces admitting that is the strategy. Even in the face of global economic collapse, Bush and Cheney will grind us all up and sell us for dog food before they stop the war.

What should you think?

Think whatever you wish, but the time-tested truth of the matter is this: when you see some Tucker Carlson or Bill Kristol type pounding the drums of war, be aware you're looking at and listening to a genocide enabler, and a damned PUSSY COWARD. They're having giddy daydreams about vacationing at the unbuilt Baghdad Hilton On The River, where everyone speaks English and there isn't a brown face in town. Hitler had the common decency, at least, to develop a slightly more humane program to exterminate the Jews by euthanizing them in an orderly way. The American government was not that civil with Native Americans, leaving only enough alive to inhabit a few reservations in the remote frontier. I imagine that exact picture ahead for the people of Iraq.

I'm not in favor of that. I never was. We shouldn't have gone in the first place, and when I hear some military officer or TV network jackal talking about calming the insurgency, or some other weak rubbish like that, I see and hear only a genocide-enabling, pussy coward. Now the blood of the quickly vanishing country of Iraq is on the hands of every democrat in Congress. They can improve Iraq's zero immigration rate by moving there, now.