The results objectively mean that the situation in Iraq is 40 times worse than our corporate media, morally bankrupt government and imperialist military will admit to.

This editorial should have been written months ago, which happens to support one of the main points I’m trying to make. I haven’t watched an entire newscast in six years yet, not ironically, I usually find out any news worth knowing well before most people, since the corporate media does such a poor job informing, or rather, such a great job dis/misinforming people on issues that really matter.

Not too long ago, my parents were watching Tim Russert when I, by chance, happened to walk into the living room to see a congressman prostituting himself on television, being as un-daring as possible to win the most appeal for himself. He said in passing that 30,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the war. I was so disappointed in him I had to sit down. “Politicians are still quoting 30,000?” I asked the cosmos.

At that time I had thought the body count was 655,000 as shown in the Lancet¹ report, already a year old. But Bush dismissed the report² with a wave of the hand for counter-evidence, which is apparently enough to satisfy the cowardly corporate media. Bush was then asked to estimate the body count as of October 2006, to which he replied: “I stand by the figure a lot of innocent people have lost their life³.” The last real number he admitted to was 30,000 back in December of 2005.

On Sept. 14 of this year, two days before Alan Greenspan⁴ confessed, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil,” the latest survey, taken by Opinion Research Business (ORB) placed the body count more in the vicinity of 1,220,580⁵ with a 2.5 percent margin of error. In other words, a catastrophic 1 in 21 Iraqis, 4.66 percent of the entire population, have died as a result of the occupation. ⁶

Unlike Bush, who relies on demagoguery, ORB, nonpartisan and trusted by clients as conventional as the BBC, the Conservative Party in the UK, Morgan Stanley and the Bank of Scotland, actually went and asked Iraqis how many civilians had died under their roof since the beginning of the war. ⁷

The results objectively mean that the situation in Iraq is 40 times⁸ worse than our corporate media, morally bankrupt government and imperialist military will admit to. The body count is well over Milwaukee County’s population. The familiar Buffalo Springfield lyrics come to mind: “I think it’s time we stop, children, what's that sound- everybody look what’s going down.”

Public support of the Vietnam War began to fall once the media started exposing the “credibility gap” in the military’s inflated casualty reports. (Nevertheless, the war killed 1 million Vietnamese soldiers and 4 million civilians.⁹) Public support for today’s war continues to deteriorate, but not nearly as fast as it will after the true body count is made known. Whereas back then the government exaggerated Vietnamese losses, the government today understates the body count, which betrays the fact that the Iraq War is actually an occupation.

Walter Cronkite’s words hold true today, “We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders… to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds… To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past.”

Seventy-two percent of Americans¹⁰ are against the war. However, even though that percentage is comparable to the percent of the daily value of cholesterol found in a large egg, it is not enough to clog the arteries of Uncle Sam’s cold heart which is the war machine. Imagine how many more Americans would be against the war if everyone knew the true body count. The easiest and fastest way to bring an end to the war is to arm people with the truth of what is going on. Innocent lives depend on how fast this information travels.

To that end, every third Friday of the month is a national day of protest against the war, called the Iraq Moratorium. You can wear a black armband, put a sign in your window or on your lawn, write a letter to a congressman, ask your local radio or television stations to broadcast the true body count, and perhaps most beneficial of all is the anti-war protest from 5:00 to 6:00 on Water St. and Wisconsin Ave- bring a sign and a friend.

¹ http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/10/11/iraq.deaths/
² http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/politics/2006/10/11/sot.bush.iraq.death.toll.study.cnn
³ http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/10/12/MNGUTLNP6C1.DTL
⁴ http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2170237,00.html
⁵ http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=78
⁶ 654,965 deaths reported in Lancet report, comprising 2.5% of the total population. (1,220,580/ 654,965) x 2.5% = 4.66%. http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/journals/lancet/s0140673606694919.pdf
⁷ http://www.opinion.co.uk/our-clients.aspx
⁸ 1,220,584 divided by 30,000.
⁹ http://www.vietnam-war.info/casualties/
¹⁰ http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=8710

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