From Juan Cole's site -
"To date, of Iraq's pre-war population of about 30 million, about 13% have either fled their country or are internally displaced--a historically very large proportion of a population.
"That means that a very large percentage of the Iraqi people have found conditions so dangerous or otherwise unacceptable--constant threats to life, polluted water, uncertain electricity, broken medical facilities, bad sanitation, uncertain educational opportunities and more--that they have left home, family, friends, jobs for the uncertainties and often miseries of the life of a refugee.
"Think about what that means in personal terms.
"And, according to reports of refugee organizations such as the IOM, the outward flow continues."
Or this, from Cenk Uygur -
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/9811:"Imagine if someone told you of all the Americans who had died and been injured in the war, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed, the fact that there were no weapons of mass destruction, that Saddam Hussein had no links to the 9/11 bombers, that Iraq was in a state of chaos, there was mass ethnic cleansing and sectarian warfare and Baghdad was 100% unsafe to Westerners - then imagine that the Bush administration was still talking about how we were making great progress in the war and that it was still worth doing. And then imagine that people took them seriously.
"I don't think the people inside Washington have a sense of how awful this war has gone.
"It is an unimaginable failure. It is a historic and epic catastrophe. And here we are this far into it with politicians still talking about winning..."
Historians will be debating exactly WHY this war happened for a long time...
...what they WON'T be debating is that it was an immoral act of undeniable, outright aggression, that not only destroyed the moral standing of the US and UK, but called into serious question the legitimacy of the entire existing world power structure.
- pretty lies, who used to be a conservative...
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