Iraq: Five Years, And Counting
Dahr Jamail March 19, 2008
- Devastation on the ground and largely held Iraqi opinion contradicts claims by U.S. officials that the situation in Iraq has improved towards the fifth anniversary of the invasion Mar. 20.
- A survey by British polling agency ORB estimates the number of dead at more than 1.2 million.
- Nobel laureate and former chief World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz recently published a book titled ‘The Three Trillion Dollar War’.
- U.S. Department of Defence, – 4,000 U.S. soldiers killed. British casualties = 175.
- United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees – more than four million Iraqis displaced from their homes, roughly half of them outside of the country.
- one in every four residents of Baghdad, a city of six million, is displaced from home.
- millions still deprived of clean water and medical care.
- Iraq’s infrastructure is worse on every measurable level compared to Iraq under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, including 12 years of the harshest economic sanctions in history. During those sanctions more than a million Iraqis died from malnutrition, disease and lack of medical care.
- 70 percent of Iraqis lack access to safe drinking water.
- The average home in Iraq, even in Kurdish controlled northern Iraq , has less than five hours of electricity a day.
- Oil exports have not for a single day of the occupation matched pre-war levels.
- Unemployment varies from 40% to 70%.
- more than a million dead, four million displaced, and another four million in need of emergency aid: this means a third of Iraqis are displaced, in need of emergency aid — or dead.
- Cheney calls a "successful endeavour".
- Baghdad has become the most dangerous city in the world, largely as a result of a U.S. policy of pitting various Iraqi ethnic and sectarian groups against one another. Ethnic and sectarian cleansing strategies, backed by occupation forces, have virtually eliminated all mixed areas of Baghdad.
- U.S. military bases established
- US embassy in Baghdad the size of the Vatican City
