Over one million Iraqis killed, still

Iraqi war deaths
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Back in September, British opinion pollsters ORB released a study showing over a million Iraqis had died in the war and occupation. Now they’ve released a follow-up study, which focussed on rural communities rather than urban areas like the previous one and guess what? the results confirm their earlier study:

Further survey work undertaken by ORB, in association with its research partner IIACSS, confirms our earlier estimate that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict which started in 2003.

Following responses to ORB’s earlier work, which was based on survey work undertaken in primarily urban locations, we have conducted almost 600 additional interviews in rural communities. By and large the results are in line with the ‘urban results’ and we now estimate that the death toll between March 2003 and August 2007 is likely to have been of the order of 1,033,000. If one takes into account the margin of error associated with survey data of this nature then the estimated range is between 946,000 and 1,120,000.

All of this is largely in line with the two Lancet studies, as well as the Iraqi Family Health Study (See Deltoid for more information). No doubt it will be hotly denied by the true believers, but the evidence is overwhelming that the invasion of Iraq continues to be a crime of gargantuan propertions. The solution remains the sme: troops out of Iraq.

Meanwhile, I would like to see similar surveys for Afghanistan, which isn’t looking good either.

Fuck Planet Earth

funny, video
Published on

Re-imagining Worthy BBC Attenborough nature documentary series Planet Earth, making it slightly more juvenile, also more funny, to cheer up your Monday. (Found via Sore Eyes.)

The Execution Channel – Ken MacLeod

books and books review, science fiction
Published on

Cover of The Execution Channel


The Execution Channel
Ken MacLeod
307 pages
published in 2007

The Execution Channel is MacLeod’s newest science fiction novel and a return to the sort of book he made his name with, after several more traditional sf novels: intensily political, near future novels in settings that seems to flow logically from our own times and as a reaction to contemporary political developments. In science fiction the urge to respond to current events often results in shallow, cliched tripe, but that’s never the case with Macleod, largely because he’s a better writer than that, but also because he doesn’t as much respond to a single event as to the general direction politics is taken. In his Fall Revolution novels he was partially responding to the accelerating pace of globalisation and the role of the US as a caretaker superpower, here it’s the War on Terror and the emergence of the hypersecurity state and the increasing brutalisation of our societies as a result of this, made visible by the concept of the execution channel. Which is exactly what it sounds like, a tv channel dedicated to showing state sanctioned killings.

MacLeod has been at his best so far when he’s writing near-future science fiction and The Execution Channel is about as near-future as you can get, set perhaps ten years from now, perhaps only five. It’s a future in which all the fears we’ve had and still have about the War on Terror have become true: American and British troops not just in Iraq and Afghanistan anymore, but all over the Middle East, while in Britain itself the security state has taken over, terrorism is rampant and this in turn has led to pogroms against Muslims. And then a military airfield, RAF Leuchars, is hit by what looks like a nuclear attack. From there on things get worse.

Read more…

Praising with faint damns

Nu Labour, War on Iraq
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That’s what it feels like this this Guardian article is doing, with its amazing revelations that the Blair government was just as clueless as the Bush junta in preparing for the War on Iraq:

The government’s top foreign policy advisers were as inept as their US counterparts in failing to see that removing Saddam Hussein in 2003 was likely to lead to a nationalist insurgency by Sunnis and Shias and an Islamist government in Baghdad, run by allies of Iran, the Guardian has learned.

None of Whitehall’s “Arabists” warned Tony Blair of the difficulties which have plagued the occupation. The revelation undermines the British claim that it was US myopia which was to blame for the failure to foresee what would happen in postwar Iraq.

[…]

Christopher Segar, who took part in Whitehall’s Iraq Policy Unit’s prewar discussions and later headed the British office in Baghdad immediately after the invasion, said: “The conventional view was that Iraq was one of the most Western-oriented of Arab states, with its British-educated, urban and secular professionals. I don’t think anyone in London appreciated how far Islamism had gone.”

Officials alone cannot be blamed. Ministers failed to ask serious questions. Blair never called on the experts for detailed analysis of the consequences of an invasion, officials say. He saw the war as Iraq’s liberation and felt any postwar problems would pale in the face of Iraqi delight.

See? It’s not that Blair and his cronies helped start an unnecessary immoral war that has so far killed between half a million and one million Iraqis, it’s just that they weren’t prepared for those horrible Islamists determined to spoil the liberation party. Nobody could have foreseen that the people of Baghdad would dislike having foreign troops coming in and bombing the powerplants and shooting up the neighbourhoods. Of course not, who could’ve thought that the Iraqis would not be pleased by seeing their American and British liberators?

Oh wait…

The truth is, Blair knew what the consequences of the war were going to be and didn’t care. As long as he could pretend he had personally liberated the Iraqis, he was happy. Now that the situation has become even worse than expected, his media chums are recruited to put the most positive spin on this disaster still possible: we didn’t mean it, it was the horrible Islamists that made us do it.

Bonus paragraph, awe-inspiring in its awful stupidity:

Contrary to the conventional view that the occupation’s problems stem mainly from failure to plan for postwar Iraq, they say there was plenty of planning, from how to react to mass refugee flows and a humanitarian crisis to the fallout from a sharp rise in the world price of oil. The real failure, they concede, was one of political analysis. Officials did not study how Iraqis would react to an occupation and what political forces would emerge on top once Saddam was removed.

Superhero porn

Comix
Published on

February 2008 Playboy cover, featuring Tiffany Fallon bodypainted as Wonder Woman

Sometimes you wonder why certain search terms bring people to your site, until you realise that having a blog that’s old enough means that almost every possible combination of words in the English language will occur in it at least once. (Also, that doing a post on weird search engine terms is very easy and brings more attention to those terms hence luring more people here. Profit guaranteed. (I learned that from Splintered Sunrise.)) So no wonder even such an unlikely combination of words like superhero porn gets results here. Unfortunately for whoever was looking to get their rocks off to some hot ‘n sweaty superaction, you won’t find it here. Apart from the image on the left, of course.

If you don’t know what’s going on, that’s next month’s Playboy, featuring one Tiffany Fallon bodypainted as Wonder Woman, which has become the latest crisis in the comics blogosphere. It’s supposedly sexist and demeaning and not worthy of a great female superhero like Wonder Woman blah blah blah. It’s all a bit silly, considering Wonder Woman is easily the most purposely kinky superhero title of all time, created by a man with a serious interest in bondage games. (William Moulton Marston; look him up.) Having a model painted as Wonder Woman is only as troubling as you find Playboy to be in general. Which to me is not very. I don’t believe porn is inherently demeaning to the people who appear in it, Wonder Woman has long been a fetish object to all kinds of people and this cover is a lot more respectable than some of the stuff Wonder Woman and other heroines have been subjected to in the comics themselves. I mean, at least it’s not Greg “all my characters look like they’re in the throws of orgasm” Land.

Meanwhile, to the hapless seeker for the forbidden superhero flesh, remember this nugget of wisdom from Evan Dorkin’s Eltingville Comic-Book, Science-Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Role-Playing Club: “it ain’t no good without the costume”.