CIVC Worldwide:�of-ed by Marla: "Recently, I obtained statistics on civilian casualties from a high-ranking U.S. military official. The numbers were for Baghdad only, for a short period, during a relatively quiet time. Other hot spots, such as the Ramadi and Mosul areas, could prove worse. The statistics showed that 29 civilians were killed by small-arms fire during firefights between U.S. troops and insurgents between Feb. 28 and April 5 � four times the number of Iraqi police killed in the same period. It is not clear whether the bullets that killed these civilians were fired by U.S. troops or insurgents."
When you visit the CIVIC web site you are very quickly struck by Marla as an Icon. There are so many photos of this beautiful young blond American with a small dark Iraqi survivor of violence between America and Iraq.
Will she be an iconic figure of martyrdom? Did she wish it that way? What gave her the strength, courage, and determination to do as much as she did for her Campaign for the Victims of Conflict?
I recall seeing so many pictures of H with her Romanian orphan children, already safely in a well run orphanage.
But the opulence of the CIVIC web site also shows a child in a more opulent setting than that of downtrodden Romania.
I want to remind my readers that Iraq was a prosperous country with a health service we would have been proud of.
Before Q8 was invaded, Saddam fought a war on behalf of western secular values against the Iranian theocracy with western arms and Rumpsfeldt's full support.
Marla's last report indicates that the army is tracking civilian deaths. They simply don't like to tell us about it.
Before the war I wrote poems about civilian life in Falluja, as if it were Oxfordshire. I include one here.
How would it be if the Blair Government covered up civilian deaths caused by a military intervention here?
No one picked it up this morning, but last night Blair admitted to Paxman that "We had to let the Kelly name come out." Those with functional memories will recall his earlier denial that he had been at all responsible for the name coming out. We all know now he chaired the meeting where it was agreed.
He is a liar and a war criminal.
I suspect that it would have been covered up if the Americans had shot an intruder at their Oxfordshire air base as they claimed the right to do.
Whether they would have been successful in doing so is another matter. They seem to have got away with Kelly's death, though.
In Iraq they seem to have got away with 100,000 civilian deaths.
That puts Blair and Bush quite close to Saddam as monsters, doesn't it?
Last night, withPaxman, Blair made the most pathetic defense of the war yet. Minges Campbell explained that his latest version of an excuse of Regime Change is legally indefensible.
But it is worse than that. He said the international community would have been humiliated had the troops not gone in.
So 100,000 civilians died so Blair and Bush, not the international community, who did not back the war at all, would not have to lose face.
FAllUJA-IN-C******Y
Dazzle-blue dragonflies
A dance of delight
Among yellow flag iris
Soft haze of summer by the waters edge
Arcadian Oxfordshire
Cool waters slipping silently through Cotswold stone
A moment away
In cyberspace
Cavalier copters clash and crash
An unholy mating
Death in the desert
Closer still
Not even a breath away
In a parallel universe
The copters have landed
Safely on our playing close
These young missionaries
Schooled in a games-of- war Arcadea
Chew gum
And slither through the streets
A base they make of our primary school
A place of safety
Big boys, fearsome toys
Uncertain of their liberator status
Settling in
They don't seem to understand
We want our school back for our children
As yet uneducated
Into politicians' death squads
Into weapons of your war
C******y folk
Famous in the County
A dash of colour splattered on the uniformity
Of Oxfordshire's dull Tory blue
March in protest to our school
Fifteen dead today
In this parallel universe
We wanted our school back
For our children's future.
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