None Dare Call It Genocide

How comfy we are all in the United States, as we engage in living-room debates about the US occupation of Iraq, whether "we" are bringing them freedom and whether their freedom is really worth the sacrifice of so many of our men and women.

But there's one thing Americans don't talk about: -- the lives of Iraqis, or, rather, the deaths of Iraqis. We weep for the plight of those suffering from hunger and disease, volunteer in efforts to bring plumbing to Ecuador, mosquito nets to Rwanda, clean water to Malawi, human rights to Togo, and medicine to Bangladesh.

But when "we" cause the calamity, suddenly there is silence. There is something odd, suspicious, even disloyal about a person who would harp on the deaths of Iraqis since the US invasion in 2003. Maybe a person who would weep for Iraq is really a terrorist sympathizer.

If you have ever lost a family member, you know that life is never the same again. It causes every manner of religious, social, and marital trauma. It's bad enough to lose a family member to some disease. But to a cold-blooded killing or a car bomb or an airplane bomb? That instills a sense of fury and motivation to retribution.

So we are speaking of some 1.2 million people who have been killed in this way, and that does not count the numbers that were killed during the invasion itself for the crime of having attempted to oppose invading foreign troops, or the 500,000 children and old people killed by the US-UN anti-civilian sanctions in the 10 previous years.

The US has unleashed bloodshed in Iraq that is rarely known even in countries we think of as violent and torn by civil strife.

[Excerpt of an article by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama]