Do you want to see more violence and blood sheds?
Wait for what is going to happen in the next couple of days,
Let me introduce the new Shia leader…
Moqtada AsSadr.

ok..
and now..
The Topic of The Day: Numbers numbers numbers...

War IS expensive…
I was really amazed to hear how many billions the Bush administration spent – till now- in Iraq.
Let me use the language of numbers…
ehmm...
ONE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS.
Just for military purposes…
And another $23 billion are being spent for “reconstruction” purposes…

Expectations say the American government (Bush or Kerry) is going to spend another $50 billion next year.

These numbers are totally out of scale for my mind… I mean… anything that costs more than $100,000 is unperceivable for me… but yet…
I know that the Iraqi annual national income used to be something around $15 billion dollars… mmm… one hundred billion is really… I mean really a big amount of money.

Karzai was begging the other day, for some extra billions for rebuilding Afghanistan; he received four billion dollars since the end of his war (i.e. some years ago…) that’s exactly what the American army spends in one month in Iraq now!
What the!

War is really expensive!

One of the hugest projects in Iraq was the Main highway, it’s a six lanes highway connecting the Jordanian border (and the Syrian one) to Baghdad, and reaching to Basra and the Kuwaiti border in the south. It is a 1000 KM highway; the government paid one million dollars to complete each Kilo Meter… the final cost is one billion.

One hundred billion dollars is not a big number for the six-trillion-dollars-economy of the United States, but it could have built more than one Iraq for sure, could have made the Iraqi people so rich, I mean WAY so rich…
Did I ever mention that the income average of the Iraqi individual was less than $50 before the war? Fifty U.S. Dollars… not fifty thousand, not fifty billion.
And now, I think the average stil around $50 for those who could find a job...
mmm… ok... let me put it this way…
The one hundred billion dollars are the salary of the entire Iraqi working population for the next DECADE.
(Or a better option) if we had just distributed the 100 billion directly for the Iraqi people, each one will get around $5,000 (i.e. more than seven million Iraqi Dinars!!!)

I think that Bush just lost a unique chance to create the first nation of millionaires.
:*)

But this is not the only thing that makes war expensive…
The souls of thousands of Iraqis, and hundreds of Americans are even more costly than all the money that was spent.

I was the country director of the first (and maybe only) door-to-door civilian casualties survey, Marla Ruzika was my American partner, the fund raiser and the general director of CIVIC.

But unfortunately, she didn’t have the chance to publish the final results until now.

I decided to publish my copy of the final results of the Iraqi civilian casualties in Baghdad and the south of Iraq on the 9th of this month, in respect to the big effort of the 150 volunteers used to work with me and spent weeks o hard work under the hot sun of the summer, in respect for Majid my brother that spent weeks arranging the data entry process, and in respect to the innocent souls of those who died because of irresponsible political decisions.

Two thousand killed, Four thousand injured.

Each one of these thousands has a life, memories, hopes… each one had his moments of sadness, moments of joy and moments of love.

In respect to their sacred memory, I would appreciate it if you could spend some minutes reading the database file when I publish them, read their names, and their personal details, and think about them as human beings, friends and relatives, not mere figures and numbers.

I led the volunteers in their work in Baghdad, and the nine cities of the south: Karbala, Hilla, Najaf, Diwanyya, Simawa, Nasryya, Basra, Kut and Amara through my weekly visits. I went to the north for a couple of times, and arranged some smaller scale surveys…

The survey teams were from the local areas, I made sure to create homogenous groups that reflect the ethnical, religious and gender ratio of the targeted regions. And I designed the survey form… all of that depending on my scientific background I gained from my M.Sc. researches, and depending on the very cooperative spirits of the volunteers and of the Iraqi families.

We preferred not to include the military casualties to give our survey a civilian perspective.

Civilian: is everyone killed outside the battle field, even if his original job was military (e.g. a soldier killed in his house is a civilian)
Military: everyone killed while fighting in a battle, even f his original job was a civic one (e.g. an engineer killed while fighting as a Fidaee)

We had primitive and simple tools of research, yet I believe our survey is creditable and accountable.

Two thousand civilians killed in the 21 days of war is an enormous number… it is a tragic thing to happen… as tragic as the 11th September events where two thousand American civilians were killed.

And the more painful and tragic thing to happen, is having people like Colin Powell saying: Oops… who arranged that presentation about the WMD?

Doesn't he feel shy?
Can't he admit? I WAS WRONG? I AM A BIG LIAR?
please?