Iraq, Then & Now
From the Brookings Institute:
Crude oil production
Pre-War Levels: 2.5 million barrels
Now: 2.14 million barrels [Apr. 2006]
Electricity
Pre-War Levels: 3,958 Megawatts
Now: 3,600 Megawatts [Apr. 2006]
People with access to potable water
Pre-War Levels: 12.9 million
Now: 8.25 million [Nov. 2005]
People with access to sewer system
Pre-War Levels: 6 million
Now: 5 million [Nov. 2005]
posted by storiesinamerica @ 9:04 AM
6 comments
6 Comments:
Any "Then & Now" numbers for women violated in Rape Rooms?
Tortures? Forced amputations? Number of children in "Children's Prisons"?
Just asking...
Sounds like you really care about tortured women.
Do a little searching. You'll find that women cannot leave their homes and lead "normal" lives.
Women and children cannot lead normal lives? You mean like they could in the good old days?
"Entire families were rounded up in the town of Dujail after the assassination attempt against Saddam. Many have said they were tortured, and 148 were sentenced to death. They all died, either by execution or during interrogation.
Saddam wasn't charged with the deaths of the 148, but is accused of murdering nine people the judge said were killed in the first days of the crackdown. He is also charged with illegally arresting 399 people, torturing women and children and ordering farmlands razed."
http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2006/05/15/saddam-trial-charges.html
I don't see you criticizing this because you could clearly give a shit.
In a major Baghdad hospital, 12-year-old Fatima Harouz lay in her bed
dazed, amidst a crowded hospital room. She limply waved her bruised arm
at the flies that buzzed over the bed. Her shins, shattered by bullets
when American soldiers fired through the front door of her house, were
both covered in casts. Small plastic drainage bags filled with red fluid
sat upon her abdomen, where she had taken shrapnel from another bullet.
She was from Latifiya, a city just south of Baghdad. Three days before I
saw her, soldiers had attacked her home. Her mother, standing with us in
the hospital, said, "They attacked our home and there weren't even any
resistance fighters in our area." Her brother had been shot and killed,
his wife wounded, and their home ransacked by soldiers. "Before they
left, they killed all of our chickens," added Fatima's mother, her eyes
a mixture of fear, shock and rage. A doctor who was with us as Fatima's
mother narrated the story looked at me and sternly asked, "This is the
freedom
in their Disney Land are there kids just like this?"
The doctors' anger was mild if we consider the magnitude of suffering
that has been inflicted upon the children of Iraq as a direct result of
first the US-backed sanctions and then the failed US occupation.
Poverty in Iraq has plummeted acutely during the invasion and
occupation. Those who were already surviving on the margins due to years
of deprivation have sunk further, and the children of such families have
recourse to no nutrition, no health care, no education, no present and
no future. Those from less unfortunate backgrounds are now suffering
because the family wage earner has been killed, detained, or lost
employment. Or the source of the family's income, a shop, factory or
farm have been destroyed, or simply because it is impossible to feed a
family under the existing economic conditions of high costs and low to
nil income in Iraq.
"I don't see you criticizing this because you could clearly give a shit."\
Sorry, I almost forgot -- the Left has a monopoly on compassion.
"You'll find that women cannot leave their homes and lead "normal" lives."
I understand that women in North Korea can also leave their homes and lead "normal" lives. Things must be good there as well.
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