As Lawyers, Guns, and Money notes, some 3100 Iraqi civilians died in June alone.
Of course, this is either good news or bad news - depending on your ideological position. The Right Wing will argue that this result is good (from the LGM link, above):
1. Still better than Saddam (which is true, if you wildly inflate estimate of the death toll under Saddam).
2. It's the fault of Iran (these are the wingnuts who remain optimistic).
3. It's the fault of the Iraqis (these are the wingnuts who are ready to move on to "Exterminate the Bastards").
4. It's the fault of the Democrats, except Joe Lieberman (all wingnuts will hew to this one).
5. Lies. All lies.
6. It still compares favorably to living in Detroit/Washington DC/some other city.
7. The spike in the death numbers shows just how desperate the terrorist resistance has become, and is a measure of [how] close President Bush's strategy is to total victory.
8. Something something BILL CLINTON something.
9. Look! Over there! Two homos are fixin' to get married!
10. What are we still talking about Iraq? That's so last year. Now, about this mexicofascist reconquista...
11. You're ugly and your butt smells and you like to smell your own butt.
12. Someone said something outre in a comment section somewhere! WHY WON'T LIBERAL BLOGS TAKE A STAND ON THIS?!??
(Note: numbers six through twelve provided by a commenter at LGM)
I particularly like number nine.
All frivolity aside, how long do you think the Iraq will last as a contigious country given the level of violence seen there on a daily basis. I understand that the somewhat trivial direct ratio comparisons are useless, but if there are 300 million people in the US, and 25 million in Iraq, and Iraq is suffering 3000+ civilian deaths a month (that doesn't even count non-deadly injuries), if you do the conversion, that is 36,000 dead in America per month. The level of violence paralyzes the political decision-making, polarizes the armed forces/police (making them less effective), and generally drives all thoughts of political compromise out of the general populace (they retreat to either anger/rage and more violence, or self-preservation/survival, and disenage from the political process - in any event, they aren't working towards any sort of solution).
Iraq cannot sustain this level of violence for long periods of time. It will either collapse into complete anarchic civil war, or fracture into the Kurd/Sunni/Shiite states that many have advocated.
Posted by baltar at July 18, 2006 11:33 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Atrocities of War | International Affairs | IraqSo - when does it hit "complete anarchic civil war"? It's perilously close if it's not already there. And you've got to think that the July numbers are going to be even worse than the June numbers given the number of horrific sectarians massacres that have occurred over the last couple of weeks. And we've seen little, if anything, to suggest those numbers will go down any time soon - quite the opposite. Ugh.
Oh, and of course you can have the fun of BOTH civil war and a state breakdown - it's not an either/or deal.
And hmmm - a big Shiite autonomous region (if not state) right there on the border with Saudi and Kuwait - you know how thrilled those 2 must be about that.