End This Bloody Occupation

Iraq:

End This Bloody Occupation

100,000 killed since US-led invasion

THE US has had a policy of not even bothering to count the number of Iraqis
killed during their war in Iraq. So an independent team of researchers risked
their lives to survey 1,000 Iraqi households. They discovered that the death
toll throughout Iraq must now be over 100,000! This horrifying figure is ten
times the level previously estimated in most of the media.

Judy Beishon

More than half of the dead are women and children, killed by ‘strikes’ from
the latest high-tech aircraft of the US military. What a damning revelation of
the reality of this war!

This death toll is worsening daily. Fallujah is presently being pounded
from the air. The planned massive ground assault on the town – timed for after
the US election – will bring a further rise in the rate of casualties. Many
areas of Fallujah already look like earthquake zones. Yet now another
coalition invasion force is being assembled to go in with "overwhelming force"
to "liberate the city".

Even the US-friendly and symbolic Iraqi ‘interim president’, Ghazi al-Yawar,
felt compelled to point out that it will be a mistake for coalition forces to
go into the town. Community leaders in the Sunni triangle have warned it could
ignite a new general uprising among the entire Sunni minority population.

However, the more direct representative of US imperialism, ‘interim prime
minister’ Ayad Allawi, has declared the invasion imminent saying: "I owe it to
the Iraqi people to defend them from the violence and the terrorists and
insurgents".

‘Defence’ of the Iraqi people from ‘violence’ by using a massive show of
obscene military firepower won’t convince anyone. On the contrary, it is
another step into an abyss from which the US regime – backed up by Blair in
Britain – will have huge difficulties extracting themselves.

Whatever the result of the US election, a large majority of workers
throughout the world are becoming increasingly enraged against those who are
perpetrating this vicious occupation and war. Future events will prove that
the balance of forces lie against whichever new occupant of the White House
continues to pursue them.