100 Iraqis being killed each day, says UN

The number of Iraqis being killed each day in Iraq is now around a hundred according to figures released by the UN. One hundred. Each day. Every day.

As Gandhi stated, "What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?"

Bush and Blair have exported death and labelled it democracy. Surely we cannot look at the slaughter taking place on the streets of Iraq and call that democracy? To do so would be Orwellian. As Shakespeare aptly puts it, "It out-Herod's Herod. Pray you avoid it."

The death toll has risen every month this year and totalled 5,818 in May and June. This far exceeds the number given by the Iraqi Coalition Casualty Count, a web site that compiles casualty figures based on published accounts, which said that 840 civilians died in June. Overall 14,000 civilians were killed in the first half of the year says the UN.

Ever since the invasion in 2003 the US military and later US-supported Iraqi governments have sought to conceal the number of Iraqi civilians being killed. The US Army for long denied that it counted the number of civilians killed by its soldiers. The Iraqi Ministry of Health also refused to reveal to the UN the civilian casualty figures.

Now, for the first time, the health ministry in Baghdad has told the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq, which publishes a bimonthly report on human rights, the exact death toll recorded by hospitals around the country. The central morgue in Baghdad provides figures for unidentified bodies, of which there were 1,595 in June. In the first six months of the year the number of Iraqi civilians dying violently rose by 77 per cent.

Kidnapping, often of children, is common and the victims are frequently killed regardless of whether or not they have paid a ransom. "In one case the body of 12-year-old Osama was reportedly found by the Iraqi police in a plastic bag after his family paid a ransom of $30,000 [£16,300]. The boy had been sexually assaulted by the kidnappers, before being hanged by his own clothing. The police captured members of this gang who confessed to raping and killing many boys and girls before Osama."

It is literally no exaggeration to say that, in Bush and Blair's new Democratic Iraq, child rapists are roaming the streets.

These figures are shocking. Worse than expected. And when one hears of the manner of some of the deaths, of a child hung with his own clothing after having been raped, your heart sinks.

This is being done in our name, paid for by our taxation. We have a responsibility here.

That they could have the gall to do what they have done in Iraq, to unleash the forces that they have unleashed - which they obviously have no way of controlling - that they could cause this level of carnage and then look us in the eye and dare to label it "Democracy" says as much about our democratic system's faults as it does about the sham democracy we have supposedly exported to Iraq.

Surely in a real democratic system the men responsible for this appalling situation would have been driven from power? Surely they would face such public disapprobation that they would be forced to live in shame in any system in which the power truly resided with the electorate?

But yet, there the two of them still sit: Shameless.

After Suez, which was in no way a disaster on the scale of the Iraq debacle, Anthony Eden offered his immediate resignation. That Bush and Blair have not been forced to do the same debases us all.

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Tags: Iraq, Bush, Blair, body count,