Covering up the ugly truth

As Bush continues to cover up the ugly truth about his “war on terror” (aka his “crusade for oil”) his misdirections and outright lies are getting more and more blatant. For instance, does anyone believe that he underestimated the war casualty count by a factor of 20?

Talk about a numbers game! On October 11 the British medical journal Lancet published a study by a team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists that estimated that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.
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As numbers go that is shockingly high. It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group.

Of course, statistical studies based on surveys are subject to an error margin, and the study has received strong critique. Even so, the most alarming statistic that the study appears to reveal is that the situation in Iraq has been getting worse — not better.

That conclusion, by the way, is confirmed by the study which divided the reported deaths up into four time periods of roughly 13-14 months each:
Period I (pre-war): 5.5 deaths per 1,000 people/year
Period II: 7.5
Period III: 10.9
Period IV: 19.8
In short, deaths have been growing steeply throughout every year the US has stayed in Iraq. Simply dismissing the study findings because they are politically inconvenient is the wrong move for the Bush administration.

Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe Bush isn’t lying to us. It could just be incompetence, I suppose.

Regardless of Bush’s motivations, we will be left to deal with his mistakes. For decades to come the United States will suffer a tarnished image world-wide. Countries that formerly looked to us as a potential beacon of hope now think of us an yet another Imperial power intent on conquest. The worst part is this: Can we honestly say that’s not what we represent now? Actions speak louder than words… or ideals.