<h3>Peace at Last?</h3>

There is a surreal quality about visiting the United States in the last days of the presidential campaign. If George W Bush wins, according to a scientist I met, who escaped Nazi-dominated Europe, America will surrender many of its democratic trappings and succumb to its totalitarian impulses. If John Kerry wins, according to most Democrat voters, the only mandate he will have is that he is not Bush.

John Pilger | Will There Be A War Against The World After November 2?


Want more?

The recruits were taken in batches of 12 to the side of the road and made to remove their shoes and lie face down on the ground before being shot in the back of the head. The killings are seen as a significant step in the growing confidence and propensity to violence of the militants. Although hundreds have died in bombings and mortar attacks, this is the first time they had carried out a planned operation with such a high number of casualties.

Kim Sengupta | Massacre at Baquba


Then vote Kerry...

Like Jimmy Carter back in the 1970s, President Kerry will be well aware that what shoe-horned him into the White House was an entirely negative public emotion, hostility to George Bush. Just as Kerry consistently disdained his eager and all-forgiving left supporters before November 2, he’ll redouble his public and private displays of rejection thereafter, contemptuously wiping Michael Moore’s moist kisses from all his cheeks. The constituencies President Kerry will be eager to placate and to satisfy will be exactly the ones he has courted the whole of this election year: the Neocons in Washington, and the bankers in Wall St.

Alexander Cockburn | The Great Delusion: Kerrycrats and the War


...or Bush for that matter.

As for the American people, look, you're never going to be able to persuade me that even the most rabid Bush supporter in Texas wasn't horrified by what he saw. The question though is how do you deal with it. And for a lot of people in America, they simply expunge it or deny it. When I wrote my first stories about My Lai, I remember vividly a Minnesota public opinion poll that showed that more than half of the American people didn't think I should have published that story. They weren't accusing me of doing anything wrong, but they didn't think I should have written about it. So you always have this resistance to an ugly truth.

Lakshmi Chaudhry | Seymour Hersh: Man On Fire

Note: Thanks to EastSouthWestNorth for the above and other photographs of the invasion-inspired Baquba massacre, the continuing Chaos in Iraq series, and a wealth of links to stories worldwide. Thanks too to all newsgatherers fighting dumbed-down broadcast media to bring their readers unvarnished reportage. Good journalists are filing stories from all corners of the globe, but it is these sites that bring them to us. Sadly, the fast-deteriorating United States-Iraq-Iran-Palestine imbroglio remains the story of our time.

Update: 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead

Giving the lie to difficulties attending assessments of Iraqi post-invasion deaths (laughably pegged at 10,000), the Guardian and Independent report a scientifically sound survey [pdf] by The Lancet [registration required]. Introduced by Richard Horton's [pdf] compelling plea for sanity, the study puts the number of Iraqis murdered thus far by invading American and mercenary forces at 100,000.

After spending a page casting doubt on the report's methodology and veracity, The Washington Post allows us, on the second page of its cynically muted response, Household Survey Sees 100,000 Iraqi Deaths:

Even though the sample size appears small, this type of survey is considered accurate and acceptable by scientists and was used to calculate war deaths in Kosovo in the late 1990s.

And, with Fallujah, Ramadi and every other city in the country closed to the invaders, this war has barely begun. Look at it this way. Were the United States to be invaded, more than ten times that number would have to die to approximate the slaughter visited on the hapless Iraqis. A million Americans blown to blazes by surgical strikes? Could I live with that? Well, given the American response to Iraqi deaths, I guess, yeah, easily. I could live with ten million dead. Why not? Blow them away, Bubba.

• Guardian | 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead, says study
  
• Independent | Revealed: War has cost 100,000 Iraqi lives
• The Lancet | The war in Iraq: civilian casualties, political responsibilities
  
• The Lancet | Summary: Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey
  
• The Lancet | Report: Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey [pdf]

Note: The first two articles, pointed to by Danny Dayus's World Crisis Web, brought the survey by The Lancet to my notice. What sort of person disseminates these links, day after day, month after month, year after year? The sort that chooses to make a difference.