Action: Call for Ceasefire

From Amnesty International USA:

Since December 27, these horrific attacks on Gaza have caused over 400 Palestinian deaths and 2000 injuries. Rocket fire by armed Palestinian groups, including Hamas, has taken the lives of 4 Israelis and caused several dozen injuries. Amnesty International condemns the violence on both sides and calls on both parties to abide by international law and policies.

The U.S. government cannot continue this lop-sided blame on Hamas for the crisis. Ask Secretary Rice to urgently express deep concern about Israel's disproportional response and its policies which have brought the Gaza Strip to the brink of humanitarian disaster.

Civilians in Gaza, already trapped in disgraceful humanitarian conditions, are victims of Israeli air strikes and intensified attacks. Israeli blockades of humanitarian supplies continue to deny Palestinians the food and medical supplies they desperately need.

Bush's Petraeus PR Gambit Not Making it on Main Street

According to a USA Today/Gallup poll released today, more people view the Iraq war as a mistake since General Petraeus reported to Congress that everything is A-OK in Iraq and since Bush announced plans for a long-term occupation of Iraq and pretended as though everything in Iraq is fine.

Petraeus also failed to convince people that staying the course in Iraq is the right thing to do.

Additionally, with statistically irrelevant shifts, about the same number of people view the surge, the main subject of the Bush PR campaign of last week, as having little or negative effects.

What Bush ignored is that the occupation is the main source of sectarian conflict and that a humanitarian crisis already exists in Iraq. According to various UN organizations, humanitarian groups, and media reports:

* 8 million Iraqis require emergency aid
* About one-fourth of Iraqi children are malnourished
* 5 million Iraqis depend on the country's food rationing system; only 3 million have reliable access to it
* 3 to 4 million Iraqis are internally or internationally displaced
* 80% of Iraqis lack effective sanitation
* 70% lack sanitary water
* 50% unemployment
* 12,000 doctors have left Iraq due to the violence

But Bush's PR campaign wasn't really about convincing Americans that the war is going fine. It was about strong-arming Republicans in Congress to not vote with Democrats who want to change course or set a timetable for bringing the troops home.

That goal may have been achieved. And with it, Bush just may have convinced a bunch of Republicans to toe the line at the expense of their jobs in the 2008 elections. No wonder so many of them are retiring these days.

Iraqi Civilian Death Toll May Top 1 Million

Two recent estimates put the total number of Iraqi deaths due to the war at over 1 million.

JustForeignPolicy.org uses the estimate made by the British journal The Lancet in 2006 of over 600,000 as a starting point and then uses estimates from the media to project forward. It estimates total deaths at 1.044 million.

A new survey of Iraqi households, as reported in the Los Angeles Times, by ORB, a British polling agency, uses a statistical projection as well to estimate that as many as 1.2 million Iraqi civilians have been killed in the war.

Because no accurate record of civilian deaths has been kept by the Iraqi government or the US military occupation forces, these estimates are the best statistics so far. That the data has been collected independently and has arrived at similar figures suggests that the estimates have merit as fairly accurate.

The outrageous number of over 1 million deaths combined with the ongoing humanitarian crisis Iraqis face as a result of the occupation indicate that far from saving Iraq form an evil tyrant, the US has imposed a far worse life on the Iraqi people. Is this what democracy looks like?