CBS Evening News temporary anchor, Bob Schieffer tonight expressed outrage that an estimated two and a half million Syrians have so far been displaced, wounded, or killed as a result of the civil war raging in that country.
He laid the blame squarely on Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad.
That figure is fractionally more than half the estimated number of Iraqis displaced (4-5 million) after the US invaded Iraq in 2003. But, wait! The Iraqi figure doesn’t include the (approx) 655,000 civilians slaughtered in that conflict (Lancet figure – death certificates supported in 92% of cases), and an indeterminate, but obviously huge number of Iraqis wounded.
In 2007, the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki quoted a figure of five million Iraqi children orphaned as a result of the conflict.[1]
Where was Schieffer’s outrage then? I guess the Iraqis were simply playing for the wrong team?
Bashar al-Assad still has a long, long, way to go as a war criminal to beat the record of US President George Walker Bush, and UK Prime Minister Anthony Charles Lynton Blair.
[1] “Occupation’s Toll: 5 Million Iraqi Children Orphaned” AlterNet, December 18th 2007
How soon they forget – very conveniently. That’s supposing they ever took notice in the first place.
Ah RJA, you need to listen up. Bush+poodle were bombing countries into democracy, a saintly purpose.
Syria? – heathens, non-democratic.
QED.
XO
WWW