"[A]bsolute despair would be the wrong response. Instead, the disaster that is the West's current strategy in Iraq must be used as a constructive call to the international community to reconfigure its foreign policy around human security rather than national security, around health and well-being in addition to the protection of territorial boundaries and economic stability."
- Richard Horton, editor of the British medical journal The Lancet, which published a study by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health estimating the total civilian death toll in the Iraq conflict to be approximately 655,000. (Source: The Guardian)
Read Jim Wallis' editorial The Killing Must Stop here. For those of you who won't, here's how it closes:
From now on, any political debate on Iraq must start here and be disciplined by these facts. Not by politics, not by arguments, not by visions of democracy in the Middle East, but by the deaths caused to so many of God’s children. Any politician speaking about the war should be asked how they intend to stop the violence and blood-letting that has overwhelmed that country. As Bob Dylan famously asked a long time ago – “how many deaths will it take till he knows, that too many people have died?” That question must be in the mind of every single voter this fall and those not speaking about the war must now be forced to. Every candidate running for the U.S. Senate or Congress should be asked how they feel about the loss of all these lives and how they intend to stop it.
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