“Roughly” 500,000 children in the early 1990s? “About” a million people killed by the invasion and its aftermath? “A few million” more lives maimed, displaced, wrecked (as much by grief and despair as by physical mutilation)? Such statistics are terribly abstract, obscenely abstract: an adding-machine tabulates an endless list of corpses into an abstract figure to be entered in the chronicle of “collateral damage,” “civilian casualties,”—or a “body count.”
Iraq’s recent history includes two far reaching events, on the 2 August 1990 Iraq’s invasion into Kuwait and on 19 March 2024 the US/UK invasion into Iraq. Whether political leaders will draw lessons from these events will be, at best, questionable. Iraqis continue to be wronged. Danger to life and turmoil remain a cruel part of Iraq’s reality in early 2024. The collective suffering of a nation is visibly all pervasive. It can not be hidden.
A record 188 countries voted on Tuesday for an annual UN General Assembly resolution condemning the five-decade old US embargo against Cuba. The vote in favor rose from 186 for the 20th anniversary resolution last year.