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Tomgram: Crashing the Plane of State into Iraq

[Note to Tomdispatch readers: Don't miss the new project, Lie by Lie just up at the Mother Jones website. A cleverly cross-referenced time-line, It is in the process of cataloguing all the lies and manipulations of the Bush administration on the way to war and thereafter. It may be a work in progress but it's an important one. Bookmark it. Let me also thank three sites in particular for helping me to keep up on Iraq: As always, Juan Cole's indispensable Informed Comment blog, Antiwar.com with its plethora of pieces I would otherwise never catch, and the War in Context whose editor has a telling eye for the important article. Tom]

The Real Link Between 9/11 and Iraq (Finally) Revealed

By Tom Engelhardt

You've heard the President and Vice President say it over and over in various ways: There was a connection between the events of September 11, 2001 and Iraq. Let's take this seriously and consider some of the links between the two.

Numbers and comparisons

*At least 3,438 Iraqis died by violent means during July (roughly similar numbers died in June and August), significantly more than the 2,973 people who died in the attacks of September 11, 2001.

*1,536 Iraqis died in Baghdad alone in August, according to revised figures from the Baghdad morgue. That's over half the 9/11 casualties in one city in one increasingly typical month. According to the Washington Post, this figure does not include suicide-bombing victims and others taken to the city's hospitals, nor does it include deaths in towns near the capital.

*By the beginning of September, 2,974 U.S. military service members had died in Iraq and in the Bush administration's Global War on Terror, more than died in the attacks of 9/11. (Twenty-two more American soldiers died in Iraq in the first 9 days of September; at least 3 in Afghanistan.)

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