Last week, the Foreign Policy journal posted a map visualizing 35,000 instances of violence that harmed civilians over the 2003-13 period. The animation lasts for 42 seconds and functions more as an art piece than anything. For just under a minute, the viewer watches flashing red bursts dance across a map of Iraq, each representing an incident that claimed at least one civilian. "Postwar" Iraq looks an awful lot like wartime Iraq.
I suppose there's little to say at this point. The United States was attacked on 9/11—largely attributable to its foreign policy in the Middle East since the 1950s—and in response devastated two countries uninvolved in al-Qaida's operations that morning.
The reflexive, silver-lining argument about Saddam Hussein being gone is difficult to take seriously for a list of reasons. One is the numbers, which indicate that, disturbing but true, Iraq was better off under Hussein than under US occupation or subsequent postwar governance. As I mentioned in the Aug. 9, 2012, blog post:
Before the invasion, Iraq's mortality rate was 5.5 per thousand. This makes for 148,500 deaths a year, owing to the normal range of factors, 2 percent of which were caused by "violence" (taken generally). Therefore the number of deaths due to violence in prewar Iraq was roughly 2,970 annually.
Put another way, the increase for 2013 alone was equivalent to two 9/11s.
