https://www.iraqbodycount.org/
Documented civilian deaths from violence
139,707 – 158,226
Total violent deaths including combatants
216,000
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/thou_shalt_not_kill_20150607
from a chris hedges article, who won the pulitzer prize for covering wars, who has also covered many revolutions:
"
The military in the United States portrays itself as endowed with the highest virtues—honor, duty, self-sacrifice, courage and patriotism. Politicians, entertainers, sports stars, the media, clerics and academics slavishly bow before the military machine, ignoring its colossal pillaging of state resources, the egregious war crimes it has normalized across the globe, its abject service not to democracy or freedom but corporate profit, and the blind, mind-numbing obedience it inculcates among its members. A lone soldier or Marine who rises up inside the system to denounce the hypermasculinity that glorifies violence and war, who exposes the false morality of the military, who refuses to kill in the service of imperial power, unmasks the military for what it is. And he or she, as Chelsea Manning has learned, swiftly pays a very, very heavy price.
But after hearing the veterans’ tales, his worldview crumbled. He began to ask questions he had not asked before. He began to think. And thinking within any military establishment is an act of subversion.
...the military also incentivizes killing. If you do well at marksmanship you get rewarded with three-day passes....Every aspect of popular culture incentivizes violence, from television shows to movies like ‘American Sniper.’ Killing is presented as noble. Those who kill are supposed to be heroes. And this prepares us for the military.”
He began to hear disturbing stories about the wars in the Middle East, not the glorified stories spun out by recruiters, the media or the entertainment industry, but stories about whole families being blown up or gunned down by U.S. troops in the streets of Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I read about Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Agent Orange, radiation and how it’s still affecting people today, how people are still dying or being born with congenital defects. I found Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. I had never heard of them. I guess there was a good reason I had never heard of them. I read ‘A People’s History of the United States,’ by Zinn. I read ‘Understanding Power,’ by Chomsky.
“But in the military there is a double standard. If I do not obey the regulations I get court-martialed. If they do not obey the regulations nothing happens. It is I who suffers.
"
again we hear about the 2 tiered justice system, the system of mass propaganda, american empire,
