Unfortunately, most Americans are unaware of the facts behind what is really happening outside our borders.

Case in point, one of the most important news stories was released last week, and the mainstream “liberal” media gave it little attention. On October 28, Reuters reported that since the start of the Iraq invasion in March of 2003 over 100,000 Iraqis had died.

“Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100,000 excess deaths, or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq,” said Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in a report published online by The Lancet medical journal.

Reuters further reported that, “The rise in the death rate was mainly due to violence and much of it was caused by U.S. air strikes on towns and cities.” Just so all of you understand this, as a country, America has killed over 100,000 Iraqi people.

For some reason, I am the only one who has even heard about this. It is f*’$%@$ amazing. Would somebody please wake up and start reading the paper.

Further insight can be gained from comparing this statistic to the number of people who are thought to have died under Saddam Hussein’s reign as President of Iraq.

Estimates place the number of dead under Saddam between 1 and 2 million people. It sounds very small when you say it like that so let me show you a bigger picture.

Between 1,000,000 and 2,000,000 PEOPLE were estimated to have died under Saddam. It is awful.

Mass killings continue to this day. We see it in Iraq, we see mass killings in the Darfur region of Sudan now, which no one in our “great” country seems interested in, and it makes me sick.

Now it is time for the comparison.

Saddam served as president from July of 1979 through March of 2004. That is almost 24 years. So let us do some math and see on average how many people were killed every year under Saddam.

Let us see here, using the largest estimate of 2,000,000 people divided by 23 years gives us a yearly average of… 86,957 Iraqi’s. So on average, 86,957 people died per year under Saddam and over the last 18 months over 100,000 Iraqi’s have died under us.

In order to make this a fair comparison divide OUR 100,000 Iraqi’s by 3 and subtract OUR 100,000 Iraqi’s by that 33,000 Iraqi’s. This gives OUR average of 67,000 Iraqi’s killed by America in one year.

I know that was like homework, but just like homework it gives you a better appreciation of the big picture. We are to blame for the deaths of 67,000 people per year on average, and we are making progress. If we had only tried a little harder, we could have beaten Saddam’s average.

Oh well, there is always North Korea, or Iran, or Syria….

Roberts also says, “What we have evidence of is the use of air power in populated urban areas and the bad consequences of it.”

So our brilliant plan for fighting “terrorists” in Iraq is to just bomb the hell out of the urban population, till we have killed enough people, terrorist or not.

I for one feel proud that a fine leader, and his fearless administration, led us into a war in Iraq.

It somehow feels justified knowing so many Iraqi people died so we could give them freedom.

By the way for all you Bush supporters, Iraq is not connected to the attacks of 9/11 as the 9/11 Commission has concluded.

Yet Vice President Dick Cheney is quoted as saying, in an attempt to rally support for our war in Iraq, that Iraq is “the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11.” He certainly sounds like one misinformed individual.

I have some more “facts” for you un-informed masses, Dick Cheney included.

For those of you who feel Bush is a strong leader who showed what he was made of in the days after 9/11; the Bush Administration gave the 9/11 Commission only $3 million to investigate the causes for 9/11, while it gave $50 million to the commission investigating the Columbia space shuttle crash.

For those of you who think Bush is not in the pocket of “big business”, Bush’s energy bill “provides industry tax breaks worth $23.5 billion over 10 years aimed at increasing domestic oil and gas production, and $5.4 billion in subsidies and loan guarantees.” Most of these tax breaks and subsidies are for some of his 3 dozen major fundraisers. This information was obtained from the Thomas B. Edsall’s November 22, 2003 Washington Post article.

But, what might be the biggest surprise for many of the Students at the University is that we put Saddam Hussein into power just as we put Osama Bin Laden into power in the ’80s. In 1959, after a failed assassination of then Iraqi President Qassim, a 22 year old Saddam Hussein went into hiding in Egypt. While there, he met with several CIA agents. Do to the fact that the U.S. was interested in ousting the Qassim, the CIA agents installed Hussein in an apartment across the way from the President so he could keep inform the CIA of Qassim’s actions. In 1968, the final Ba’athists coup is accomplished and Saddam takes a position of power in the new Iraqi government. Robert Komer, a national security advisor to President Kennedy, in regards to the coup stated “Almost certainly a gain for our side.” Yep, the Ba’athists used to be on OUR side.

In 1979 Saddam then led his own coup and took the reigns of president. During the Iraq-Iran war, President Reagan, who by the way will be inaugurated as the new god of America if Republicans have anything to say about it, gave chemical and biological weapons to Saddam with full knowledge that it would be used against Iran and possibly Iraqi citizens.

If that was not enough, right before Saddam invaded Kuwait, he informed George H.W. Bush of his plans and was told that the U.S. had no interest, one way or the other, in Iraq’s conflict with Kuwait. H.W. then went back on his promise not to attack and invaded Iraq in the first gulf war.

This is what depresses me. The whole Iraq problem is something we helped to start. So in all honesty, some of the 2 million dead attributed to Saddam are actually on our heads.

What I have laid out in this article is true, and if you still voted for Bush on election day, then you support all the deceit and lies his administration has been spinning for four years. Lies that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq. Lies that American troops would be greeted as liberators. You support a president who is on vacation over 40 percent of the time. And the kicker is, the Bush administration does not even deny these charges, they just blame someone else. This is why it is so hard for me to listen to people tout the Bush administration. People do not know their facts. I would like to ask all of the students at the University to “ge’cho ass together” and pay attention, because this kind of deceit and corruption is rampant.

Students interested in checking my facts can go to

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041108’s=facts to learn even more about the Bush administration. Students should also go to http://www.secondterm.us/ and click on “Thank you!” in the upper left hand corner to learn more about Saddam.