Tick tock.
This is very sobering. Go and have a look before reading any further.
It’s difficult to think of a more stark way to demonstrate one side of the costs of the Iraq war/occupation/screw-up. If you’ve got sound on your computer, you’ll hear the gentle clicks that signify each death, like a manual typewriter putting a full-stop on the end of a person’s life. I’m a little disturbed that what this most reminds me of is the game Defcon, where similar points and expanding circles on a stylized map signify the impact of nuclear missiles.
Can you imagine, however, what this map would be like if it also included the deaths of Iraqi people? We’re talking estimates of between 600,000 and over a million so far. A proportion of these are ‘indirect’ (but no less important) deaths - if a hospital is destroyed, someone who might have lived will not now be able to get the necessary treatment, or if fresh water supplies are disrupted then diseases become prevalent.
Include these on the map, and that irregular tick of each death would become a cacophony: the sound of a swarm of insidious locusts. If you’ve ever seen time-lapse film of mould spores growing, I imagine that’s what the dots on the map would become like, growing and spreading until all the major cities and villages became clearly defined by the human cost of this war.
I don’t know what should be done about the situation in Iraq. I’m horrified by how people were mislead and lied to by the government as to the reasons for the war - that whole mess over the WMD claims. But the invasion cannot now be taken back. The Western world can’t just swoop in, oust a dictator and dismantle a corrupt government, and then disappear off again into the sunset expecting everything to revert to a happy ending - those are the actions of a superhero in a cheap child’s comic. Instead, this is something that is going to take years, decades, or more to resolve, whatever happens. And that map is going to keep on ticking away until that special consensual hallucination we call ’stability’ begins to develop.