Record number die in Iraq during November

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Walid Hassan's slaying came as the Iraqi death toll rose to more than 1,300 for the first 20 days of November — the highest for any month since The Associated Press began tracking the figure in April 2005.

In all, 22 Iraqis were killed today in a series of attacks in Baghdad, Ramadi and Baqouba, police said. The bodies of 26 Iraqis who had been kidnapped and tortured also were found on the streets of the capital, in Dujail to the north of Baghdad and in the Tigris River in southern Iraq.

The Iraqi death toll this month is already well above the 1,216 who died in all of October, which had been the deadliest month in Iraq since the AP began its count.

The actual totals are likely considerably higher because many deaths are not reported. Victims in those cases are quickly buried according to Muslim custom and never reach morgues or hospitals to be counted.

In addition to the victims of violence, countless Iraqis have had close calls with death. Among them were two government officials who escaped assassination attempts today.

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It's total insanity over there, approaching the scale and style of the post-apocalyptic science fiction movies of the 80s, and we unleashed it. Politicians and pundits have been hemming and hawing for months now about whether it's a civil war, or a "full blown" civil war. Whatever. It's obviously a civil war. The question that we should now be asking is whether this is genocide yet. My buddy Matt over at Caffeinated fears that things will get much worse if we pull out now, and, at this point, that's a completely reasonable concern. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine that there would be no question at all about whether a genocide is happening over there if we just left Iraq high and dry. But it's obvious that we're not doing much at the moment to make things better. Frankly, I'm not really sure of what to do about it. Should we send over 500,000 more troops to control the place with an iron fist? But then, we don't really have 500,000 more troops to send. My gut instinct is that Kissinger's right about getting the UN and local powers involved because we can't resolve this alone.

Of course, once we go down the diplomatic road, the US will no longer be solely in charge, and if I understand the White House's intentions in Iraq correctly, they'll never allow that to happen. I guess we'll see. And by the way, this in no way means that I've abandoned my belief that we need to get the hell out of there: once we've got the rest of the world involved, then we can pull out; after all, I think it's pretty clear that the US presence only aggravates the situation--that is, things will never stablize in Iraq until we're gone.

At any rate, something needs to be done, like, yesterday.

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