Wampum

There are so many photos like this. Capa's Spanish Civil War negatives just definitively surfaced in Mexico, having been lost in Paris when the German Army entered the city. Goya worked this in paint. The mass graves of the two great wars, 1914-1918 and 1940-1945. The Indo-China Wars. Rawanda. Bosnia.

Lifted from Juan Cole:

A new professional poll carried out by a British firm in Iraq concludes that excess deaths from violence since March 19, 2003 through summer 2007 came to just over 1 million. Note that excess deaths from violence do not necessarily imply that they are directly war-related. Thus, murders of a criminal sort, tribal feuding, and so forth would be included. Since Bush interfered with the establishment of a strong new government after his invasion, he promoted the sort of insecurity that permitted high rates of violence, whether political, criminal or war-related. This poll tracks with the findings of the studies of Gilbert Burnham and Les Roberts, published in the Lancet and disputes lower numbers found by a recent WHO study (which, however, only ran through June 2006 and was limited solely to civilians--this British study goes to 2007 and seems to include everyone.)

The British findings are also consistent with estimates of between 1 million and 2 million widows in Iraq. These widows, many of them young, face extreme poverty without a breadwinner. As the Iraqi street has been captured by religious parties and militias, gender segregation and female seclusion have increased, which prevents single young women from going out to work in mixed-gender settings like stores and workshops. In short, Iraq is being Talibanized by Bush's war.

Reuters points out that almost none of the widows are getting any welfare payments from the Iraqi government. It adds: "A report by aid groups found that 43 percent of Iraqis lived in "absolute poverty". Four million people needed food assistance and only one in three children under five had access to safe drinking water."

Its about fur. It could just as well be about Iraq, where O(10⁶) human beings have died since March, 2003. Except that the image control (in the American media market) has been more selective than in those earlier celebrations of mass casualty ritualisms.