What if all your friends died or moved away?

What if – every friend you had was either recently dead or had moved to another country?

In an 800+ word blog post on the NYT website, this horrific reality is brutally explained. It is titled “I have no living friends in Iraq Now”.

It happened in Iraq. The responsible party is the United States.

Riyadh Mohammed starts his piece by saying how at the end of the year, we tend to reminisce about old friends and look back on good times and bad times with them. But for this Iraqi man, the end of the year means a time to update his list of the dead. He started with the American invasion in 2003. In his own words:

Since the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, I had kept a list of every relative or friend killed in violence. As of late 2006, I counted 124 deaths. Suddenly I stopped. No. 125 was my father.

He said he did not cry at his father’s funeral. He had lost the ability to feel pain and sorrow at that point. The latest name on his list is his ex-girlfriend. Here is how he found out:

When I received messages on my cellphone from friends saying, “Please accept my condolences,” I asked one of them, “What happened?” Another message came that explained that my ex-girlfriend was killed in the Dec. 8 bombings in Baghdad.

She was injured in the bombing, and then crushed to death under the feet of the terrified government employees trying to escape the inferno and the carnage.

His list, which has not been updated since late 2006, is kept in this manner:

When I look at my personal phone book now, I read: “X: killed in Al Mustansiriya University bombings in 2007. Y: missing in western Baghdad in 2005. Z: killed in the Justice Ministry 2009. It keeps going on like that for the most of the book. The ones who left Iraq were the only ones who survived. I lost my last friend when he went to the United States as a refugee in June 2009. I have no living friends in Iraq now.

If he does update his list, he will have to add scores of names of people he knew - friends, neighbors, relatives, co-workers - who have died since the end of 2006.

Holy mother of God, we have really committed some serious and deep evil. We have committed genocide on the citizens of Iraq.

This man felt on April 9, 2003 that Iraq would have a new beginning….. and as time went by, the reality of what the US had started became the “new” Iraq. As he put it:

For millions of Iraqis, it was the death of a nation.

It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed in the violence set off by the violence of the US invasion and occupation. Millions more fled the country as permanent refugees, and millions more are internally displaced inside Iraq. The vast majority of them are desperately poor, while Americans citizens do not notice or care. The rate of cancer in the country of Iraq is exploding. The number of serious birth defects is significantly higher than they have ever been in the modern history of Iraq. The US, both it’s government and it’s citizens, ignore this reality and do nothing to help. Our media enables this by also ignoring the reality.

The rest of the world knows.

Pictures of the carnage that our invasion and occupation have unleashed are presented here. They will be updated tonight.

I tried, like millions of Americans, to stop this invasion and carnage from ever starting. I failed. I tried, ever since the invasion, to get our troops out of there. I failed. Today, we have 120,000+ troops in Iraq, and even more contractors.

In the years 2003 and 2004, I felt frantic trying to get the US troops out of there before the place was destroyed. It seemed that a large number of Americans felt they should stay to “fix” the problems our invasion caused. This is huge pile of horseshit. The point of our military is to kill people and to break things. They are needed to kill our enemy and destroy the enemy’s ability to hurt us. The problem is – Iraq and Iraqis were never our enemy. But we killed them and destroyed their culture, educational system, infrastructure, health care system and even their history.

In my eyes, we are a monstrously evil country.

Today, the US has been in Afghanistan for over 8 years.

Today, Afghanistan is the ‘most dangerous place in the world to be born’ per human rights groups and UNICEF.

The onset of winter means freezing nights, cold-related diseases and more problems for the children at an informal settlement of internally displaced people (IDPs) in the western outskirts of Kabul city. “They lack access to adequate food, shelter, healthcare, safe drinking water and sanitation, education, and are vulnerable to forced labour, sexual exploitation and many other problems,” Paola Retaggi, the coordinator of a Child Rights Consortium (CRC) led by Switzerland’s Terre des Hommes in Kabul, told IRIN.

We did not go into Iraq or Afghanistan to help the native people who already lived there. That is total and complete horseshit. That has never been true, and the crap about how bad the Taliban or Saddam is/was, is nothing but a sick, perverted excuse for our monstrous behavior. Our evil far outstripped Saddam’s evil as far as the Iraqi people are concerned. And soon, IF WE DO NOT GET OUT OF AFGHANISTAN IMMEDIATELY, our evil will far outstrip the evil done by the Taliban or the warlords prior to our arrival.

And since our citizens are deaf, dumb and blind to the actual reality in Afghanistan (just like they are in Iraq) and are not rising up against our politician’s EVIL decisions to escalate the war and occupation in Afghanistan, one day we will be reading about how some decent man in Kabul made a list of his friends, family, co-workers and acquaintances who were killed by violence as a direct result of our evil intervention.

It is too late for Iraq, but not for Afghanistan. WE MUST GET OUT OF AFGHANISTAN NOW.