There are two polls that show up some terrible truths about US culture, the first finds that while Americans are aware of the numbers of US soldiers killed in action they state the Iraqi figures so low that it seems akin to holocaust denial. The best count of Iraqi dead is the Lancet survey it uses peer reviewed scientific sampling to find that by now 3/4 million people have been killed by the invasion. US respondents put the figure at 10,000 and add that it is an unfortunate side effect of war (hmm, where does Richard Wolffe get his ideas?):-
“You have to look at who’s doing the killing,” said Neal Crawford, a restaurant manager in Suttons Bay, Mich., who guessed that about 10,000 Iraqis had been killed. “If these people are dying because a roadside bomb goes off or if there’s an insurgent attack in a marketplace, it’s an unfortunate circumstance of war – people die.”
Neal you’re a friggin’ idiot, overall this level of ignorance is clearly deliberate they know the US figure but are choosing not to know the Iraq figures, their craptastic corporate media helps. The other poll (h/t Lenin’s Tomb) shows that acceptance of killing innocents particularly in terrorist attacks is higher in the US than in predominantly Muslim countries:-
The survey, conducted in December 2006 by the University of Maryland’s prestigious Program on International Public Attitudes, shows that only 46 percent of Americans think that “bombing and other attacks intentionally aimed at civilians” are “never justified,” while 24 percent believe these attacks are “often or sometimes justified.”
Contrast those numbers with 2006 polling results from the world’s most-populous Muslim countries – Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria. Terror Free Tomorrow, the organization I lead, found that 74 percent of respondents in Indonesia agreed that terrorist attacks are “never justified”; in Pakistan, that figure was 86 percent; in Bangladesh, 81 percent. -
As a Vietnam veteran once famously remarked, ‘This shit is fucked’.
