BBC News just published a special report on their web site: “Iraq violence, in figures”. For people who can’t really comprehend numbers without a visual representation, these statistics should finally make an impact.

One of the saddest things is that nobody officially knows how many civilian casualties there have been (I guess nobody “official” cares?). Independent studies have found anywhere from 80,000+ to 650,000+ civilians killed. That’s a humongous range and absurd human cost for a war based on false-pretenses if not downright governmental deception.

As of the publication of this blog, the U.S. has spent something like 511 TRILLION dollars on this failure (I’m not making that number up – visit the National Priorities Project!). That comes out to be somewhere in the approximate range of $800,000 to $6,000,000 per individual killed.

A July 2007 estimate by the CIA placed the population of Iraq at 27,499,638. Do the math again, and that comes out to just over $18,000 spent by the United States of America per LIVING, BREATHING IRAQI CITIZEN.

Just consider for a moment: what would happen if, instead of shooting at perceived threats and blowing things up, we gave every single person in Iraq $18,000 U.S. dollars?