Recently the Iraq Body Count and Oxford Research Group jointly released a set of numbers: From the breakout of the Iraq war in March 2003 to March 2005, 24,860 Iraqi civilians had been killed in the war and 42, 500 injured.

This is a set of bloodstained figures that brings a huge shock and tugs at people's heartstrings. Life is the most valuable to human beings; human body is the most precious, which, once damaged, cannot be recovered. The thousands of Iraqis deprived of lives and health by the war are all innocent people; they are all wronged. The dead can never close their eyes; the injured will ever remember the enmity.

Those Iraqis hurt by the war are far more than the dead and the injured. The United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in his report submitted to the UN Security Council recently that the US forces have detained as many as 6, 000 people with no deadline and no legal procedures.

The disastrous impact of the war is also far more than on people. Iraq has suffered destructions in its economy, culture and environment. It is reported that not long after the war began in 2003, the US forces dropped over 2,600 depleted uranium bombs on the areas surrounding Baghdad, which seriously contaminated the air, water, soil and plants there and incurred the local ecology and environment long-lasting and far-reaching damages. The immediate aftermath is in the sharply increasing number of cancer patients in Iraq now.

As we see it now, the Iraq war is an unjustified one, because the original reason for launching the war -- that "Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction (WMD)" -- has been totally crushed by facts. The "Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction", nominated by the US president, drew a conclusion not long ago: the US intelligence bodies are almost "completely wrong" in their judgment on Iraq's possession of WMD: the daily intelligence bulletins before the Iraq war had flaws as they, with eye-catching titles and through repeating questionable materials, exaggerated the possibility for Iraq to develop WMD. The war is labeled unjustified, also because the warmongers bypassed such a multilateral core of the United Nations, launching the Iraq war in a "preemptive" way regardless of the calls of the world's most nations opposing to the use of force.

The war not only killed innocent Iraqi civilians but also led to heavy casualties of the US troops. US president George W. Bush admitted on June 28 that over 1,700 US soldiers had fallen in the war. In addition, with the pollution brought by the war, US troops in the frontline have seen more and more "strange diseases" such as blood bacteria infection and skin ulcer. And many of them have shown insanity due to psychological stress.

Deprivation of human lives, damage of human bodies and detainment of civilians with no lawful procedures, etc. are all acts most seriously trampling on human rights and violating human dignity. For those who led the war, criticizing other countries and willfully playing human rights cards, their condemnation of other countries of undermining human rights can never be in a higher tone. At this moment, they do not reflect on themselves for the war which incurred untold damages on innocent lives, instead, they beautify it with pompous wording such as "democracy" and "human rights", in an attempt to legalize it.

However, such efforts are futile. More and more people have clearly recognized the nature of the war and the serious disasters it has caused. Cries against war are growing louder in the United States. As many as 59 percent Americans do not support the Iraq war, for they are unwilling to see themselves or their relatives bleed or even die for the war.

By People's Daily Online