HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE WE KILLING IN IRAQ?

Of the many moral outrages associated with the unprovoked, illegal and unilateral invasion and occupation of Iraq, perhaps the most egregious and unforgivable is our continuing failure to take responsibility for the ongoing carnage and loss of lives there. From the very outset of the conflict, Anglo-American commanders on the ground paid little attention to the so-called ‘collateral damage’ inflicted on the Iraqi civilian populace by their invading forces. The infamous declaration by US general Tommy Franks – "We don't do body counts" – set the cold-blooded tone for things to come.

In fact, earlier this year, an internal army investigation by Major General Eldon Bargewell – commissioned in the wake of the notorious Haditha massacre - was scathing in its criticisms of the US Marine Corps in Iraq and, in particular, the deliberate indifference by Marines to the massive loss of innocent Iraqi lives resulting from their trigger-happy actions. From the Washington Post's report:

"All levels of command tended to view civilian casualties, even in significant numbers, as routine and as the natural and intended result of insurgent tactics," Bargewell wrote. He condemned that approach because it could desensitize Marines to the welfare of noncombatants. "Statements made by the chain of command during interviews for this investigation, taken as a whole, suggest that Iraqi civilian lives are not as important as U.S. lives, their deaths are just the cost of doing business, and that the Marines need to get 'the job done' no matter what it takes."

It is this casual indifference to the spilling of innocent blood, this view of civilian deaths as routine and natural, this primacy on the value of American lives over Iraqi lives – all testified to by a senior US general – which reminds those of us who opposed the war that we were right to do so and are right to continue to oppose the subsequent and ongoing occupation. One such anti-war protestor, who has managed to both become a moral beacon as well as sharp thorn in the side of our warmongering government, is Brian Haw, who has (literally) been camped outside of Parliament for over six years now, single-handedly manning his 24-hour vigil there in opposition to the militaristic foreign policies of our elected politicians.

On Sunday, however, so-called ‘liberal hawk’ (and ex-left-winger) Nick Cohen, chose to use his Observer column to excoriate, defame and patronize Haw, while deliberately distorting the situation vis a vis killings in Iraq. Cohen claims:

“Like so many others, Haw can't ask who is killing whom in Iraq. There are no slogans expressing his disgust at the death squads of the Baathists and Iranian-backed Shia militias, nor of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the late leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq…The best justification for Haw's morality is that if British and American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot guarantee order, they are indirectly responsible for atrocities committed by their opponents."

Notice here the key planks in Cohen’s non-argument. 1) Blame everyone else. He spits out the names of the usual suspects – Baathists, militias, Al Qaeda, etc – without recognizing the rather obvious and straightforward point that the fact that terrorists, insurgents and criminals are nowadays responsible for the bulk of the bloodshed in Iraq does not mean that we (the British, the Americans, the ‘allies’) are not also responsible for some share in that same bloodshed. After all, their killing of innocents do not preclude our own killing of innocents. 2) Assume only indirect responsibility. Cohen is willing to accept only that the occupying troops should be doing more to stem the violence (of others), rather than acknowledge our pro-active role in spreading violence, and his solution is for US and UK troops to inflict even more violence in the name of ‘counter-insurgency’, although he pretends that our violence has no consequences for the innocents of Iraq, no ‘collateral damage’ to apologize or be ashamed for.

As the massacres in Haditha and elsewhere reveal, however, the reality on the ground is a far cry from the distorted, deceptive and dishonest vision of Iraq promulgated by liberal hawks like Cohen.

Of course, Cohen is only the latest in a long line of pro-war liberal pundits (think Aaronovitch, think Hitchens, think Hari) who cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the fact that civilian deaths in Iraq are not simply the ‘indirect’ responsibility of the ‘benign’ occupying forces (i.e. the Americans and the Brits) but, in hundreds, nay thousands, nay hundreds of thousands of cases, the direct moral responsibility of the marauding militaries of the United States and United Kingdom.

Take the report from the leading epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health, published late last year in the renowned British medical journal the Lancet. It estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred. According to the study, of the total 655,000 estimated "excess deaths," 601,000 resulted from violence and the rest from disease and other causes. Crucially, out of those violent deaths, Iraqi households attributed 31 percent of the deaths to coalition forces – i.e. American and British troops, our troops, the ‘liberators’ of Iraq, have the blood of around 186,000 innocent Iraqi civilians on their hands.

There is simply no avoiding this fact. You can try and question the credibility of this report. You can try. But you’ll fail. One of the first to do so was George W. Bush, who said at the time: "Six-hundred thousand or whatever they guessed at is just... it's not credible." Of course, it is difficult to take lessons in credibility, science or statistics from a man who is virtually illiterate and innumerate and who has publicly described the inhabitants of Athens as "Grecians". It is especially difficult in light of the fact that the epidemiologists at John Hopkins University are amongst the finest in the world and their study was peer-reviewed before being published in the world-renowned Lancet to the widespread acclaim and approval of their academic colleagues – Professor Ronald Waldman, for example, an epidemiologist at Columbia University who worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for many years, called the survey method "tried and true," and added that "this is the best estimate of mortality we have." And despite the British government’s own pathetic public attempts to cast doubt on the report’s findings, the Ministry of Defence’s own chief scientific advisor said in an internal memo that the survey's methods were "close to best practice" and the study was "robust".

So that’s 655,000 excess deaths in Iraq, for which we are indirectly responsible. And 186,000 for which we are directly responsible. Yet, tragically, depressingly, we, the great British public, the great American public, the inhabitants of the self-proclaimed free world remain – like those Marines castigated for Haditha by General Bargewell in April – almost totally indifferent to and unmoved by the death and destruction that we have inflicted on the poor people of that castrated and defenceless nation.

Madeleine Bunting wrote in the Guardian in November:

“Can we claim innocence of the chaotic violence of Iraq now normalised into the background of our lives? …We’re numbed to the atrocities; except for some stalwarts, the initial anti-war activism has been crowded out by other responsibilities. Life goes on, even if in Baghdad it frequently doesn’t."

We are indeed numbed. Apathetic even. Uncaring and seemingly blind to the suffering we have caused. The responsibility for 186,000 deaths lies squarely at our own doorstep. Imagine: the equivalent of the entire population of Portsmouth or Luton wiped out by members of the US and UK armed forces in Iraq in less than four years. Should that not bother us? Should that not shame us? Perhaps. Or perhaps it is understandably difficult to envisage and fathom – after all, in the notorious words of Joseph Stalin “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.”

So let us consider an individual incident. Not a faceless statistic, but the real story of real deaths. The latest edition of the New York Review of Books includes an essay by the brilliant Michael Massing, in which he casts a light on a whole host of new books that he hopes will "impress on Americans the terrible human costs of the invasion". Massing quotes from one such book – House to House: An Epic Memoir of War – at the start of his essay, in which the author, Staff Sergeant David Bellavia, a gung-ho supporter of the war, casually recounts how in 2004, while his platoon was on just its second patrol in Iraq,

“…a civilian candy truck tried to merge with a column of our armored vehicles, only to get run over and squashed. The occupants were smashed beyond recognition. Our first sight of death was a man and his wife both ripped open and dismembered, their intestines strewn across shattered boxes of candy bars. The entire platoon hadn't eaten for twenty-four hours. We stopped, and as we stood guard around the wreckage, we grew increasingly hungry. Finally, I stole a few nibbles from one of the cleaner candy bars. Others wiped away the gore and fuel from the wrappers and joined me.”

Shocked? You should be. It’s not for no reason that the fiercely independent US journalist, Dahr Jamail, has written that “if the people of the United States had the real story about what their government has done in Iraq, the occupation would already have ended”. Of course, it has become the ideologically-charged job of pro-war, pro-government flacks like Nick Cohen in the Observer to prevent us from getting to grips with the truth of this “real story”; of death, destruction and destitution on a countrywide scale. In fact, how people like him sleep at night, I’ll never know.

Ironically, Cohen concludes Sunday’s article with this gem of a line: “I don't think the moral blindness of the intelligentsia can last much longer. Obviously, some who have lost their bearings after Iraq will never find them again and stagger around bellowing for the rest of their days…”

Thanks Nick - I couldn’t possibly have written a better description of you and your liberal, hawkish friends myself.