The prestigious British medical journal The Lancet has published a study estimating the number of Iraqi civilian deaths to date as a result of Bush's War: Conflict May Have Killed 100,000 Iraqis, Report Says Los Angeles Times 10/29/04.
As many as 100,000 Iraqis may have been killed, most of them by violence, as a result of the U.S.-led invasion, American public health experts estimated in a report released Thursday.
There is no official figure for the number of Iraqis killed since the conflict began, but some nongovernmental estimates had put the number between 10,000 and 30,000. More than 1,100 U.S. service personnel have died. ...
Designed and conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, the study was published Thursday on the website of the Lancet medical journal.
The survey indicated that airstrikes from coalition forces caused most of the violent deaths, the researchers wrote.
"The use of air power in areas with lots of civilians appears to be killing a lot of women and children," Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health said in an interview.
Juan Cole has a good brief discussion of the significance of the report, including some appropriate cautions about its methodology: US Has Killed 100,000 in Iraq: The Lancet, Informed Comment blog 10/29/04.
The article is available online if you want to take a minute or two to register: Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey The Lancet 10/30/04.
The fact that most of the deaths are due to the heavy use of air power is important to understand. The "Rumsfeldian" notion of "military transformation" has to do with an intense faith in the use of air power as a technological miracle solution that will allow the US to win wars with minimal US casualties. But it has a cost in real lives, costs that eventually translate into military shortcomings for the US forces, as we see now in Iraq. The heavy number of civilian casualties becomes a major incentive for people to support the insurgents, or to withhold support from the pro-US interim government.
The following from the body of the report goes to a very basic issue in the Bush dynasty's approach to military transformation, which is a key part of the neoconservative strategy:
Despite widespread Iraqi casualties, household interview data do not show evidence of widespread wrongdoing on the part of individual soldiers on the ground. To the contrary, only three of 61 incidents (5%) involved coalition soldiers (all reported to be American by the respondents) killing Iraqis with small arms fire. In one of the three cases, the 56-year-old man killed might have been a combatant. In a second case, a 72-year-old man was shot at a checkpoint. In the third, an armed guard was mistaken for a combatant and shot during a skirmish. In the latter two cases, American soldiers apologised to the families of the decedents forthe killings, indicating a clear understanding of the adverse consequences of their use of force. The remaining 58 killings (all attributed to US forces by interviewees) were caused by helicopter gunships, rockets, or other forms of aerial weaponry.
Many of the Iraqis reportedly killed by US forces could have been combatants. 28 of 61 killings (46%) attributed to US forces involved men age 15–60 years, 28 (46%) were children younger than 15 years, four (7%) were women, and one was an elderly man. It is not clear if the greater number of male deaths was attributable to legitimate targeting of combatants who may have been disproportionately male, or if this was because men are more often in public and more likely to be exposed to danger. For example, seven of 12 (58%) vehicle accidentrelated fatalities involved men between 15 and 60 years of age.
US General Tommy Franks is widely quoted as saying “we don’t do body counts”. The Geneva Conventions have clear guidance about the responsibilities of occupying armies to the civilian population they control. The fact that more than half the deaths reportedly caused by the occupying forces were women and children is cause for concern. In particular, Convention IV, Article 27 states that protected persons “. . . shallbe at all times humanely treated, and shall be protected especially against acts of violence . . .”. It seems difficult to understand how a military force could monitor the extent to which civilians are protected against violence without systematically doing body counts or at least looking at the kinds of casualties they induce. This survey shows that with modest funds, 4 weeks, and seven Iraqi team members willing to risk their lives, a useful measure of civilian deaths could be obtained. There seems to be little excuse for occupying forces to not be able to provide more precise tallies. In view of the political importance of this conflict, these results should be confirmed by an independent body such as the ICRC, Epicentre, or WHO. In the interim, civility and enlightened self-interest demand a re-evaluation of the consequences of weaponry now used by coalition forces in populated areas.
In an editorial comment accompanying the article, Richard Horton writes:
[T]hese findings also raise questions for those far removed from Iraq—in the governments of the countries responsible for launching a pre-emptive war. In planning this war, the coalition forces—especially those of the US and UK—must have considered the likely effects of their actions for civilians. And these consequences presumably influenced deployments of armed forces, provision of supplies, and investments in building a safe and secure physical and human infrastructure in the post-war setting. With the admitted benefit of hindsight and from a purely public health perspective, it is clear that whatever planning did take place was grievously in error. The invasion of Iraq, the displacement of a cruel dictator, and the attempt to impose a liberal democracy by force have, by themselves, been insufficient to bring peace and security to the civilian population. Democratic imperialism has led to more deaths
not fewer. This political and military failure continues to cause scores of casualties among non-combatants. It is a failure that deserves to be a serious subject for research. But this report is more than a piece of academic investigation. [my emphasis]
A vital principle of public health is harm reduction. But harm cannot be diminished by individual members of society alone. The lives of Iraqis are currently being shaped by the policies of the occupying forces and the militant insurgents. For the occupiers, winning the peace now demands a thorough reappraisal of strategy and tactics to prevent further unnecessary human casualties. For the sake of a country in crisis and for a people under daily threat of violence, the evidence that we publish today must change heads as well as pierce hearts.
This report emphasizes an important point made by Helana Cobban earlier this year in The Myth of Humanitarian War, 'Just World News' blog 07/15/04:
This business of--whether retroactively or pro-actively--pinning a 'humanitarian' label on a war has undergone a bit of a revival in recent years. Remember Kosovo, 1999? Remember Bosnia, before then?
But trying to claim that any war can be 'humanitarian' is fundamentally dishonest. No war is 'humanitarian', ever. War sucks. War kills people; and by design it is a blatant attack on their most basic human rights--their rights to life, to physical security, to the pre-conditions of material and mental wellbeing. To pretend that any war serves 'humanitarian' aims is fundamentally to ignore those most evident facts about war--facts that too many Americans seem to have forgotten, if indeed they ever knew them.
Interlude for a seldom-pondered fact here. Almost no governments have ever launched military adventures far from their own borders without citing 'humanitarian' war aims... Nearly all the distant imperial conquests undertaken by European powers in past centuries were cloaked in great clouds of 'humanitarian' rhetoric... Perhaps this is connected to the fact that no government ever invites its people to mobilize for an 'unjust' or even 'unjustified' war? Every government, after all, likes to present itself as good, not greedy, overbearing, and grasping.
Those who claim that they support the US invasion of Iraq for the noble purpose of freeing Iraqis from a terrible, brutal tyranny should take this report on civilian casualties in The Lancet with the greatest of seriousness.
Most of them, of course, will not. Most of the Iraq War fans don't care at all about the well-being of the Iraqi people. Never have, never will.
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