[THS] 5 Million Iraqis Killed, Maimed, Tortured, Displaced

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25790.htm


5 Million Iraqis Killed, Maimed, Tortured, Displaced
Think That Bothers War Boosters Like Christopher Hitchens?

By Fred Branfman

June 22, 2010 "AlterNet" -- In 1970 a Lao villager who had survived five years of U.S.
bombing wrote: "In reality, whatever happens, it is only the innocent who suffer. And
as for the others, do they know all the unimaginable things happening in this war?
Do they?"

Do we? And if we did know about the innocent men, women and children our
leaders kill, would it matter? Does it matter that those who justified the Iraqi invasion
in the name of the people of Iraq have largely ignored their unimaginable suffering
under U.S. occupation, as more than 5 million civilians have been murdered,
maimed, made homeless, unjustly imprisoned and tortured -- and millions more
impoverished? Would war supporters serve themselves and their nation if they wrote
about both the humanity and suffering of, say, just 10 Iraqi victims -- and sought to
convey how each represents at least 500,000 more? Is the suffering our leaders inflict
on innocent civilians relevant to deciding whether to support our present war-making
in Afghanistan and Pakistan? Would it matter if the N.Y. Times had run daily profiles
and photos of Iraqi civilian victims since 2003, as it did of U.S. victims after 9/11?

Such questions are raised by Christopher Hitchens' recently published best-selling
memoir, Hitch-22, in which he proudly claims to have helped cause the invasion of
Iraq as the most prominent of a group of war hawks ("by which political Washington
was eventually persuaded that Iraq should be helped into a post-Saddam era, if
necessary by force”), but entirely ignores the human cost that followed. No one
spoke more eloquently of the Iraqi people’s suffering before the invasion. Thus his
indifference to it since has been striking.

The key issue is not what this reveals about Hitchens' soul but about America's. His
memoir epitomizes one of the most chilling phenomena of our time: a growing
“nonhumanity” in which our leaders and their supporters claim to wage war on
behalf of a foreign people but are largely indifferent to their suffering. (Full
disclosure:  when Hitchens was writing his book about Henry Kissinger, he
interviewed me about Kissinger's mass murder of Laotian rice-farmers.)

Citizens take on no more solemn role than when they convert a personal opinion into
the political act of publicly promoting violence by their nation's leaders. Debating
health care, gay marriage or Wall Street reform is one thing; promoting policies that
wind up killing innocent human beings quite another. Whether they acknowledge it
or not, those advocating war assume a moral responsibility for its innocent victims.
Or, more plainly, they have their blood upon their hands.

This blood can be easily justified in a hypothetical case of "humanitarian
intervention," e.g. imagining that Bill Clinton had successfully used military force to
stop the Rwandan genocide. It is also easy to justify war when only hated political
leaders or groups are discussed: “Saddam Hussein,” “Ahmadinejad,” “the Taliban” –
and the civilian population, always the main victims in war, are treated as nonpeople.
But an honest evaluation of war in a case like Iraq requires a far more serious moral
calculus.

The Immensity of Iraqi Civilian Suffering

Taking seriously one's responsibility for promoting war in Iraq requires more than
simply listing the war's human benefits, such as removing the genuinely evil Saddam,
increased power for the long-suppressed Kurds and Shiites, limited movement
toward free elections, a parliamentary democracy and free press. Such benefits must
be weighed against the suffering of millions of innocent Iraqis, including:

-- Nearly 5 million refugees: “Counting both internal and external refugees, the Office
of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that nearly
5 million of Iraq’s population of 24 million have been uprooted during the conflict,”
the N.Y. Review of Books reported on May 13, 2010.  This is the equivalent of 60
million Americans by percentage of population. Five-hundred thousand are homeless
squatters within Iraq, whose "settlements all lack basic services, including water,
sanitation and electricity and are built in precarious places -- under bridges,
alongside railroad tracks and amongst garbage dumps" according to Refugees
International in March 2010. The emigration of 2-3 million Iraqis to refugee camps in
Syria and other Mideast countries decimated Iraq's educated middle class, with some
daughters forced to become prostitutes and sons menial laborers just to keep their
families alive.

-- Hundreds of thousands dead and wounded: Estimates of dead civilians range from
100,000 documented cases by Iraq Body Count, which acknowledged in October
2004 that “our own total is certain to be an underestimate of the true position,
because of gaps in reporting or recording” to over one million by a John Hopkins
University group. A basic rule of thumb in war is that for every person killed, two
have been wounded.

-- Tens of thousands of innocents imprisoned, many tortured: In an article headlined
"In Iraq, A Prison Full of Innocent Men," the Washington Post reported that "100,000
prisoners have passed through the American-run detention system in Iraq," that Iraqi
Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi says that "most of the people they detain are
innocent,” but that prisoners are not permitted to prove their innocence. Conditions
have been even worse in the secret torture chambers run for five years by General
Stanley McChrystal, from which all outside observers including the Red Cross have
been excluded. Salon's Glenn Greenwald recently reported that "72% of
Guantanamo detainees who finally were able to obtain just minimal due process --
after years of being in a cage without charges -- have been found by federal judges
to be wrongfully detained." Countless innocent Iraqis have been regularly tortured.

-- Millions more who lack jobs, electricity, water and health care: Reuters reported on
June 6 that "according to government statistics cited by the ICRC (the Red Cross),
one in four of Iraq's people does not have access to safe drinking water." The
unofficial unemployment rate is estimated to be as high as 30 percent, security is
shaky, the entire non-oil economy decimated. "As recently as the 1980s, Iraq was
self-sufficient in producing wheat, rice, fruits, vegetables, and sheep and poultry
products. Its industrial sector exported textiles and leather goods, including purses
and shoes, as well as steel and cement. But wars, sanctions, poor management,
international competition and disinvestment have left each industry a shadow of its
former self," the N.Y. Times has reported. It also reported on June 20 that “(Basra’s)
poorer neighborhoods, by far the majority, often have just one hour of electricity a
day, a situation not uncommon in Baghdad and other regions. The temperature in
Basra on Saturday was 113 degrees.”



War advocates are correct, of course, that much of the responsibility for this suffering
rests with Iraqi and Al-Qaeda extremists who have no compunction about inflicting
civilian casualties. But this in no way absolves them and the U.S. of their own
responsibility for Iraqi civilian suffering, both directly from U.S. war-making and
indirectly by the U.S. failing to meet its legal responsibilities as an occupying power to
provide security for the civilian population.

Nonhumanity, Not Inhumanity

U.S. leaders killed large numbers of civilians during World War II, of course, in an
earlier age of "inhumanity" marked by the depredations of Hitler, Stalin and Mao. But
they did so relatively openly. They did not claim, for example, that only “enemy
insurgents” were killed at Dresden, and Americans relatively soon learned what had
happened at Hiroshima.


It was only as U.S. leaders constructed America's first global empire after 1945 --
increasingly waging secret, massive, illegal and unconstitutional bombing campaigns
in countries like Laos and Cambodia, refusing to even acknowledge the countless
civilian deaths they caused throughout Indochina, failing to help rebuild it after the
war, and supporting savage local dictators and policies destroying local economies
around the world -- that they created a new age of "nonhumanity." By now U.S.
leaders’ Third World victims -- whom they have neither acknowledged nor made
amends for -- number in the tens of millions.

We have entered a new Orwellian age in which continuous "fighting ... takes place
on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at," and
its innocent victims are simply airbrushed out of history. Nothing symbolizes this
nonhumanity more than U.S. leaders’ use of the term “collateral damage” to refer to
millions of innocent human beings who have as much right to their lives as those who
so mercilessly snuff them out. Generals Tommy Franks and Colin Powell say "we don't
do civilians" when asked how many civilians they kill, and their countrymen are so
indifferent to civilian murder that no one even asks why not. Who is in a better
position to discover how many innocent men, women and children U.S. leaders kill,
and help them avoid further civilian murder? The only act more nonhuman than not
caring is killing civilians in the first place.

U.S. indifference to civilian suffering is particularly noticeable in the case of "liberal
war hawks" who justified the Iraq invasion on humanitarian grounds but then largely
ignored its human costs as much as conservatives who do not even claim concern for
the civilians they destroy. Slate, for example, asked an online panel of 10 such folks
in March 2008 -- when civilian victims were in the millions -- to explain how they had
gotten the Iraqi war wrong.

While all but one (Christopher Hitchens: "How Did I Get Iraq Wrong? I Didn't")
acknowledged error, and a number expressed pain over civilian suffering, the
reasons listed for their mistakes included misjudging "Bush's sense of morality," "I
wanted to strike back," "I believed the groupthink," “I didn't realize how incompetent
the Bush administration could be,” and the "the self-centeredness and sectarianism
of the ruling elite."

All failed to acknowledge their own moral blindness in failing to imagine what millions
of their fellow Americans clearly saw: the havoc that the U.S. war-machine would
inevitably wreak on innocent Iraqi civilians whatever its stated intentions or claimed
benefits.

U.S. Responsibility For Civilian Suffering in Iraq

One of the panelists – the diplomat Phillip Carter -- did, however, make a key point.
After explaining how a former Iraqi law professor he worked with was presumably
killed by Al-Qaeda, Carter wrote, "I felt guilty for not doing more to protect him. I felt
guilty for not doing more 
 to make Iraq safe.” His words point to the considerable
U.S. responsibility for post-invasion civilian suffering, whether caused by its own
troops or others. An occupier assumes not only moral but legal responsibility for
ensuring the safety of civilians in the zones it occupies. By both disbanding the Iraqi
army and not using its own forces to maintain law and order U.S. leaders failed that
responsibility, which was thus not merely a “mistake” but a war crime.

And America bears an even greater responsibility for the direct suffering it has
caused. Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian explored
U.S.-inflicted civilian suffering by interviewing 50 American veterans who had fought
in Iraq.

Their book Collateral Damage reports how U.S. soldiers, unprepared for urban
warfare and understandably terrified, have regularly killed, wounded, arrested and
humiliated countless Iraqi civilians -- at checkpoints, by driving recklessly in convoys,
in early morning searches, and by firing indiscriminately in response to IEDs and
enemy fire. "The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder," Hedges writes. "Human
beings are machine-gunned and bombed from the air, automatic grenade launchers
pepper hovels and neighbors with high-powered explosive devices, and convoys race
through Iraq like freight trains of death."  U.S. soldiers also revealed how, though
this behavior violated official rules of engagement, the rules were ignored and
required reports either not filed or falsified.

Collateral Damage and  the N.Y. Review of Books article cited above illustrate another
key point: Americans can report on civilian suffering if they choose.  Washington Post
columnist David Ignatius has written that "when you see my byline from Kandahar or
Kabul or Basra, you should not think that I am out among ordinary people, asking
questions of all sides. I am usually inside an American military bubble." But there is
nothing stopping him and other war supporters from leaving their bubbles to report
on the civilian suffering they helped produce, any more than the N.Y. Times is
prevented from taking Iraq’s civilian dead as serious as American ones.

Christopher Hitchens'  Memoirs: A Textbook Case of Non-Humanity

Chris Hedges' concern for post-invasion civilian suffering contrasts sharply with
Hitchens' memoirs. Ample time has passed for Hitchens to provide a moral reckoning
of the human costs and benefits of the invasion, and to apologize to both Iraqi
victims and the millions of antiwar Americans whose concerns about post-invasion
civilian suffering have proven so much more accurate than his own -- and whose
personhood he so demeaned with  epithets like "moral imbeciles," "noisy morons,"
"overbred and gutless," "naive" and "foolish."

Hitchens’ memoirs provide a textbook case of nonhumanity. For while proudly
bragging of helping cause the invasion, he does not even mention let alone
acknowledge responsibility for the civilian suffering to which it led.

He writes movingly, for example, of a fine young American, Mark Daily, who
volunteered to fight in Iraq partly because of Hitchens’ pro-war writings and died
heroically protecting his fellow-soldiers. But Hitchens does not mention even one of
the countless Iraqis who did not volunteer to have their lives destroyed following the
invasion he claimed would help them. He properly befriended Daily's parents, but
does not discuss a single Iraqi parent among hundreds of thousands whose loss is
equally great.

And he does not even mention the overall scale of Iraqi civilian suffering under U.S.
occupation: 5-10 million murdered, maimed, homeless, unjustly imprisoned, tortured
and impoverished innocent civilians have all been consigned to the dustbin of his –
and America's -- history.

Ignoring post-invasion civilian suffering, of course, also allows Hitchens to avoid his
and America’s responsibility for it. He instead admits and then excuses himself for far
smaller errors, e.g. writing that "it is here that I ought to make my most painful self-
criticisms ... What I should have been asking Wolfowitz was `does the Army Corps of
Engineers have a generator big enough to turn the lights of Baghdad back on? 

But, not being a professional soldier or quartermaster 
I rather tended to assume
that things of this practical sort were being taken care of.”

The Iraqi people’s post-invasion agony is also trivialized by Hitchens’ ongoing
attempts to blame the “left" for Saddam's crimes because they failed to rally to his
call to invade and occupy Iraq. By that logic any people who hate their leader but do
not support being invaded and occupied indefinitely by U.S. troops are responsible
for their own misery.



But, in any event, it is obvious that pre-invasion issues are entirely separate from his
and America’s responsibility for the unspeakable civilian horror that has followed it. As
Iraq Body Count has noted, “Amnesty International
  estimated that violent deaths
attributable to Saddam's government numbered at most in the hundreds during the
years immediately leading up to 2003. Those wishing to make the "more lives
ultimately saved" argument will need to make their comparisons with the number of
civilians likely to have been killed had Saddam Hussein's reign continued into
2003-2004, not in comparison to the number of deaths for which he was responsible
in the 1980s and early 1990s.”

We have words to describe the act of seeking moral acclaim for helping an individual
whose life one harms – “hypocritical” or “shameless” come to mind. But we lack even
the thought-category to describe claiming moral credit for aiding an entire people
while ignoring one’s responsibility for the broken lives of millions of them.

Many Americans may find themselves called upon to invent such words in coming
years, as the mentality that has treated millions of foreigners as nonpeople
increasingly affects American lives at home.

Nonhumanity Abroad, Nonhumanity At Home

In today's interconnected world, the West ignoring its civilian victims is increasing
both terrorism and mass displacements of political and economic refugees. Increased
terrorism and anti-illegal immigrant hysteria threaten American lives, political chaos
and increasing police-state measures such as the wiretapping of U.S. citizens and
Arizona’s recent immigration law. U.S. leaders’ nonhumanity abroad is increasingly
affecting domestic security at home.

The most fundamental question for Americans is whether they too will be treated as
nonpeople by U.S. elites should America now be entering a period of long economic
decline and resulting political instability -- as has already occurred for those
homeowners tricked out of their life savings by Wall Street. Will America respond to
hard times as it did in the 1930s by expanding the safety net, taxing the rich and
spending to combat unemployment? Or will its elites move to secure their own wealth
and respond to the protests this will inevitably create with harsh measures?

Any American who tries to look at U.S. leaders from the perspective of a Lao refugee,
an innocent Iraqi prisoner, a Haitian slum-dweller or a Helmand housewife terrorized
at the prospect of the next U.S. offensive, can only shudder at such questions.
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