Posted by Nicholas | Consider this. A body has a cancer, and after the doctors have excised it, they lop off some limbs and rip out a few other organs that were completely uninfected and unaffected. Or, if carcinogenic hypotheses make you uneasy, think about your house – a small fine in one of the rooms. Along come the fire-fighters who douse the flames but they also smash the rest of the building to pieces and use their hoses to soak all that therein is, making the place uninhabitable. Do you thank the doctors and the fire-fighters or, in spite of the good thing they at first did for you, do you begin to resent and then hate them?
Think about that for a moment, and them let us turn our thoughts once again to Iraq. Saddam has gone: chased from office almost as soon as the invasion began, and despatched at the end of a rope in a barbaric procedure from another age. Except for Saddam’s cronies, few mourned his fall from power. Were we not all delighted by the sight of his statue toppling to the ground? Iraq rejoiced, and we shared her pleasure.
Does Iraq still rejoice? In a masterpiece of bad planning, which could only have been devised by strategists whose knowledge of the region and its people was almost zero, the entire country was thrown open to looters and thieves, with the result that all government offices were trashed, records destroyed and the nation’s administrative infrastructure was destroyed. The nation’s physical infrastructure was also destroyed, and continues to be. An estimated 400,000 people were displaced – in plain English, made homeless. Iraqi refugees have fled to every country in the region, to the extent that some of them, notably Saudi Arabia and Jordan, are closing their borders to them.
The figures for coalition army deaths are well known and available: approximately 3500 Americans, 150 British, and lower figures for another dozen or so nations. There has been far less clarity about how many Iraqi civilians have been slaughtered. It makes the supporters of this war uneasy to contemplate this. They also seem to feel that the question is an irritant, to be avoided at all costs. There’s a sense that, hey, we liberated them so they shouldn’t feel too bad about dying, and anyway they’re Ay-rabs so they don’t really count. Totals of the Iraqi dead vary widely, and are often blurred and heavily qualified, when they are mentioned at all.
Now, though, we have a figure to stop us in our tracks. 655,000 dead Iraqi civilians. This doesn’t come from a subversive organization or a hotbed of anti-establishment agitation – it comes from the most respected medical publication in the world, The Lancet. They calculate that as a result of the war, and the destruction of Iraq and its workings, that number of civilians have died. You can read about The Lancet’s their findings here, and the methodology used to reach this figure.
They have no axe to grind. The Lancet has no vested interest in either a high or low figure, unlike other bodies which have reported their own versions of the Iraqi body count. The Lancet’s figure is carefully arrived at and is remarkable on many sad levels. It is higher than the number of Vietnamese civilians who were killed in the ten years of that war. It is higher than the number of German civilians who died in the Second World War. It is higher, let it be said, than the number of Iraqis killed by Saddam during his long years in power. So, do you cure the patient of cancer if you kill him in the process?
655,000 dead Iraqis, and every time an innocent civilian dies as a result of this illegal war, the emotions of anger and revenge in those who survive spawn more terrorists, even among those who danced for joy when Saddam was ousted.
655,000 dead Iraqis. Bush and Blair must be very proud.
***This posting also appears at A Gentleman's Domain***
Comments