Iraq

100,000 Iraqi Civilians Killed - In the cause of neo-con imperialism

The Anglo-US invasion of Iraq was about many things. That Iraq had a stockpile of most lethal chemical and biological, maybe even nuclear, Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) enough to kill and destroy almost everything in Saddam Husain’s way; that the regime had strong links with Al-Qaeda; that the Iraqis, groaning under the heels of a particularly odious regime, were only waiting to be liberated; and that the invasion was implicitly authorised under the UN Security Council Resolution 1441. So they went in. It looked like a cakewalk, but then one by one each and every claim began to unravel as nothing more than a false pretence.

Even the tongue of the always right and never wrong US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, happened to slip and admit that he had not seen any ‘strong hard evidence’ linking Al-Qaeda with the Saddam regime. Nothing new really, explained former senior intelligence officer John Morrison in the British Ministry of Defence. Tony Blair, he said, had introduced ‘a culture of news management’ and ‘misuse of intelligence terminology’ to convey a fallacious impression of intelligence data. It was done during Operation Desert Fox (the bombing of Iraq in 1998) and later in Kosova.

After years of unofficially expressed doubts about the existence of Iraq’s alleged WMD, on 30 September 2004 the Iraq Survey Group’s submitted its final report, a 1000-page document, declaring at last that Iraq had not maintained an active programme to develop WMD after the 1992 Gulf War and it had no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons when the US invaded the country last March.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who has generally chosen to acquiesce in US view, too had to admit finally in a BBC World Service interview (16 September 2004) that the invasion of Iraq ‘was not in conformity with the UN Charter, from our point of view, from the charter point of view, it was illegal’.

The brunt of this blatant, illegality and falsehood was, however, to be borne by the people of Iraq. According to a first scientific study conducted for the British medical journal Lancet, about 100,000 Iraqi civilians – half of them women and children – have died in Iraq since the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. These fatalities have been mostly caused by air strikes by coalition forces.

The study was led by Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, USA, who notes that the figure of 100,000 is based on ‘conservative assumptions’ and excludes the resistance hotspot Falluja. If the data for Falluja too is included, the study says, the invasion death toll would exceed 200,000.

The team of US and Iraqis scientists recorded mortality during the 15 months before the invasion and the 18 months afterwards until September 2004. They carried out a survey of 988 Iraqi households in 33 areas across Iraq selected randomly using a global positioning system unit. ‘Before the invasion, most Iraqis died of heart attacks, stroke and chronic illness. But the risk of a violent death was now 58 times higher than it was before the invasion.

’The research was completed under the most testing of circumstances – an ongoing war. And therefore certain limitations were inevitable and need to be acknowledged right away,’ says The Lancelot editor Richard Horton. He assumes that ‘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,’ yet he finds that from a public health perspective, whatever ‘planning did take place was grievously in error’. He, therefore, calls for an ‘urgent political and military response’ to this unacceptably high rate of civilian killings.

The British response was, however, to quibble and question the methodology used in the investigation. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw found the figure very high and referred instead to the Iraq Body Count website figure of 16,000 which was based on western press reports. The ministry of defence would rather wait for the Iraqi government’s official figures. It was starting to compile the death data and according to estimates, between 15 April 2003 and 25 September 2004, 3,500 Iraqis had been killed and 14,500 injured. However, realising that the Iraqi government estimates were too ludicrous to be of any help in any serious discussion, the ministry skirted the very question of numbers. ‘The government thinks there is no reliable figure,’ said a defence official. ‘We would be guessing if we tried to give a total number of casualties.’

The most famous aphorism in this regards has, however, come from US General Tommy Franks who was widely quoted as saying, ‘we don’t do body counts.’ It was not so much a how many dead, it was about why innocent Iraqi civilians were being killed indiscriminately and incrementally by artillery, helicopter gun ships or other forms of aerial weaponry.

What should be of more serious concern was this neocon culture of terror and aggression that was totally devoid of even basic humanity yet claimed to be engaged in a battle to defend civic values and civilisation. The likes of Franks seemed hardly bothered by the fact that occupying armies have responsibilities under the Geneva Convention and violating them could be a crime against humanity.

As Dr Horton asserts: ‘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.’

Even a compliant and compromising Kofi Annan was now saying that the Iraq war has not made the world safer against terrorism and done little to increase security. ‘I cannot say the world is safer when you consider the violence around us, when you look around you and see the terrorist attacks around the world and you see what is going on in Iraq.’

For the Iraqis though, especially in the resistance triangle, death and destruction have become a matter of daily routine, US-led occupation forces getting more and more sucked into a quagmire. This is a battle they are neither able to win nor do they have the sense to walk away from gracefully.

‘How will this war be won? What will victory look like?’ Earlier this October, someone asked the neocon hawk, the deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz. Elementary, he said. We hold elections in Iraq in January. The resulting transitional government writes a constitution. That government will run Iraq for a year until elections at the end of 2005 produce a permanent fully independent government. By then, he said, we will have trained several Iraqi army divisions and, equally important, 50 or more battalions of the Iraqi National guard, the domestic stability force.

This indeed was the exit strategy, which was to set up an Iraqi government and an Iraqi security force to fight the resistance, allowing the Americans to pull back and, eventually, to withdraw.

If the interim government headed by an old-time Ba’athist and CIA asset, Ayad Allawi, was supposed to provide an Iraqi cover for the Anglo-American forces and keep them our of harm’s way, the arrangement has not worked. The puppet regime, besieged in the garrisoned safety of a fortified ‘Green Zone’, was itself in need of protection by occupation forces.

Ayad Allawi too is desperate about the elections being held in January 2005, hopefully to legitimise his regime. But to be able to hold the election, he has to crush the resistance. He told President Bush when he saw him earlier in September that if he let the coalition troops to do this, it might fuel greater insurgency against ‘occupation’. He, therefore, asked Bush for more training and more equipment for the interim government forces.

Back in Baghdad, Ayad Allawi sent a letter to Bush, stressing again the urgency of this situation and urging him to fast track the American training programme. Otherwise, he wrote, the forces he required would not be ready until well after the January elections. He said he needed at least two trained mechanised divisions to make an effective show of force.

For some reasons, however, Americans do not seem to trust the Iraqis with tanks. One can, therefore, detect a little emerging tension – if a puppet can be allowed the luxury of being tense with its master, that is, between Ayad Allawi and the US. The Americans are looking to enlist other collaborators from the former Ba’ath party; it seems the US has not really written off its senior agent Ahmad Chalabi.

Right now the exit strategy both in London and Washington seemed predicated very much upon holding the election in January 2005. However, the elections themselves depended on pacifying the Resistance around Baghdad and in Central Iraq. Meanwhile, Falluja and other towns in the triangle were being pounded daily by artillery fire and air strike and an all out ground attack seemed imminent.

But Interim President Ghazi al-Yawar says, ‘the coalition’s handling of this crisis is wrong. It’s like someone who fired bullets at his horse’s head just because a fly landed on it; the horse died and the fly went away.’ He totally disagreed with those who saw a need to decide Falluja through military action. An al out attack was likely to backfire and trigger a general uprising.

Ghazi al-Yawar suggests the coalition forces hold their fire and hold dialogue with resistance leaders until the Iraqi forces were ready on the ground. That was a tactical assumption that the resistance would somehow give up resisting and everything would be fine afterwards. But so far Iraq has disproved almost each and every assumption and calculation that had informed the neocon strategy of changing the regime in Baghdad and changing all the Arab world. The resistance, however, wants all foreign forces to leave their country.