Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

A recent US opinion poll has found that respondents’ median estimate of Iraqi deaths resulting from the March 2003 invasion is 9,890.

This is considerably less than the most recent Presidential estimate in December 2005, that 30,000 Iraqi civilians “more or less” have perished as a result of the invasion. (But then who could blame US citizens for not particularly heeding this President.)

On the other hand, the poll found that respondents’ estimation of US military deaths is “right on target” at about 3,000. And...

Given a range of possible words to describe their feelings about the overall situation in Iraq, people were most likely to identify with “worried,” selected by 81 per cent of those surveyed.

It’s, of course, possible to overstate the sagacity of popular wisdom. While the numbers remain and are forever in flux, commonsense seems increasingly uncommon.

Sidney Blumenthal:

"Deep within the bowels of the Pentagon, policy planners are conducting secret meetings to discuss what to do in the worst-case scenario in Iraq about a year from today if and when President Bush's escalation of more than 20,000 troops fails, a participant in those discussions told me."

Well, let's see. What if the Americans leave Iraq. The Left psuedo intelligentsia in the West will initially join with their Sunni militia and Islamist allies - the, cough, cough, "resistance" - in celebrating their "victory" over the Americans. Thus allowing the government of Iraq, freely elected by a huge turnout of those eligible to vote, to fend for itself against the Syrian backed Sunni militias, foreign Islamist adventurers, Iranian backed Shiite militias and various other anti-democratic tendencies, such as Sadr's private armies. The Islamists will do everything they can possibly manage to create as much chaos and bloodshed as possible, expecting God to intervene at any moment and thank them for killing as many women and kids as can be fitted into the market places and Mosques of Iraq. The Sunni militias, on the other hand, will imagine they can capitalise on the chaos to shove the Shiite genie back into the bottle.  The Shiites, with complete justification, will do whatever they can to defend themselves against the depredations of the malignant, reactionary Sunni militias and the maniacal Islamist mass-murderers.

In other words, you'd have a situation on the ground something like that in Gaza since the Israeli withdrawal - only on a scale more comparable with what prevailed in Germany after 1919. The Shiites will start ethnic cleansing the southern Iraqi provinces, aided and abetted by Tehran who will work with its proxies in Iraq with a view to annexing the southern Iraqi provinces for Iran. The Kurds will declare their independence. Iran will annex the southern provinces. The pinko psuedo intelligentsia in the West will denounce the Kurds as "traitors" or "running dogs of Zion" according to instructions from whoever is supplying them with big enough cash payments or holidays in Bahrain. Did I say 'George Galloway'?

Panicked, the Sunni militias will coalesce into an army of sorts - and will call on Syria to help them.  Syria will "help" them just like it "helped" Lebanon.  A banner reading "We are all Syrians now" will appear at a London "peace" rally in support of the Syrian "liberation" of Iraq. Iran will invade southern Iraq. And Kurdistan. No one will ever mention the Kurds again. Nor will they ever be seen again.

Bob Brown will make an impassioned speech in the Senate calling on the prime Minister to "for God's sake call on our allies to help the Kurds." He will then spend the following 20 years trying to gather up every copy of Hansard he can find to shred them. The Iranian armed forces will kick the living shit out of the corrupt and incompetent Syrians who in turn will be surprised at finding themselves picking on someone actually larger than Lebanon for once. The Iranians will round up millions of Sunnis and kill them. Strictly for "peaceful" purposes, though. The pinko psuedo intelligentsia in the West will deny any such thing has happened, even writing books to 'prove" that it was all Western media lies. The pinko psuedo intelligentsia in the West will finally admit such thing has happened, even writing books to "prove" that it was all the fault of Western politicians who were too cowardly to stay and defend the Sunnis against the Shiites and Iranians. Bob Brown will try to put the shredded copies of Hansard back together again. The pinko psuedo intelligentsia in the West will deny it ever supported the Iraqi "resistance". John Pilger will make a television documentary for Channel 4 'proving' that the Iranians were backed all along by Donald Rumsfeld. Someone will publish a picture of Rummy shaking hands with the Iranian Ambassador to the UN in 1984 as proof of this. It will later turn out that the Iranian Ambassador to the UN in 1984 was actually Rummy's gardener or chauffeur or something. The London Sun will unearth a video of George Galloway promising Ayatollah Ali Khamenei 'a really good time' if he could just have a slice of the action on some natural gas sales to China.

G'day Jacob, dark days do seem likely, except for those who create their own reality. Here is an article by Sidney Blumenthal about Pentagon planning, the NIE and political games.

Feb. 8, 2007 | Deep within the bowels of the Pentagon, policy planners are conducting secret meetings to discuss what to do in the worst-case scenario in Iraq about a year from today if and when President Bush's escalation of more than 20,000 troops fails, a participant in those discussions told me. None of those who are taking part in these exercises, shielded from the public view and the immediate scrutiny of the White House, believes that the so-called surge will succeed. On the contrary, everyone thinks it will not only fail to achieve its aims but also accelerate instability by providing a glaring example of U.S. incapacity and incompetence.

And on the NIE:

The report described an Iraqi government, army and police force that cannot meet these challenges in any foreseeable time frame and a reversal of "the negative trends driving Iraq's current trajectory" occurring only through a dream sequence in which all the warring sects and factions, in some unexplained way, suddenly make peace with one another. Nor does the NIE suggest that this imaginary scenario might ever come to pass. Instead, it proceeds to describe the potential for "an abrupt increase in communal and insurgent violence and a shift in Iraq's trajectory from gradual decline to rapid deterioration with grave humanitarian, political, and security consequences."

Despite the usual mantra all that occurs results from the invasion - refer back to the reason a war of aggression is the worst crime under international law.

 Jacob A. Stam: "Thanks, C Parsons, for drawing us back to the hideous weekend bombing in Baghdad, which presents an opportunity for all of us to protest, however impotently, at yet another depraved atrocity."

Oh, there's heaps more to come. Last night's SBS doco on the power of religious fundamentalism gave some indication as why. I was particularly impressed by the logic of an Islamist philosopher, formerly a chicken farmer from Algeria, who argued that everyone should be killed because they are all corrupt.  Not just 'everyone' in Algeria. Or even merely 'everyone' in Iraq. But 'everyone'. Except himself and his hardy band of mujihadeen, of course.

There were the mandatory cack-handled BBC/SBS attempts to equate this sort of logic with Christian fundamentalism. I'm no fan of Christian fundamentalism by any measure, but protesting on street corners against abortion and calling for the ban on prayer in school rooms to be overturned is not the same as deliberately, systematically killing thousands of your co-religionists and machine gunning passing bus parties of Japanese tourists to death because they are 'corrupt'.

So too in Iraq. The civilian population of Iraq is being hunted down like dogs by this filth because they had the temerity to participate in elections, even letting women vote, or otherwise by upsetting the natural ethnic and political order of Mesopotamia by 'collaborating' with the Zionist Infidel occupier. The civilian population of Iraqi is being targetted by the Ku Klux Resistance because they are the enemy. If you can shoot down the odd US helicopter or two, that's good for a soundbite or two on CNN and CBS. But let's not forget who the real enemy is. It's those kids over there wating for lollies outside the Mosque, so fuck 'em because they deserve to die.

But, we cannot afford to be choosy. Those are the good guys with the truck bombs and Semtex belts. They don't share our purity, sure, but neither did Hitler and he was good for a mutual non-aggression pact or two, wasn't he? We have no choice, do we? 

Thanks, C Parsons, for drawing us back to the hideous weekend bombing in Baghdad, which presents an opportunity for all of us to protest, however impotently, at yet another depraved atrocity. F***king bastards, I say!

The Andrew North article CP has linked to raises further troubling issues; for example, North writes:

"All you report on is the violence." That is a criticism we've long heard of BBC coverage of Iraq.

Not true, we say. [And...? JAS]

Another charge is that we ignore the fact that many areas outside Baghdad are relatively peaceful.

That appears to be true, although it is very hard to verify because in many smaller towns and cities there are no journalists or other independent witnesses to check.

Compare Gil Burnham's testimony, in the transcript I cited of the Congressional hearing on Iraqi civilian casualties, in which he asserts:

Now, most of the information we see on television and in the print comes from Baghdad. That's the most accessible area. We found that Baghdad was not by any means the most violent area. So we found also that, as I say, violence has spread right across the country.

It appears nevertheless that Baghdad is very much the preferred 'theatre' for suicide bombings, obviously because that's where such dramatic 'statements' will have maximum impact.

It's also interesting to note that Les Roberts is cited, in the TomDispatch article linked by Bob Wall (thanks Bob), as "an expert on the human costs of the war in Iraq". I'd certainly endorse that, in as much as Dr Roberts is virtually the only authority who has even tried to address that complex, troubling - and troubled - issue.

That TomDispatch post darkly augurs further dire consequences for Iraq's civilians from the latest Bush 'surge' strategty/tactic/whatever. Beyond the Pentagon's purported "secret air war", this will almost certainly have immediate consequences for Baghdad's populace, as further pressure is brought to bear on the warring factions.

One obviously hopes that the objective of 'security' is achieved, but this frankly just seems to be a replay of similar 'initiatives' that have ended desultorily.

G'day Jacob, you have manned this thread on your lonesome so when this arrived in my Inbox I thought it would fit here very well. It is A Tom Engelhardt featuring Nick Turse on the little reported US bombing campaign in Iraq.

A secret air war is being waged in Iraq -- often in and around that country's population centers -- about which we can find out little. The U.S. military keeps information on the munitions expended in its air efforts under tight wraps, refusing to offer details on the scale of use and so minimizing the importance of air power in Iraq. But expert opinion holds that the forms of aerial assault being employed in that country, though hardly covered in our media, may account for most of the U.S. and coalition-attributed Iraqi civilian deaths there since the 2003 invasion.

While some aspects of the air war remain a total mystery, Air Force officials do acknowledge that U.S. military and coalition aircraft dropped at least 111,000 pounds of bombs on targets in Iraq in 2006. This figure, 177 bombs in all, does not include guided missiles and unguided rockets fired, or cannon rounds expended; nor, according to a U.S. Central Command Air Forces (CENTAF) spokesman, does it take into account the munitions used by some Marine Corps and other coalition aircraft or any of the Army's helicopter gunships. Moreover, it does not include munitions used by the armed helicopters of the many private security contractors flying their own missions in Iraq.

Not pleasant reading. 

Juan Cole has observed that “the presence of so many U.S. troops in Iraq, and the way in which they’re often dragged willy-nilly into sectarian fights, such as Diyala, is probably impeding the natural process whereby Iraqis would be forced to compromise with one another.”

On this view, the recent Bush ‘surge’ plan is likely to exacerbate sectarian conflict in the short term. Presumably the ultimate objective of the troop ‘augmentation’ will be to ‘pacify’ the warring parties by means of overwhelming force. Which is to say: Terror.

In short, the plan would appear to be to clobber and otherwise terrorise the factions into “compromise”. Which is to say, to kill each and every militia or insurgent player until the will to fight on all sides has been subdued.

To put it another way, the essential strategy seems to be to impose a Pax Saddam on strife-torn Iraq. The question that then arises is whether the achieved ‘compromise’ will be a durable one.

Former Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone demonstrates the native inquisitiveness that made her such a success in the portfolio:

Asked if the humanitarian crisis in Iraq – where up to 50,000 Iraqis are leaving their homes each month – is comparable to the refugee crisis triggered by the Vietnam War, Senator Vanstone said she could not remember because she was in school at the time.

Well, I don't know what the hit rate is on this thread, but I've distilled some of the material I posted here on a post at my blog, for which there've been over 700 page views in the last 24 hours (yielding a total of ... um ... three comments).

A majority of these have been from the USA, judging by the SiteMeter map, in which the USA lights up like a Christmas tree.

I gather that this interest is mainly driven by the fact that Congressman Dennis Kucinich recently stepped up for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Further to the Congressional briefing on civilian casualties in Iraq, I quite liked this closing statement from Congressman Ron Paul, a Republican from Texas:

I'd like to thank my colleague and friend, Representative Dennis Kucinich, and his staff for their hard work in organizing this important oversight hearing, and I appreciate the opportunity to have sponsored this event along with Representative Kucinich.

As a medical doctor, I've spent a good part of my professional life trying to reduce pain and suffering. It is something I feel very strongly about. Various reports, including the very important Lancet study, suggest that the level of pain, and suffering, and worse, among the non-combatant population in Iraq is on a scale almost unimaginable.

While the administration has shown little interest in the extent of civilian deaths in Iraq, it is important that we in Congress treat this matter with the seriousness it deserves.

We need to have a better understanding of the unintended consequences of this war, not the least in the hope that in the future, Congress will take its constitutional responsibilities regarding war and declaration of war more seriously.

It is also clear we have failed to consider carefully enough our own dead and wounded in this Iraq war. Recent reports suggest that some 100,000 U.S. soldiers have been permanently disabled fighting in Iraq. We need to think of their terrible pain and suffering, and that of their families.

This pain and suffering will not end when this terrible war finally ends, it will continue for the rest of their lives. This is the tragedy of the unnecessary war -- both sides suffer needlessly.

I hope this hearing, and others that hopefully will follow, mark the beginning of congressional oversight of this misguided war in Iraq that has sorely been lacking in the three-and-a-half years since the war started.

Ah well, there doesn't seem to be much interest in this topic, but I just remembered there was another development just before Christmas that didn't receive much attention.

On December 11, two of the authors of the Johns Hopkins studies, Drs Les Roberts and Gil Burnham, gave a briefing on the survey to a bipartisan Congressional hearing on civilian casualties in Iraq, convened by Congressmen Dennis J. Kucinich (D-OH) and Ron Paul (R-TX). See here for a transcript of what the authors said to the US people's representatives.

It's a longish document, but worth a read. Roberts and Burnham make a good fist of explaining the methodology and limitations of the study in everyday language. Les Roberts also makes some interesting remarks about how their results more accurately reflect reality than do other sources.

If our Lancet report is correct, we're saying that right now there's maybe three times as many bodies coming into graveyards and morgues across Iraq as there were back in 2002. And if Iraqi Body Count and Brookings are correct, it would only be about 10 percent more than there were back in 2002. Again, every report, including an article last Wednesday in The New York Times talking about how over-stressed ambulance drivers are, sort of confirms that it's not just 10 percent more deaths than used to occur in 2002.

Interestingly, the Iraqi minister of Health had been supporting this 40,000 to 50,000 death estimate until our study came out, and he changed it to perhaps 100,000 to 150,000 the week our study came out.

And since then, he's been quoted by AP as saying more like 150,000, not the 600,000 reported in the Lancet. He tripled his estimate as a result of our study coming out. Can anyone pretend the Iraqi Minister of Health really knows?

According to the United Nations, the Iraqi government surveillance network reported exactly zero violent deaths from Anbar province in the month of July, in spite of all the contradictory evidence we saw if we watched CNN. The most widely cited sources -- IBC, the United Nations, Brookings -- report about 80 percent of all violent deaths coming from Baghdad. And as Dr. Burnham mentioned, Baghdad actually is only about as violent as the nation on average.

So here it is -- one-fifth of the country reporting four-fifths of all violent deaths, and we know their rate of violent deaths isn't any higher than the rest. Something is wrong with those sources.

Similar incompleteness has been noted by the coalition surveillance activities. The Baker-Hamilton report of last week on page 95 said, and I quote, "For example, on one day of July in 2006, there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported, yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 violent acts."

We feel our estimate is by far the best available, in spite of considerable imprecision. We also feel that in terms of understanding the situation in Iraq, in terms of moving forward, it's important to know, has one in seven houses in Iraq lost a loved one, or one in a hundred, as Iraqi Body Count would suggest.

Further along, Roberts and Burnham also note that the cluster survey model is increasingly commonly used by the UN, USA and others, to measure mortality and other health issues in situations of conflict and other settings, where more conventional or direct measurement has been rendered impossible. Roberts cites Kosovo and Darfur as theatres where the method has been successfully employed. It emerges that USAID has accepted the method as a valid

The conundrum is that “balance and objectivity” may tend to leave us as clueless as the war-masters in Washington, London and li’l ol’ Canberra.

I’ve had a rant elsewhere about the official cluelessness that abides in those halls of power, so won’t flog that particular dead horse further.

Most recently on this topic, it was reported that

More than 34,000 civilians were killed in Iraq in 2006, according to United Nations figures released today which are nearly three times higher than the number reported dead by the Iraqi Government. ... The Iraqi Health Ministry has not yet commented on the figures, but the Government has disputed previous statistics released by the UN as "inaccurate and exaggerated." ... When asked about the difference between Iraqi government figures and those collated by the UN, Mr Magazzeni [of the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq] said the UN figures were compiled from information obtained through the Iraqi Health Ministry, hospitals across the country and the Medico-Legal Institute in Baghdad.

(The Australian, 17 Jan 2007)

The reliance on figures from the Iraqi Health Ministry almost guarantees that these latest UN figures will under-estimate the actual numbers to a ‘significant’ degree. It’s also well-accepted that “hospitals across the country” do not see all the dead, some proportion of whom are simply buried almost where they fall.

The only way to capture such non-statistics is, of course, by means of a Johns Hopkins-type cluster survey, with all its potential for imprecision and ‘biases’, particularly in a war zone. Hence, we’re lumbered with this self-reinforcing cluelessness that permits supporters of the Iraq disaster to discount the real human costs of this war.

It’s numberless, therefore imponderable with any balance or objectivity.

(NB: Someone forgot to close of the italics tag at the end of the main article.)

I recall being soundly criticised for questioning the methods used by the John Hopkins group for assessing the death rate in Iraq as a result of the current war. And a certain retired WDiarist was prone to fling all sorts wild figures into the discussion at that time. Ms Daponte brings a bit of balance and objectivity back into this issue.

Nobody will ever really know how many people died in Iraq, either at the hands of Saddam Hussein over his 30 year rule, during the invasion, or as a result of the current tit for tat sectarian killings. All we can say is that a great number of people have died a violent death in that country over those years. And that every death is painful for those left behind.

Margo: Go to bed, Jenny!