Michael Schwartz writes about the rules of engagement in Iraq:
A little over a year ago, a group of Johns Hopkins researchers reported that about 100,000 Iraqi civilians had died as a result of the Iraq war during its first 14 months, with about 60,000 of the deaths directly attributable to military violence by the U.S. and its allies. The study, published in The Lancet, the highly respected British medical journal, applied the same rigorous, scientifically validated methods that the Hopkins researchers had used in estimating that 1.7 million people had died in the Congo in 2000. Though the Congo study had won the praise of the Bush and Blair administrations and had become the foundation for UN Security Council and State Department actions, this study was quickly declared invalid by the U.S. government and by supporters of the war.
This dismissal was hardly surprising, but after a brief flurry of protest, even the antiwar movement (with a number of notable exceptions) has largely ignored the ongoing carnage that the study identified.
One reason the Hopkins study did not generate sustained outrage is that the researchers did not explain how the occupation had managed to kill so many people so quickly -- about 1,000 each week in the first 14 months of the war. This may reflect our sense that carnage at such elevated levels requires a series of barbaric acts of mass slaughter and/or huge battles that would account for staggering numbers of Iraqis killed. With the exception of the battle of Falluja, these sorts of high-profile events have simply not occurred in Iraq.
But the Iraq war is a twenty-first century war and so the miracle of modern weaponry allows the U.S. military to kill scores of Iraqis (and wound many more) during a routine day's work, made up of small skirmishes triggered by roadside bombs, sniper attacks, and American foot patrols. ...
Good catch Tim!
I assume that you're as puzzled as I am by the claim that "60,000 of the deaths [were] directly attributable to military violence by the U.S. and its allies."
As careful readers of your blog know, the correct number is 27,000.
I assume you've requested a correction?
Thanks Ragout, I actually hadn't noticed it. I've emailed Schwartz.
Most of the time the only deaths that seem to make the front pages are the ones from the massive suicide bombing attacks. But various forces (crime, death squads, maybe American troops) have been killing hundreds and up to a 1000 per month in Baghdad alone, so just Baghdad by itself could have suffered tens of thousands of violent deaths, mostly unreported except when Fisk visits the morgue.
thought you guys might be interested in this article which highlights the child mortality rates during sanctions in Iraq.
http://leninology.blogspot.com/2006/01/genocide-and-west_11.html
it mentions the analysis by Richard Garfield(http://www.casi.org.uk/info/garfield/dr-garfield.html). It makes the sobering point of how this genocide is brushed under the carpet by the media.
I suppose in the future we ought to just resort to writing stern letters when dictators get out of hand? Or maybe that would hurt too many feelings.
ben - how about stopping support to those "out of hand" dictators?
Or maybe at that point he was still "in hand"?
That would be a start. Now, how to finish? Maybe send a nice fruit and cheese basket?
Pointing out these obvious contradictions does not help in finding a solution. And if you don't have an alternative solution to the problem, then what is the point of the complaint?
ben Says:
January 13th, 2006 at 4:40 am
And if you don't have an alternative solution to the problem, then what is the point of the complaint?#
what a load of cack-handed thinking. my tax pounds are right this minute slaughtering more Iraqis under a massive escalation in aerial bombardment. my responsibilty is to stop the bloodshed. my responsibilty to point out the illegal nature of the aggression. it is not my responsibilty to propose an alternative to the illegal attack.
So then it is your responsibility to do one of two things, as I shall demonstrate as a pair of short plays involving you:
Now, that was helpfull. Anyone else have any suggestions for what we ought to do, in light of what momo is saying we ought not to do?
Send you over there, for a start.
While a noble effort, I'm sure there's a lot of commentors here who could point out why that won't work. Anyone else wanna take a shot at proposing a solution that has a better probability of success, whatever your metric for success might be?
Well, you could for instance use careful sanctions. That way said dicatator can have his capabilities to act outside his border (eg invade Iran, Kuwait) reduced.
Then, either you let them stew for a decade or two, after all, do you want the UN deciding whether countries should be invaded?
Or else you actively encourage propaganda etc to break up the society. Or else you can just invade, as the USA has done.
Note that there was little to no pre-invasion planning for after the invasion. There were comparatively few casualties on the invasion, but then the pEntagon etc seemed not to have planned for what they would do after Saddam left office. Hence the mess they are in just now.
ben - the attack on Iraq seems to have made the situation there much worse, while making it much harder for us to take military action against a nuclear-armed Iran or to prevent the genocide in Darfur. So my proposed solution would be to pick our wars more cautiously.
Ben,
Another issue that has been often pointed out isn't just all of the errors by many over several decades leading into the war, but by the complete incompetence of those managing the post invasion 'peace.' The insurgency was possibly preventable though peaceful means. It certainly did not have to be this bad.
So the Lancet study is not just a condemnation of war as a vehicle of progressive change, it is also a strong criticism of the Bush and Blair government's post-invasion incompetence.
I guess Bush never read Julius Caesar. I expected more from Blair.
ben for your first reason, option 1: why on earth does the US assume to have the right to do anything to any country (by way of an illegal aggression, that is recognised by the geneva conv as the supreme war crime)?
and your option 2 is an eminently sensible action if you want to avoid making any situation worse(the hippocratic principle).
and mike your "picking war more cautiously" also assumes that the US/UK or any other elite agenda has benign intent for people on the receiving end of their "intervenbtions".
not that this precludes any case for "humanitarian intervention", and as many commentators note many "humanitarian interventins" can made made simply by withdrawing support to the guilty country.
Ben,
You seem to ignroe the fact that US policy towards Saddam in the 1990's did work to a large extent.
It removed all effective Iraqi WMDs and restrained him from any further aggressuion his neighbours or his own Kurdish population.
I'd also be interested to hear your thoughts on how the US should "deal with" Pakistan's militarry dictatorship.
I'd also be interested to hear your thoughts on how the US should "deal with" Pakistan's military dictatorship.
Heck with that, I wanna know what ben's gonna do about China.
Man, those freedom guys in China need democracy. We freedom invaded Eye-rack to bring democracy, right, ben? I mean, after we freedom invaded them for the dubya-em-dee, but heck, freedom is what we're bringin' freedom.
Sign up, ben. Bring freedom to China. They're not free. They need to be invaded. They're not able to choose which classes to not go to.
Ian, A Scott Ritter speech was on AR last night, talking about the sanctions in Iraq and their result. Interesting.
Best,
D
Momo:
Yes, they did - on extremely faulty premises.
Essentially the claimed that thre had been an increase in mortality in post-war Iraq and attributed that increase, in its entirity, to sanctions.
In other words, the war; the destruction of large parts of Iraq's infrastructure in the war and the subsequent shia uprising; and the movement of large numbers of internally dispalced peopel into or out of Kurdistan (Kurds fleeing north, arabs fleeing south) were assumed to have had no effect.
The FAO officals (and when did the Food and Agriculture Organisation become experts on public health or infant mortality?) compounded their error by arguing that in the absence of sanctions, infant mortality in Iraq would have continued to fall at the rate it did in the 1980's.
The "500,000 dead children" are the total increase in infant mortality from the hypothetical lower infant mortality rate which the FAO assumed would have occurred in the absence of sanctions.
In practice, all across the arab world infant mortality rates stagnated or rose in the 1990s as a result of lower oil prices and economic recession which led to cutbacks in public health budgets.
Dano,
Any way to access that Ritter speech without shelling out money?
Ben, your going to iraq might not accomplish much, but it would concentrate your mind.
ben - you agreed that stopping supporting the dictators is a good start. Great!
Once this policy is applied consistently, we will be facing a completely new situation. If any further action is required, we will then be in a much better position to determine what that action is. (I am doubtful that sending a fruit platter would be it, but it's the thought that counts.)
In the meantime, why don't we focus on that common-sense, agreed-upon good start? To make matters more concrete, here is a partial list of US-backed non-democratic regimes: Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Haiti, Myanmar, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria.
Pushing an agenda of disengagement from all these regimes should keep any political activist or movement busy for quite some time. Can we count on your help?
Israel is a democracy. Why should the US disengage when that is against the expressed wishes of their respective democratically elected governments?
I don't think the US gives a whole lot of support to Burma either - Singapore does though.
I agree with what you say in principle but it looks far better if you actually check your facts.
"Israel is a democracy."
I'm sure that the 300,000 Palestinian arabs living in East Jerusalem (annexed by Israel after 1967) who are denied Israeli citizenship will be glad to hear that.
According to wikipedia nearly 20 % of Israeli citizens are Arab with the vast majority being muslim. They vote. Residents of East Jerusalem have permenant resident status and get state-funded health care and social security. Not too shabby really.
-
With millions of Palestinians in the West Bank living for the last 38 years under military occupation, Israel is a democracy in just the same way pre-civil war U.S. was.
Don't know much about pre-civil war US but whatever Israel's policy on the West Bank it doesn't make it any less of a democracy (just like the US's policy on Iraq, however wrong, doesn't make it a dictatorship). Israel has pulled out of Gaza and under the Prime ministership of Ehud Barak offered to pull out of 95 % of the West Bank which was, of course, refused. The continuing poverty in the West Bank and Gaza has as much to do with corrupt Palestinian leadership as the Israel military incursions.
Israel is by no means perfect but it is not the demon it is made out to be. Unfortunately ideologues of the left who truly believe otherwise are no better than those on the right who support war in Iraq no matter what.
And as for Myanmar - yes, it does not actually get billions of dollars yearly in aid like Israel does (only Israel and Egypt enjoy this level of support), but American companies do a lot of business in Myanmar. Here is a recent report.
Yes - sadly true. The film "The Corporation" was recently on SBS and, though I thought it showed it's anti-capitalist bias in some parts, the sections on the business dealings of some companies in undemocratic countries with shocking human rights records was quite scary , particularly the relationship between IBM and Nazi Germany. Am sure there are plenty of modern examples in Africa as well.
Denying 5% of your population the right to vote (and all the other rights of citizenship) doesn't make you less of a democracy?
The study, published in The Lancet, the highly respected British medical journal, applied the same rigorous, scientifically validated methods that the Hopkins researchers had used in estimating that 1.7 million people had died in the Congo in 2000.
Wow, this is the same thing that Paulos tried to claim, and it is still wrong. Is this the creation of a new meme?
ian, not sure what point you are making?
the article i linked to reports richard garfield's later assessment which gives a figure of 227,000 between 1990 and 1998.(and as of 2000, 350,000 excess deaths)
and quotes him as saying: "there is almost no documented case of rising mortality for children under five years in the modern world"."
stevef - were you watching the same film "The Corporation" as i did. the film "showed" more than an "anti-capitalist bias"! it's thesis is that corporation's are psychopathic! i.e. very dangerous to humans. my metaphor would be that corporations are more like cancer and need to be eliminated.
Momo that'd be the article by Garfield entitled: "Morbidity and Mortality Among Iraqi Children from 1990 Through 1998: Assessing the Impact of THE GULF WAR and Economic Sanctions", right?
The one that states in its opening paragrahhs: "In Iraq, there have been many reports suggesting a rise in rates of death and disease since the Gulf war of January/February 1991 and the economic sanctions that followed it and continue to this day. There is no agreement, however, on the magnitude of the mortality increase, its causes, who is responsible for these deaths, or how to stop them from happening."
and also states:
"Data are not available from any reliable studies on mortality since 1991."
The key conclusion:
"For 1996, after five years of sanctions and prior to receipt of humanitarian foods via the oil for food program, this model shows mortality among children under five to have reached a minimum of 80 per one thousand, a rate last experienced more than thirty years ago. This rise in the mortality rate accounted for between a minimum of 100,000 and a more likely estimate of 227,000 excess deaths among young children from August 1991 through March 1998. About one-quarter of these deaths were mainly associated with the Gulf war; most were primarily associated with sanctions."
This implies sanctions caused approximately
165,000 deaths - not the 500,000+ the Leninology article you also link to claims.
Models of the sort Garfield used here are subject to numerous possible errors - see Tim's various posts regarding Lott's use of multiple regression models.
The report also states that there appears to have been a significant reduction in infant mortality after sanctions were relaxed in 1998.
The sanctions regiem was a very imperfect tool for dealign with Saddam. But it has been proven to be vastly superior to one of the principal alternatives - invasion and occupation.
Given Saddam's track-record (the Iran-Iraq War which he started killed a million or more people), sanctions were probably also preferable to the alternative of ending sanctions and leaving Saddam in power.
The impact of sanctions is being overstated by right-wingers to manufacture a bogus "humanitarian" justification for the invasion of Iraq.
I for one am not going to help them do that.
ah i see the point you are making. and yes i agree with you. the aggressors and their supporters are arguing +now+ that sanctions failed! though at the time as the Lenin's Tomb article notes Blair for example was saying they were working (well the oil-for-food part) and the Lenin article reports that "According to UNICEF, between 1999 and 2002, there was some mild improvement in child mortality - from 130 per thousand live births to 125 per thousand."
now this could be due to the easing of sanctions though to be honest i do not know the precise history of the samctions so maybe you and other posters will help me put here?
ian you say "sanctions were probably also preferable to the alternative of ending sanctions and leaving Saddam in power", well that is very debateable since we know how withdrawing of support to saddam could have made a big effect. i think that, with respect, you may be making a similar assumption that right wingers do i.e. that somehow "we" the west have a right to actively interfere with another sovereign country.
all the best
My reference was to the existence of a sizable population (the slaves) with no rights at all - including of course political rights. The situation in Israel with respect to the West Bank Palestinians is the same. How can a situation like this be described as a Democracy?
What? The Palestinians forced the Israelis to stay?
This is like saying: "The white owners offered to free the slaves for 6 out of 7 days a week, but they, of course, refused."
(By the way, your assertion is factually wrong - the area Barak wanted to keep was 10-20%. He basically wanted the Palestinians to sign onto the same arrangement that Israel is now trying to impose unilaterally).
Ian, it's true that some rightwingers now use the same probably inflated death tolls for sanctions that anti-sanctions activists used to use, and it's true that we don't know what the true death toll was, but it seems plausible that sanctions caused a death toll in the low hundreds of thousands. And this death toll shouldn't be separated from the deaths caused by damage to infrastructure by US bombing in the Gulf War, because it was all part of the same policy--
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/history/0623strategy.h…
I agree that the invasion/occupation has made things worse. What should have been tried, and what the US was being pressured into doing pre 9/11, would have been "smart sanctions".
Steve F, I'm not sure if you're denying Israel's crimes or just arguing that it is a democracy. Democracies are often guilty of enormous human rights abuses. as any honest history of the US or Great Britain or France will illustrate. (Probably Australia as well, but maybe the worst occurred when part of the Empire? I don't know.) It's certainly true of Israel as well.
As for Barak's generous offer, you could read Charles Enderlin's book "Shattered Dreams" or Clayton Swisher's book (I haven't read that one) or articles by Robert Malley --these will provide antidotes to the simplistic notion popular in the US that the current mess is all Arafat's fault. He gets part of the blame, but Barak's original offer wasn't so great and it was the Israelis who pulled away in the end while Arafat dithered. It's odd that Sharon is treated as a force of nature, someone who can't be held responsible for having no interest in building on what happened at Taba.
"Israel is a democracy in just the same way pre-civil war U.S. was."
With the slight exception that Africa had not been attacking the US for 25 years prior to that...
...this death toll shouldn't be separated from the deaths caused by damage to infrastructure by US bombing in the Gulf War, because it was all part of the same policy-
Here we differ - the US considered, and rejected the option of a fullscale invasion and occupation of Iraq in 1991.
The decision to impose sanctions was the least-bad of the three major post-war options: occupation, sanctions or do nothing.
Ever heard of John Brown or Nat Turner?
I'm shocked, shocked, that this thread has gone off-topic! Why, after showing that Lambert shills for peddlers of false information, we're talking about Israel, infant mortality during the sanctions, the Bush Sr. 1991 Iraq policy, and just about anything else...
Funny stuff.
FYI, Seixon has been banned again for making personal attacks. It's a one week ban this time.
Ian, it's not a question of differing about what policy should have been followed--according to that Washington Post article to which I linked, the US bombing of civilian infrastructure was in fact linked to the policy of sanctions afterwards. The idea was that the sanctions would prevent repair and the civilian population would suffer and Saddam would either be overthrown or at least forced to acquiese to US demands in order to have sanctions lifted. As it happened, he wasn't greatly perturbed by the suffering of Iraqi civilians.
All of the above was simply a description of what happened--if you disagree then you're saying that the Washington Post article was wrong.
Where we might disagree is about policy. I'd have favored smart sanctions (although I'm not sure I'd have trusted the US to implement them) and you might or might not have supported the sanctions as they were actually applied. I agree that either policy--smart or dumb sanctions--turns out to have been preferable to Bush's invasion and occupation.
"I agree that either policy-smart or dumb sanctions-turns out to have been preferable to Bush's invasion and occupation."
I don't see why; increasing the death and suffering of Iraqi citizens, alienating the world, particularly the Islamic and Arab world, when we need their cooperation the most, taking over Saddam's position as the international symbol for torture and repression, handcuffing the US military so that Iran feels free to restart their WMD program and North Korea is not far behind, putting Iraq on the road to another Shiite theocracy as the Middle East Canada to Iran's Middle East US, dividing the US citizenry to the point that one half feels no compunction behind spying on the other half without warrant, and completing the bankruptcy of the US economy; but at least we deposed Saddam. He was a bad guy and tried to kill Bush's daddy, you know. Besides, Clinton's penis.
"I'm sure that the 300,000 Palestinian arabs living in East Jerusalem (annexed by Israel after 1967) who are denied Israeli citizenship will be glad to hear that."
Israel approves limited vote in East Jerusalem By Jeffrey Heller
Reuters
Israel's cabinet on Sunday approved voting in Arab East Jerusalem in a Palestinian parliamentary election but said it would ban the militant Hamas group from listing its candidates on ballots there.
...
The force for good represented by the power of the opinions of Tim's audience once again shows itself!
"Any way to access that Ritter speech without shelling out money?"
Don't know what he said in the recent speech, but his position in his own words is available,
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,351165,00.html for one instance,
"There simply is no evidence of a factual nature that sustains the allegation by the Bush administration or British government that Iraq
today possesses weapons of mass destruction," (Scott Ritter, San Francisco Chronicle, March 2003) for another,
and I doubt anything has happened since that would made him change it.