War on Iraq

Media reaction to the Lancet report

Iraqi war deaths
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First things first: the report is now online (PDF file). I still need to read it properly, but in the meantime I’d like to talk about the likely media reaction to the report. Already in the LA Times article I linked to below you could see the narrative about the report taking shape, which was confirmed for me by the BBC news report on it during PM.

What is stressed in both cases is 1) how controversial the previous Lancet report was, 2) how out of line the new report is with other and/or official counts (with specific emphasis on Bush’s own estimate of 30,000 deaths earlier this year and the Iraqi Bodycount Project) and 3) the official rejections of the report. What is not reported is that the scientific accuracy of the previous report was never in question, other than by political hacks (See Tim Lambert’s sterling debunking work for more details), nor is explained how the differences in methology between the Lancet report and the Iraqi Bodycount Project makes them incomparable. The latter after all only counts deaths reported in western media and hence misses the vast majority of Iraqi deaths.

This approach is not that surprising: it’s safe ‘n easy, lazy journalism, biased towards the status quo. While Americans may think the BBC is largely immune to the inane habit of “balanced reporting” where the opinion of both sides in an argument is given equal weight, no matter where the truth lies their own newsmedia is infected with, reports like this sadly show this is not the case. Even the BBC is biased towards the status quo and not much interested in investigating the truth. There’s no calculated malice behind this, just the everyday pressures of being a news organisation, one of which is getting the news out now rather than after careful investigation. Later perhaps the claims of both parties can be examined for truth, but by then the newscycle might have already moved on and in any case the false claims are well established.

(This Lenin’s Tomb post has more evidence of the increassing laziness of the BBC’s news teams, in their answer as to why they didn’t pay any attention to the BNP terrorism case.)

Iraq: over 600,000 excess deaths since war began

Iraqi war deaths
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This according to a new study to be published in The Lancet this week, by the same team who did the much maligned 2004 study also published there, which was the first scientific study to the effects of the War on Iraq. The news this time is much worse:

WASHINGTON — More than 600,000 Iraqis have died violently since the U.S.-led invasion, according to a new estimate that is far higher than any other to date.

The report, by a team of researchers criticized for its death estimates two years ago, says that 601,027 Iraqis have suffered violent deaths since the March 2003 invasion. It also suggests that the country has become more violent in the last year.

“This clearly is a much higher number than many people have been thinking about,” said Gilbert Burnham, the report’s lead author and a professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. “It shows the violence has spread across the country.”

Iraq’s violent death rate rose from 3.2 deaths per 1,000 people in the year after the invasion to 12 per 1,000 from June 2005 to June 2006, according to the researchers, whose findings are being published this week in the British medical journal Lancet.

The article tries its best to throw mud on the study, dragging in all kinds of irrelevancies like the Iraqi Bodycount Project, all of which is still familiar from the 2004 study and all of which fails to conceal the magnitude of this disaster. It’s so much more than expected that I don’t know what to say about it, only to note that none of this was necessary.

The significance of the Haditha massacre

War Lies, War on Iraq
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Noam Chomsky has argued, in For Reasons of State as well as elsewhere, that My Lai, when put in its proper context was only a minor incident, yet it became the symbol of everything wrong with America’s war on Vietnam. The same can be said for Haditha. Worse atrocities have taken place in Iraq, worse crimes have been perpetrated by American soldiers, so one more massacre should not matter that much, should it? Why has the Haditha massacre captured the imagination of the world press and the American public when earlier outrages did not?

I think it is because Haditha, like My Lai, is so undeniably a warcrime and as significantly, it went against everything Americans like to think they stand for. Earlier misdeeds could always be excused away as “regretable errors”, “fog of war”, “a few bad apples”, etc. But here it is very clear that there were no excuses for what happened. Where even Abu Ghraib could be excused as “hijinx” and “fratboy behaviour” (conveniently ignored much more horrible things than naked human pyramids happened as well), it is nigh impossible to do so when US soldiers deliberately select innocent people and execute them, behaving like Nazis in occupied Poland.

Also, American soldiers just do not kill civilians in cold blood, that goes against everything yer average American believes in, which is why My Lai came as such a shock and why Habitha is the same. Again, Abu Ghraib was much less problematic to explain away. Torture as a last ditch attempt by the good guys to get the villain to reveal where he put the bombs that would kill hundreds of innocents is a long cherished staple of pulp tv and action movies, the idea that a bit of roughing up of obvious baddies is no big deal. Easy enough to ignore the fact that something more than roughing up was going on or that the victims were not necessarily villains. But killing people in cold blood? That’s unamerican, that’s what the bad guys do.

Even so, it has taken quite a long time for this massacre to reach the public’s awareness. It happened in November of last year, but was only starting to gain mass circulation in March (when I first posted about it) but only now has become well known enough for Bush to have to speak about. Much thanks for bringing this story to light should go to congressman John Murtha, without whose speech on the massacre this may have remained obscure. He has paid for it in attacks by wingnuts talking about how unamerican it is to mention that US soldiers engage in massacre, not noticing it is those that it is actually those that betray America’s ideals.

Joe Sacco on US torture in Iraq

Activism, Antiwar, Comix, War on Iraq
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page from Joe Sacco's strip on the testimony of Iraqi victims of US torture


If you don’t know Joe Sacco’s work, you have missed some of the best and most politically engaged comix of the past twenty years. He started out as yet another autobiographer, a Crumb-lite, but then he got distracted by the first Gulf War. Since then he has pioneered his own brand of comics journalism, going to Palestine and Bosnia, talking to people, getting their stories on paper.

His latest piece, of which the above page is an extract, is available as a 3.3 Mb PDF file from The Guardian website. Sacco talked to two victims of US torture, when they came to the US recently to bring suit against Donald Rumsfeld for their torture. Sacco manages to capture their experiences in a way no photographs could ever do.

War lies: there is little support for the Iraqi insurgency

War on Iraq
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The resistance in Iraqi against the US occupation is still being described as consisting mostly of foreign Jihadis and Al-Quida supporters, as well as disgruntled Saddam supporters. Therefore, so the reasoning goes, it has little support amongst the Iraqi population. Simultaneously, the Iraqi people are forever intoned as supporting the coalition, with the US/UK coalition working in their interests. The truth is different, as even a secret British military poll, recently revealed, made clear:

The survey was conducted by an Iraqi university research team that, for security reasons, was not told the data it compiled would be used by coalition forces. It reveals:

  • Forty-five per cent of Iraqis believe attacks against British and American troops are justified – rising to 65 per cent in the British-controlled Maysan province;
  • 82 per cent are “strongly opposed” to the presence of coalition troops;
  • less than one per cent of the population believes coalition forces are responsible for any improvement in security;
  • 67 per cent of Iraqis feel less secure because of the occupation;
  • 43 per cent of Iraqis believe conditions for peace and stability have worsened;
  • 72 per cent do not have confidence in the multi-national forces.

News surprising to no-one but the “pro-war left”, I’m sure. Yet still the various news media tend to report about Iraq in terms defined by the occupiers, describing the resistance as Al Queda supporters, or talking about various US activities as being in the interests of the Iraqi people. It just seems there’s this increasing gap between reality and the officially sanctioned version of it, even with people or institutions not beholden to Bush ‘n Blair.