Articles with the Tag War on Iraq

Celebrating the War on Iraq with the New York Times

Manufacturing Consent, War on Iraq
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list of blogs read by the US media

Here are the clowns they booked to help the party started: Paul Bremer, Richard Perle, Kenneth Pollack, Danielle Pletka, Frederick Kagan… Yes, these are all people who were either incredibly, stomach churningly wrong about the war, or people who actively helped bring it about. No, nobody from the anti-war side was invited for this. That would’ve drawn too much attention to what the NYT itself was up at the time; better to stay safe in the bubble of likeminded fools and pretend “nobody could’ve known” the claims about weapons of mass destruction were false.

Perhaps not unrelated: Henrry Farrell and Daniel Drezner’s study (PDF) on the power of blogs which reveals which bloggers the “elite media” (their term) were reading in late 2003, as shown in the chart above. Not the most inspiring of lists, with Atrois being the most outspoken anti-war blogger on it. The elite media was for the most part cheerleading the war and it seems their favourite blogs did the same. At the time it was not hard to find evidence that Bush and co were lying about the war, that it was an incredibly bad idea with horrific onsequences, but if you don’t go looking for it, you’ll never find it…

Why did the anti-war movement fail?

Antiwar, War on Iraq
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With the disgraceful fifth anniversary of the War on Iraq rapidly approaching, it is a good time to examine why we all failed to stop this war when the vast majority of people in the UK, Europe and even the US was dead set against it. What happened that two million people could march in London on February 15th and yet the war started the very next month?

Which is why I set up an open thread over at Prog Gold, to discuss this question. If y’all would like to hop on over and give your opinion on this matter?

Praising with faint damns

Nu Labour, War on Iraq
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That’s what it feels like this this Guardian article is doing, with its amazing revelations that the Blair government was just as clueless as the Bush junta in preparing for the War on Iraq:

The government’s top foreign policy advisers were as inept as their US counterparts in failing to see that removing Saddam Hussein in 2003 was likely to lead to a nationalist insurgency by Sunnis and Shias and an Islamist government in Baghdad, run by allies of Iran, the Guardian has learned.

None of Whitehall’s “Arabists” warned Tony Blair of the difficulties which have plagued the occupation. The revelation undermines the British claim that it was US myopia which was to blame for the failure to foresee what would happen in postwar Iraq.

[…]

Christopher Segar, who took part in Whitehall’s Iraq Policy Unit’s prewar discussions and later headed the British office in Baghdad immediately after the invasion, said: “The conventional view was that Iraq was one of the most Western-oriented of Arab states, with its British-educated, urban and secular professionals. I don’t think anyone in London appreciated how far Islamism had gone.”

Officials alone cannot be blamed. Ministers failed to ask serious questions. Blair never called on the experts for detailed analysis of the consequences of an invasion, officials say. He saw the war as Iraq’s liberation and felt any postwar problems would pale in the face of Iraqi delight.

See? It’s not that Blair and his cronies helped start an unnecessary immoral war that has so far killed between half a million and one million Iraqis, it’s just that they weren’t prepared for those horrible Islamists determined to spoil the liberation party. Nobody could have foreseen that the people of Baghdad would dislike having foreign troops coming in and bombing the powerplants and shooting up the neighbourhoods. Of course not, who could’ve thought that the Iraqis would not be pleased by seeing their American and British liberators?

Oh wait…

The truth is, Blair knew what the consequences of the war were going to be and didn’t care. As long as he could pretend he had personally liberated the Iraqis, he was happy. Now that the situation has become even worse than expected, his media chums are recruited to put the most positive spin on this disaster still possible: we didn’t mean it, it was the horrible Islamists that made us do it.

Bonus paragraph, awe-inspiring in its awful stupidity:

Contrary to the conventional view that the occupation’s problems stem mainly from failure to plan for postwar Iraq, they say there was plenty of planning, from how to react to mass refugee flows and a humanitarian crisis to the fallout from a sharp rise in the world price of oil. The real failure, they concede, was one of political analysis. Officials did not study how Iraqis would react to an occupation and what political forces would emerge on top once Saddam was removed.

They Do it Every Time

War on Iraq
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Phillip Carter explains the challenges facing the US Army’s new post-surge offensive:

All this partly explains the size of the offensive. It’s an attempt to impose security on these warring insurgent cells and sectarian militias by brute force in a very hard-to-secure part of the country. By way of comparison, in April 2004, a task force of three Marine battalions assaulted the city of Fallujah after the brutal killing of four U.S. contractors there. In November 2004, the Marines launched their second assault on Fallujah with six battalions of combat troops and an arsenal of airpower and artillery. Now, in the Diyala breadbasket, U.S. forces are sending seven battalions plus various special forces units and a comparable amount of firepower. This for an area of Iraq previously occupied by only one battalion of about 500 troops –or sometimes fewer– during the last three years.

One truism about the surge has been that where we deploy sufficient numbers of U.S. troops, we prevail. There is no doubt that this quantity of U.S. troops will clear this small area of insurgents and al-Qaida fighters. The only question for the near term is whether our troops will kill, capture, or merely push those fighters out of the breadbasket. This has been the pattern for U.S. military operations since 2003, and yet the insurgency continues. The more important question is whether the U.S. military –and its partners in the Iraqi army and police– can secure the area for the long term, and do so with fewer and fewer U.S. troops as the surge ends.

What was that country in South-East Asia again, in which the Americans were involved for over a decade winning every battle, or so they said, but in which they lost the war?

Oohh yyyeaah…

New Iraq mortality survey

Iraqi war deaths, War on Iraq
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With relatively little fanfare a new study into post-invasion mortality rates in Iraq was published last week, in the New England Journal of Medicine. Below is the abstract:

Background Estimates of the death toll in Iraq from the time of the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 until June 2006 have ranged from 47,668 (from the Iraq Body Count) to 601,027 (from a national survey). Results from the Iraq Family Health Survey (IFHS), which was conducted in 2006 and 2007, provide new evidence on mortality in Iraq.

Methods The IFHS is a nationally representative survey of 9345 households that collected information on deaths in the household since June 2001. We used multiple methods for estimating the level of underreporting and compared reported rates of death with those from other sources.

Results Interviewers visited 89.4% of 1086 household clusters during the study period; the household response rate was 96.2%. From January 2002 through June 2006, there were 1325 reported deaths. After adjustment for missing clusters, the overall rate of death per 1000 person-years was 5.31 (95% confidence interval [CI], 4.89 to 5.77); the estimated rate of violence-related death was 1.09 (95% CI, 0.81 to 1.50). When underreporting was taken into account, the rate of violence-related death was estimated to be 1.67 (95% uncertainty range, 1.24 to 2.30). This rate translates into an estimated number of violent deaths of 151,000 (95% uncertainty range, 104,000 to 223,000) from March 2003 through June 2006.

Conclusions Violence is a leading cause of death for Iraqi adults and was the main cause of death in men between the ages of 15 and 59 years during the first 3 years after the 2003 invasion. Although the estimated range is substantially lower than a recent survey-based estimate, it nonetheless points to a massive death toll, only one of the many health and human consequences of an ongoing humanitarian crisis.

According to this study an estimated 151,000 people died of violence during the first three years of the occupation. At first this looks a far cry from the 655,000 or so excess deaths (of which some 600,000 were attributed to violence) the most recent Lancet study found. However, as the authors of this study constantly and admirably admit to, this new study is more than likely to underrrpot deaths:

Recall of deaths in household surveys with very few exceptions suffer from underreporting of deaths. None of the methods to assess the level of underreporting provide a clear indication of the numbers of deaths missed in the IFHS. All methods presented here have shortcomings and can suggest only that as many as 50% of violent deaths may have gone unreported. Household migration affects not only the reporting of deaths but also the accuracy of sampling and computation of national rates of death

Therefore this new study does not “prove” that the Lancet studies were wrong, let alone that they were fraudulent. Doing this kind of research in Iraq is after all dangerous and fraught with difficulty. Over at Tim Lambert, Les Roberts, who was involved with the Lancet
studies has posted his reaction and argued that this new study does not in fact differ that much from the Lancet studies and that some of the differences might in fact be explained by the difficulties this survey encountered gathering data.

Now all of this won’t stop wingnuts from using this study to discredit the 2006 Lancet study or last year’s ORB survey, but this is nothing new. I remember when the only guide to how many iraqi civilians had died in the invasion and occupation was the Iraqi Body Count project and how that was vilified. Once the first independent survey of war deaths –the original Lancet study– came out, suddenly there was nothing wrong with the IBC’s estimates anymore. Now we get people arguing that this new study shows Lancet 2 is not just wrong but fraudulent. As if “only” 151,000 deaths instead of 600,000 means the invasion is suddenly worthwhile.

What no longer can be denied is that the invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation have created a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions. There are now five major studies done by four different organisations saying essentially the same thing: that the invasion has lead to an incredible increase in violence and death by violence and that this isn’t abating so far. No matter how many “deadenders” would like to argue these facts, they won’t change. The case has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the invasion was a disaster, so I feel no longer the need to engage those who refuse to see and neither should you. The question we should be asking is how to end this disaster, without being distracted by pointless rearguard actions.