American impunity

In discussing the war, Americans focus tightly on American interests and American costs. The exact number of Americans killed is reported daily, but the number of Iraqis killed is not counted at all.

Last December Bush was asked by a private citizen how many Iraqi civilians have been killed in the war. As far as I know, he has never been asked that question by any accredited reporter. Bush guessed that 30,000 Iraqis have died because of the war.

The Washington Post published a comment on this from Sarah Sewall, a Harvard professor. Dr. Sewall suggested that the 30,000 number probably comes from Iraq Body Count, which counts only deaths that are reported in two or more separate media sources. They had documented 30,000 civilian deaths as of last December.

Here's what Fallujah looked like after the marines went through.

You can make your own guess about what percent of deaths in this place make it into two or more news media. Those added up to 30,000 about a year back. I'm guessing 20% of the dead made the newspapers, so my estimate is 150,000 Iraqis dead of violence. Then we need to add in the ones who died from no sewage, destruction of hospitals, and so on. So my seat of the pants estimate is 300,000 dead Iraqis as of the end of 2004. Maybe I'm a pessimist.

Dr. Sewall mentions that a Lancet study gave a figure of 100,000 "excess deaths" as of November 2004, but she criticizes that study because "the approach was flawed. War is not like a pandemic; it comes in pockets." What the researchers did was to randomly select 30 neighborhoods, and then sample households within those neighborhoods. One neighborhood was in Fallujah, and the number of dead there was much higher than in any other area. In other words, it was one of those pockets that war comes in, so to be on the safe side, the researchers left it out when they counted the 100,000 excess deaths.

There is a way to deal with the professor's objection, that "war comes in pockets". It's called nonparametric statistics, which don't assume that the world follows the bell curve. When these techniques are used on the data from the Lancet study, the original estimates turn out to have been low - the most likely estimate is that the war had killed 183,000 Iraqi civilians by September, 2004. Since the violence has increased in the 16 months since that study, from the best available data using the most appropriate statistical techniques, an honest conclusion would be that between 200,000 and 600,000 Iraqis have died as a result of the war.

Dr. Sewall does think that America should try to find out how many civilians have been killed:

The U.S. government ably quantifies many costs of war -- service members killed or wounded, financial burdens on taxpayers, strain on our military's equipment and readiness, Iraqi enemy fighters killed, impact on Iraq's infrastructure, and even civilians the insurgents kill. To refuse to acknowledge the full spectrum of civilian harm, including Iraqis mistakenly killed by their liberators or protectors, is to deny accountability.

I guess this is how you had to talk, to get published in the Washington Post. This is the strongest statement I could find, in mainstream debate, about American responsibility to the millions in Iraq who never attacked us and never had anything to do with terrorism. It's hard to imagine that anyone in America would "deny accountability", but the official American policy is we don't have to count how many Iraqis we kill either directly, or by making them drink sewer water. We are fighting a "war on terror", but we don't have to count the number of innocent Iraqis who die at our hands or otherwise.

So the number a Iraqi victims of the war on terror is somewhere between 30,000 and 600,000. Since 3,000 people died in the World Trade Centers, deaths in Iraq have been at least 10 times and probably 100 times greater than deaths in America.
Iraqis don't vote here, they don't watch American adverts, and they don't have much purchasing power, so they don't actually count for anything to our politicians or our media. But suppose we could get some ideas about how to run the war, by imagining that those people do count for something.

In a democracy, if someone destroys your house, you go to court and get a settlement. If someone kills your kids, you go to the police and have him arrested. But no court in Iraq can try our army. We knock down whole cities and if they don't like it they can go complain at the entrance to Abu Ghraib. The Iraqis have no legal recourse against abuse by our troops.

If a whole wedding reception gets wiped out, then maybe our army will conduct an "investigation". Troops who are dumb enough to let their pictures get out over the internet will be court-martialed. Iraqis cannot file a complaint, our army decides whether to judge itself, and our politicians never face judgement.

When there is an investigation, sergeants and below have been punished if they didn't follow the rules of engagement. If the troops followed the rules of engagement, and the house just happened to be full of kids, that's the end of it. It does not matter if the troops received direct orders to violate the rules. When Lyndee England was tried, there was plenty of testimony that "military intelligence" had ordered the prisoners to be abused. Lyndee England was convicted, but there was no investigation of the ones that gave the orders.

The impunity policy is supported by all Republicans and many Democrats, not only in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pakistan says it does not allow American forces on its soil to attack or hunt militants. On Saturday, the government condemned the attack and lodged a diplomatic protest, saying it had killed innocent civilians.
However, U.S. Sen. Evan Bayh, a Democratic member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said ... "It's a regrettable situation, but what else are we supposed to do?"

In American political debate, this is called democracy. It is not democracy, it is empire. We have given Iraq a government where they get to vote but the law doesn't protect their lives or property. Troops roam the streets. Death squads go out at night. They can shoot your family and the law does not care. There is a word for people who can be killed with impunity - the word is nigger. Nigger doesn't mean black, it means someone who can be legally killed. That is exactly how our government defines Iraqis. This government we have given them, let's call it "nigger democracy", where you get to vote, but they can shoot you.

Our government claims legal impunity for killing innocent Iraqis and refuses to join the International Criminal Court. It claims not to keep a count of innocent Iraqis who are killed by our troops and contractors. The military has denied that innocent civilians were killed when there were dozens of eyewitnesses and videotapes. American impunity means that we can kill them for any reason that suits us, and there is nothing they can do about it.America's claim of of impunity is the big hole in our national thinking about Iraq. It underlies every particular error in Iraq policy. Here are some reasons why it is stupid:

Impunity is the reason we have no allies. Other countries won't support us because we refuse to be bound by law. Other governments, even Britain, are subject to law. If their soldiers kill innocent Iraqis, they can be accused of war crimes and taken to international court. America does not recognize the International Criminal Court. American soldiers and even private security contractors are under no law but their own. Other countries cannot work under our rules and anyway, they think killing innocent civilians is a stupid way to impress people.

Impunity is the real cause of the Iraqi resistance. In the mainstream media we hear a lot of stories about who is in the resistance - "baathist dead-enders" and so on. But the fact is, if you are an Iraqi, and you don't think soldiers should have the right to kill your family for whatever reason they choose, then you have a big disagreement with the American occupation. If soldiers can shoot you down, you are not a citizen of a democracy, you are a nigger - a slave. Our government claims to be above the law, so the Iraqi resistance has to include any Iraqis who don't like being slaves.

Impunity encourages bad strategy. If our generals don't have to count Iraqi lives, my thinking is they might miss something in working out their strategy for "winning the hearts and minds". It is because of the policy of American Impunity, that the Bush Gang got out of control. They fought the war they way they did because they didn't see any consequences to killing innocent people. Now our government is moving to a strategy of aerial bombardment. This will increase civilian casualties. It's not going to end terror.

Impunity is against democracy. If we demand the right to kill Iraqis with impunity, we should stop stroking ourselves for "bringing them democracy". It's giving democracy a bad name. The rest of the world wonders what our weakness is, that we have to be such hypocrites.

However stupid and evil it is to kill innocent people in the name of the war on terror, this policy of American Impunity makes it inevitable that we will do so. And America is not going to give up impunity easily - it isn't just a convenient way to run the war in Iraq, it is the entire point of the "War on Terror".

Millions of people have died in political violence, but mostly they don't come up on American screens. It was always other people who died. The terrorist attacks on 9-11 were a message to the American people, that there's a war going on. At that point, America got to choose the meaning of the war. We could have chosen to protect the innocent. As a country, we could have stood for the principle that innocent people should not be killed for political objectives. America did not do that. Instead, our army is fighting for the principle that Muslims are niggers - our troops can legally kill as many of them as our leaders see fit. If we were fighting to protect the innocent, a few thousand would have died. Since we are fighting for American impunity, we are going to have to so brutalize the Moslem world, that they give up fighting for justice. That is our present course. To succeed at it, America will have to kill hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of Muslims.

As a country, we could do a job in Iraq that would make us proud, that would make us worthy of calling ourselves Americans. Incidentally, it would genuinely reduce terrorism. To do it, we would have to mean democracy when we say democracy. We would have to to believe, for example, that "all men are created equal". Today our government does not believe this. Our policy is that Iraqis are niggers. As long as we insist on this, things will get worse.