The Carnage in Iraq—Past, Present, and Future
The headline of an August 22, 2007, article in the New York Times reads, “Citing Vietnam, Bush Warns of Carnage if U.S. Leaves Iraq.” Readers with live brain cells must be stunned by such a warning. What, exactly, does President Bush imagine is happening every day in Iraq now? Does he envision scenes of social tranquility and cooperative harmony amid the peaceful palms of Mesopotamia? And what, one wonders, does he suppose was going on earlier in Vietnam, as the U.S. forces extended their unwelcome stay year after grisly year? At times, observing the president and listening to his speeches, one simply doesn’t know what to make of him. Is he actually as detached from reality as he appears to be? And do his handlers really believe that at this late date, the American people will take seriously the rhetoric his speech writers persist in putting into his mouth?
No one knows precisely how many Iraqis have perished from violence since the U.S. forces unleashed “shock and awe” on them in March 2003 as a prelude to “liberating” them and shoving the blessings of “democracy” down their throats. Estimates vary from several scores of thousands to several hundreds of thousands. In any event, the number of deaths is enormous, especially in relation to the country’s population of approximately 25 million (as assessed in recent years).
If we suppose, for example, that 100,000 Iraqis have died as a direct or indirect result of the present war, that number is equivalent to 1,200,000 deaths in the United States, whose population has been in the neighborhood of 300 million in recent years. Does anyone doubt that Americans would consider 1,200,000 war-related deaths in four and a half years to constitute “carnage”? Whatever name one gives it, the number equals more than 400 times the number who died as a result of the infamous 9/11 attacks, and plenty of Americans were outraged by that relatively tiny number of fatalities. How might they have felt if they had suffered as a result of invasion and occupation the equivalent of the 9/11 death toll every fourth day since March 20, 2003? (The deadliest war in U.S. history, the War Between the States, caused approximately 620,000 deaths, most of them of soldiers, in four years.)
Sad to say, the Iraqi death toll may have been much greater than the one assumed in the preceding illustrations, more than six times greater, according to one respectable estimate. In addition to this appalling mortality, the war has caused countless wounds, injuries, illnesses, and an unspeakable amount of human misery and heartbreak. The great majority of those who have died or sustained injuries have been noncombatants, people who just happened to be within the blast radius of bombs, rockets, and shells or in the path of one or more of the billions (yes, billions) of bullets U.S. forces have fired and the lesser-but still considerable-number the feuding Iraqi factions have fired. The descriptions and accounts of parents whose children have been killed or terribly wounded, and children whose parents have been killed, are agonizing to read. Yet such events are utterly normal in Iraq today: they occurred yesterday; they are occurring today; and they will occur tomorrow.
So, to return to George W. Bush, what does he suppose will happen if U.S. forces do not leave Iraq? Surely the answer must be: carnage on a vast scale, carnage with no end in sight. Regardless of how deeply the president may immerse himself in wishful thinking, no other outcome may reasonably be expected.
Bush reminded the listeners of his “carnage warning” speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City that when U.S. forces pulled out of Vietnam, “the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens.” So it was. Yet, once the U.S. forces had done what they had done prior to 1973, what would have happened had they remained in Vietnam, continuing to carry on their war business as usual? The only reasonable answer is: more of the same, on a vast scale-carnage that would have continued as long as U.S. forces remained in the country.
In Iraq, as in Vietnam earlier, we must expect that if U.S. forces were to leave, more carnage would occur. It is conceivable that the Iraqis would devise a way to settle their differences without enormous violence, but the odds now seem greatly against their doing so. Ultimately, of course, they would find a way; no society can persist forever in a state of civil war on the scale that now prevails in Iraq. Yet many more people are almost certain to die and to suffer wounds and the destruction of property before a peaceful resolution is effected. And that resolution itself may be dreadful in other regards. The United States, however, cannot prevent this distressing outcome. Indeed, its invasion and occupation have created conditions that make such an outcome virtually unavoidable. In short, the U.S. adventure in Iraq cannot have a happy ending. Just because the president unleashed the demons now raging across Iraq does not mean that he or anyone else can chain them now.
Unless the U.S. forces leave, however, their containment will never really get started, because aside from a small group of collaborators and puppet officials, all Iraqis agree on the desirability of getting U.S. and other foreign forces out of the country. When, after World War I, Great Britain formed Iraq from three Ottoman provinces and governed it as a League of Nations mandate, the Iraqis resisted the overlord’s rule to a greater or lesser degree until the Brits in 1932 granted them independence (with Britain retaining military bases and transit rights), leaving behind a political situation congenial only to dictatorship and repression. When the United States leaves Iraq, the political situation will be even uglier, probably for a very long time. No one has a magic sword to slay the dragons of ethnic, tribal, religious, and ideological hatred and conflict that suffuse Iraqi society or a magic potion to suppress the Iraqi appetite for political violence. Moreover, at this point a great many Iraqis have scores to settle with one another. For the neocon ideologues to have imagined that the U.S. armed forces could waltz into Iraq and establish a viable liberal democracy, initiating a cascade of similar political transformations across the Middle East, ranks among the greatest delusions of modern history.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the president’s mind cannot accommodate much logic or empirical evidence. And he has admitted, as if an admission were necessary, that he does not “do nuance.” He and his speech writers will go to any lengths, however, to create the impression that keeping U.S. forces in Iraq will be good for the Iraqi people, not simply for Halliburton, Blackwater, Alliant Techsystems (the military cartridge manufacturer), and the rest of the military-industrial complex. Bush’s term in office is not scheduled to end until January 20, 2009-an interval that now feels like an eternity-and despite everything that suggests the wisdom and humanity of getting U.S. forces out of Iraq as soon as possible, he appears hellbent on staying the homicidal course, without so much as a rhetorical retreat from his self-righteous, Manichean conception of the complex conflicts ravaging that wretched land. Why should any humane person approve of staying this ill-fated course? Because, the president declares, a U.S. departure might result in carnage.
Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy for The Independent Institute and Editor of the Institute’s quarterly journal The Independent Review. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins University, and he has taught at the University of Washington, Lafayette College, Seattle University, and the University of Economics, Prague. He has been a visiting scholar at Oxford University and Stanford University, and a fellow for the Hoover Institution and the National Science Foundation. He is the author of many books, including Depression, War, and Cold War.
This is a very good article the US needs to leave Iraq sooner not later and they need to do it NOW!!!
Still no mention of OIL, OIL, OIL, OIL. The great big elephant in the room. The US will never leave Iraq now that they have their gready fingers this close to the OIL. Nobody seems to want to talk about the OIL. This is Exxon’s war, financed by US taxpayers with the blood of US sons and daughters.
Our leaders are killers. It’s that simple.
If you ignore the rhetoric and look at the actions, that is the cold reality.
Mr. Higgs, why do you insist on underestimating the death and suffering in Iraq? Who benefits from that?
According to the medical journal Lancet, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_surveys_of_mortality_before_and_after_the_2003_invasion_of_Iraq, the count was 654,965 from March 19, 2003 through June 30, 2006. Rounding to 39 months, that gives an estimated rate of 16,794 per month on average.
In the 14 months since that estimate, we can assume that the death rate has continued as least equal to, if not greater than, the previous rate, so another 16,794 X 14 months = an additional 235,116 Iraqi deaths since the second Lancet estimate, for an estimated total, as of 8/30/07, of about 890,000 deaths.
A proportional number of Americans would be about twelve times that amount, or about 10.6 million dead.
If we don’t end the war immediately, another 16,794 (or more) will probably die each month, or about 285,498 in the coming 17 months before Bush leaves the White House (assuming he doesn’t decide to stay under some provisional emergency of his own devising), for a total of 1.185 million Iraqi dead, not counting US fatalities, casualities or deaths in Afghanistan, Iran or other war theaters.
Of course, it doesn’t seem all that likely that the war will end in January 2009, given the current slate of candidates and the biases of the mainstream media.
There is carnage in the USA,38,000,000 with out medical,10,000,000 homeless,45,000, killed on our highways,FBI opening our mail and phone privicey gone. So what country is willing to bomb us, in oreder to save us?
Yes, it is the OIL that we went there for, and we will stay until we have secured our control of the oil. The half trillion already spent is just a down payment on what it will finally cost us in dollars, and the horrific carnage is an acceptable ongoing part of it for this administration (and for the Democrats who continue to enable this occupation). I think the fact that we citizens are not in the streets to demand that this occupation end has to do with our own understanding that without the oil, we cannot sustain our (unsustainable) way of life much longer, so we allow this crime on our behalf to go on, albeit with much verbal condemnation. The sooner we all admit this, the sooner we will examine what it might take on our part to stop this insanity.
Perhaps the only way out -eventually ( and if at all) -is for another Gandhi to emerge . One who galvanizes the masses throughout the West . And through peaceful and non violent methods ( ahimsa and satyagraha ) brings about the dissolution of the Western power structures .
The Lord knows ,we are in dire need for this vileness to pass once ,and for all ,from our midst.
For over the last few centuries , the West has , ( I am sorry to say ) single-handedly wreaked incalculable harm , misery , death and destruction on the rest of the world . Vietnam, Iraq ( and possibly Iran ) are but the most recent manifestations of an ethos -whose very sickness is unparalleled in the annals of Mankind.
I do realize that many Western brothers and sisters might, quite understandably ,find this a very bitter pill to swallow.
Well , shouldn’t they thank their lucky stars ? After all ,the most they need contend with is the occasional bitter taste in the mouth. The rest of the world ,in stark contrast, has had it far worse : being at the receiving end of the ‘tender mercies’ unleashed by the Western powers ,over the past few centuries.
It doesn’t make any sense to dissect the babblings of the idiot Bush. To him they’re just words, the next calculated dodge. I also believe oil was the main reason for this debacle, but now something else is emerging. Bush seems intent on proving that the U.S., no - he and his mob - are the most powerful force on earth because no-one can stop them.
That is their only victory; that no-one has been able to stop them. No victory for peace, no victory for justice, no victory for hope or the future. Hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, many more wounded and maimed, millions displaced and creating crises in neighboring countries. The only carnage he cares about is the carnage of his wretched legacy and the corpse of his party, dead from a kool-aid overdose.
Read the tesimony of Lance corporal Mendoza how he received orders to kill Iraqi women and children in Haditha massacre.
www,rawstory.com
Mr. Higgs writes, “At times, observing the President and listening to his speeches, one simply doesn’t know what to make of him. Is he actually as detached from reality as he appears to be”?
Unlike Ronald Reagan, George W had no formal training or experience as a professional actor prior to playing the role of Commander in Chief. At times, Reagan was caught off camera appearing dazed or confused, but when the lights came up and he toed his mark, Ronny always delivered from his handlers’ script like a pro. Where he got himself in trouble with gaffes was when he strayed too far from the prepared text and tried to ad lib.
If the last seven tortured years have proved anything, it is that the internal dynamics of the Reagan and Bush
regimes are identical, even with some of the old influence peddlers and script writers resurrected into inner circle power (Poindexter, Abrams, Cheney, Gates, etc.) What’s different is that Little George lacks the training, skills and forensic discipline of his Hollywood predecessor, at times to the great embarrassment of the whole nation.
On the more serious substance of Mr. Higgs’ commentary, I for one am delighted that at long last we can have a grown up dialogue about the comparisons and the contrasts between Vietnam and Iraq, World War II and the supposed global war on international terrorism. I hope every Republican and Democratic candidate for the Presidency is called upon at some point to discuss what they each feel are “the lessons of Vietnam”, since it is crystal clear that George W. Bush has somewhere learned “lessons” that are totally out to lunch, and totally out of sync, with what most of us came away with who lived through the Vietnam era.
In my opinion, what is most spooky and is most dangerous about the White House spin machine’s sudden embrace of a revisionist history of America’s withdrawal from Vietnam is how it tries to blame the peace movement for the rise of Pol Pot and his killing fields, and pretend that Nixon and Kissinger’s decision to invade Cambodia played no role in causing that horrendous genocide.
What the GOP neo cons are trying to do as they now try to run out the clock in Iraq into 2009 is to acclimate the American public to the idea that a continuous, ebbing & flowing low intensity counterinsurgency war of occupation should simply be accepted as a perpetual feature of US foreign policy in the Middle East for the indefinite future. No perception of carnage, no public outrage.
It is, of course, low intensity only for those lucky to be located here in the western hemisphere, and low intensity only by comparison to the millions of casualties and mountains of corpses of our earlier wars, in contrast to the mere thousands that we’re supposed to learn to shrug off today as the price of keeping America safe, or as regrettable collateral damage.
Bill from Saginaw
VINCE LAWRENCE and BILL from SAGINAW: Good postings.