Counting The Casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan
As if proving a widely held view that Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan tend to be trigger happy, Blackwater USA, a private security firm, is embroiled in a controversy over its involvement in a roadside shootout in Baghdad that killed eight Iraqis.
It turns out that the 30,000 American private security personnel in Iraq are among those immune from local prosecution.
That reminded me of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
In October 1964, in the early stages of his anti-Shah agitation, he gave a colourful speech attacking the legal immunity enjoyed by Americans in Iran.
“If an American’s servant or cook assassinates your marja (religious leader), the Iranian police do not have the right to apprehend him.
“But if someone runs over a dog belonging to an American, he’d be prosecuted. Even if the Shah himself were to run over a dog belonging to an American, he’d be prosecuted. But if an American cook runs over the Shah, no one would have the right to interfere with him.”
Khomeini’s words spread like wildfire. Within a month, he was exiled. He returned 15 years later, triumphant, having engineered a revolution that toppled the Shah and ended America’s hold on Iran.
The ayatollah remains a reviled figure in the West. But his point is relevant to Iraq and Afghanistan, where the United States and its allies do not even count the local dead.
“Imagine the U.S. not investigating who died on Sept, 11, 2001 - it’s unthinkable,” says John Sloboda, co-founder of Iraq Body Count, the U.K.-based group that tracks the Iraqi death toll, which as of Friday stood at between 73,390 and 79,999.
Last week, a British polling firm, ORB, estimated the toll at a staggering 1.2 million. Last fall, the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health pegged it at 654,965.
In the case of Afghanistan, Marc Herold, a professor of economics at the University of New Hampshire, has been tracking casualties since 2001 and posting them on a website. In fact, it was his Afghan Victim Memorial Project that inspired Sloboda’s.
Herold’s “most conservative estimate” of Afghan civilian deaths resulting from American/NATO operations is between 5,700 and 6,500.
“This is the absolute minimum,” he said over the phone. “It’s probably a vast underestimate,” because it does not include:
The dead among the tens of thousands displaced during the initial military operation in 2001-2002 and who ended up in refugee camps or elsewhere, with little or no supplies for long periods.
The victims of bombing in mountainous areas, which have few or no communications links or which the U.S./NATO forces “cordon off as part of news management.”
Herold’s figures also do not include the victims of the Taliban. Those are “significantly smaller,” even though they are the ones highly publicized.
“If one were to believe the numbers of Taliban killed as reported, I dare say Afghanistan would have been depopulated!”
As in Iraq, there are conflicting estimates in Afghanistan. Reuters news agency, for example, reports that more than 7,000 have been killed in the last 19 months alone.
As for the number of Afghans injured, Herold says it’s at least double the death toll. That would make it between 11,400 and 13,000.
How many displaced? Between 19,000 and 42,000, at a minimum.
The range of these estimates illustrates the difficulty of working in the official blackout. But Sloboda, Herold and others keep up their heroic efforts on shoestring budgets.
“It’s a means of holding our governments accountable,” says Sloboda, an internationally renowned professor of psychology at Keele University.
“As citizens, we bear watchdog responsibility. We are doing this so that at some later date, we can hand it over to some international tribunal or those undertaking truth and reconciliation and reparations work.”
Herold adds that the more our governments hide the Afghan and Iraqi casualties, the more important it is to expose the grim details of what they have unleashed.
Haroon Siddiqui, the Star’s editorial page editor emeritus, appears Thursday in the World & Comment section and Sunday in the A section.
© 2007 The Toronto Star
from the article:
“Imagine the U.S. not investigating who died on Sept, 11, 2001 - it’s unthinkable,” says John Sloboda, co-founder of Iraq Body Count…
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sorry, mr sloboda, it is not unthinkable at all.
you see there was no investigation into 9/11.
the government refused.
instead they hired a demolition company, many of us argue they hired them long before 9/11, who were under orders to get that imploded building dismantled as quickly as possible and then barge it over to china, of all places, where it was turned into scrap.
no investigation.
in fact it took the government, who claimed (promise, cross my heart) that they had no prior information about the attack; only a couple of hours to produce some 19 passport pictures alleged conspirators, in plenty of time for the evening news.
true, they finally were shamed into a farce called the 9/11 commission by the families of 9/11, but their work has been widely discredited and proven to be worthless, rather, even less than worthless.
both the commissioners have freely admitted that their work is not very good. both have admitted that the government stonewalled them, both have admitted that the government withheld documents requested, and both have admitted that they knew witnesses were lying on the stand.
quite an investigation.
the government couldn’t afford to have a real investigation into 9/11 because it would have found, among other things, thermate laden steel beams (used for controlled demolition) all over thew wtc site.
too bad, the presence of thermate (which is a military patent on thermite - a high temperature explosive used to cut steel beams)could have explained the “seas” of molten steel that burned for months under the wreckage of wtc that way, but “explaining” anything was never their intention.
the 9/11 commission didn’t even take a stab at explaining how building 7 (a 45 story office building) fell, apparently of its own volition , as it had not been hit during or after the attack by either planes or falling debris.
*the owner of the building - larry silverstein stated in a pbs documentary that he was told by the fdny the building was going to be imploded.
so, let’s implore the government to account for the iraqi dead more fully, but let’s start with the amercian dead, as their dead bodies were cruelly used the basis for the lies that lead to the iraq/afghanistan conflict, soon to include iran.
we, the counter theorist of 9/11, have endured ridicule and scorn for holding our beliefs and making them - however begrudgingly - part of the discussion has been a long and slow process. but we have endured.
if the media were not owned and operated by the same war mongering corporations who have benefited so greatly by the iraq war, there would be a lot more discussion in the public domain about this wacky government account of 19 arab boys with box cutters who egregiously attacked the republic.
the “truth” - despite virtually no mainstream media coverage - is that most americans know their government was involved in the 9/11 attacks. in nyc the figure is in the high 70’s.
moreover, the government might also try to explain how these 19 arab boys happened to commit their heinous attack during a once in a lifetime three hour window of opportunity afforded by a completely unexplained shut down of the air defenses.
and they call the counter theorists crazy…………..
What are the interests of the corporate world in a corporate war? Civilians as consumers or material to be consumed, to what end are corporations given more rights than humans?.
To participate in the robbing, raping, and killing of people, you must first dehumanize them.
This Haroon Siddiqui is really an incredibly brave man - I only hope he stays safe after speaking the truth to audaciously.
About 3000 people died in the WTC on 9/11, and about 3800 Americans have been killed in action in Iraq, and that’s how most of us Americans understand mass murder and the casualties of war.
Iraqis understand mass murder and the casualties of war in a different way. About 500,000 Iraqi children died in consequence of the UN embargo in the 1990s, and about 1,200,000 Iraqis have died under the American invasion and occupation. If we adjust those figures according to the difference in population between the United States and Iraq, it’s as if 6,000,000 American children had been killed by an embargo, and 15,000,000 Americans had died in consequence of an invasion and occupation.
About 500,000 Iraqi children died in consequence of the UN embargo in the 1990s.
Please milesofmusic, do not spread any more lies. The truth is bad enough. WTC7 was badly damaged by falling, flaming debris. I know. I live nearby. I saw it firsthand. The whole front of the building was destroyed and smoldering for hours. It’s final demise may have looked like a controlled implosion because our then egomanical Mayor Giuliani insisted that his emrgency bunker be placed there. There were tens of thousands of gallons of diesel fuel stored under that building for emergency power requirements. No conspiracy theories are needed. The stupidity is enough.