The deaths caused by the U.S. in Iraq are "untold" by
the media
By Danny Lucia
January 31, 2012 "ISO" -- OVER A
million Iraqis are dead from America's war.
 |
| War on Iraq |
That sentence is a
cognitive litmus test. Some people's immediate reaction is, "That can't be
right," because the United States couldn't do that. Or because crimes on
that scale don't still happen. Or because they do happen, but only in horrible
places that the United States hasn't rescued.
One million is a
"Grandpa, what did you do to stop it?" number. It's a number that
undeniably puts the American state among history's villains. Those who are not
willing or able to accept this are physically unable to retain the fact that
over a million Iraqis are dead. Their brains expel it like a foreign germ.
Noam Chomsky once
wrote that the "sign of a truly totalitarian culture is that
important truths simply lack cognitive meaning and are interpretable only at
the level of 'Fuck You,' so they can then elicit a perfectly predictable
torrent of abuse in response."
That pretty much sums up
the how the media reacted to the one million figure in 2007 when it was announced
by the British polling firm Opinion Research Business (ORB). (In fact, the firm estimated
1,220,580 Iraqis had died, confirming and updating a
separate study done the year before by researchers from Johns Hopkins
University and published in the Lancet medical journal.)
Take Kevin O'Brien, deputy editor of
the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Upon receiving a media advisory
about the findings from ORB, whose clients include the British Conservative
Party and Morgan Stanley, this was his response: "Please remove me from
your mailing list and spare me your transparent propaganda."
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"WE DON'T do body
counts," Gen. Tommy Franks once famously answered a reporter's question
about civilian casualties. He's not alone.
Amid all the somber
reflections last month about the end of the Iraq War, a specific number of how
many Iraqis had died was rarely given. Reporters often described the tally of
Iraqi casualties as an "untold number," a somber-sounding phrase that
reflects the same level of journalistic effort used for finding the death toll
of squirrels in a forest fire.
This line from Reuter's
Mary Milliken was typical: "[T]oday was about remembering the untold
number of Iraqis and nearly 4,500 Americans who died in the war."
How many Americans died,
Mary? Nearly 4,500. And how many Iraqis? Oh, you know,
lots. A whole bunch.
"Untold number"
implies that there are no available estimates of just how many Iraqis died. In
fact there are two: an organization called Iraq Body Count (IBC)
has tallied about 110,000 deaths, based on media accounts and health ministry
records. IBC admits that its total is surely too low since occupying armies and
sectarian civil wars are not known for meticulous bookkeeping, but it disputes
the higher figures from ORB and Johns Hopkins.
Methodology debates aside,
there are numbers on hand to describe the Iraqi death toll. They are
"untold" only by reporters like Kevin O'Brien and Mary Milliken.
The silence around numbers
is not so much a conspiracy as a reflection of the fact that some information
is simply incompatible with the American imperial mindset.
Consider a different grisly
number from a previous decade: According to the United Nations Children Fund, 500,000
Iraqi children died in the 1990s due to United Nations sanctions (rammed
through by the U.S.) that barred medicines and other basic necessities from
entering the country.
In 2000, the UN
humanitarian aid coordinator resigned to protest the sanctions, two
years after his predecessor had done the same. Both of these life-long
diplomats later used the word "genocide" to describe the American
policy.
If you are ignorant of or
forgot this information, you are not alone. So did the people who planned the
Iraq War. There is no other way to explain the fact that America's war and
occupation strategy rested on the expectation that its soldiers would be
greeted as liberators by the parents of half a million dead children. (The
sanctions, by the way, weren't imposed in the Kurdish north, the only part in
Iraq that did not offer massive resistance to the U.S. occupation.)
It's not by chance that
many of the most committed antiwar activists are revolutionaries of one stripe
or another. We are able to process and comprehend the staggering evil been done
to Iraq because we are radicals. And vice versa.
Revolutionaries face the
ironic conventional wisdom that because we want to see society radically
transformed, we are ends-justifies-the-means fanatics who think nothing of how
much blood might be spilled in the process.
But it was then-Secretary
of State Madeleine Albright who said of the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children that
"the price is worth it." And it is current Defense
Secretary Leon Panetta who used the exact same phrase recently regarding
the second invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Those are the words of a
fanatical order that anyone should be proud to oppose with all of their being.
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