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Recent
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May
16, 2003
Website
of the Day
Iraq and Our
Energy Future
May
15, 2003
Ayesha
Iman and Sindi Medar-Gould
How
Not to Help Amina Lawal: The Hidden Dangers of Letter
Writing Campaigns
Julie
Hilden
Moussaoui and the Camp X-Ray Detainees:
Can He Get a Fair Trial?
Tanya
Reinhart
Bush's Roadmap: a Ticket to Failure
Laura Carlsen
Here We Go Again: NAFTA Plus or Minus?
Kenneth
Rapoza
The New Fakers: State Dept. Undercuts
New Yorker's Goldberg
Stew Albert
A Story I Will Tell
Steve
Perry
Bush's Little
Nukes
Website
of the Day
Strip-o-Rama
May
14, 2003
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Jason
Leopold
The Pentagon and Hallburton: a Secret
November Deal for Iraq's Oil
David
Lindorff
Fighting the Patriot Act: Now It's
Alaska
John
Chuckman
Giggling into Chaos
Jack
McCarthy
Twin Towers of Journalism: Racism
and Double Standards
Wayne
Madsen
Assassinating JFK Again
M.
Junaid Alam
The Longer View
Paul
de Rooij
The New Hydra's Head:
Propagandists and the Selling of the US/Iraq War
James
Reiss
What? Me Worry?
Steve Perry
More on Saudi Arabia Bombings
Website
of the Day
A Tribute to Ted Joans
May
13, 2003
Saul
Landau
Clear Channel Fogs the Airwaves
Michael
Neumann
Has Islam Failed? Not by Western
Standards
Uri
Avnery
My Meeting with Arafat
Steve Perry
The Saudi Arabia Bombing
Jacob
Levich
Democracy Comes to Iraq: Kick Their Ass and Grab Their Gas
William
Lind
The Hippo and the Mongoose: a Question of Military Theory
The
Black Commentator
Fraud at the Times: Blaming Blacks for White Folks' Mistakes
Stew Albert
Asylum
Hammond
Guthrie
An Illogical Reign
Website
of the Day
Sy Hersh: War and Intelligence
May
12, 2003
Chris
Floyd
Bush, Bin Laden, Bechtel, and Baghdad
Dave
Lindorff
America's Dirty Bombs
Sam
Hamod and Elaine Cassel
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Uzi
Benziman
Sharon and Sons, Inc.
Jason
Leopold
The Decline and Fall of Thomas White
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George Jumps the Shark
Federico
Moscogiuri
Going to Israel? Sign or Else
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/12
Book
of the Day
Fooling
Marty Peretz
Website
of the Day
T-Shirts to Protest In
May
10 / 11, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Rosenthal Faces the Music in Key
Med Marijuana Case
JoAnn
Wypijewski
Labor in the Dawn of Empire
Annie
C. Higgins
The Last Time I Saw Mus'ab
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The Devil in New England
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Mandel
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Halliburton Still Flouts the Law as It Profits from Terror
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The Iraqi Quagmire
Larry Magnuson
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Sasan
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The Good Terrorists?
Anthony
Gancarski
Chalabi: Drowning in Ba'ath-water?
Steven
Sherman
A Letter to My European Friends
Khaled
El-Bizri
Mr. Bush Comes to Santa Clara
Bruce
Jackson
How Fear Curdles the Soul
Adam Engel
Flag in the Rain
Poets
Basement
Reiss, Guthrie, Hamod & Albert
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/10
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of the Weekend
Killing Again
May
9, 2003
Rahul
Mahajan
Don't Lift the Sanctions Yet
Wayne
Madsen
When Lying Pays Off: Neo-Con Fabricators
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Floyd
The Karamazov Question
Don Monkerud
The Great Christian Schism: War or Peace?
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Hamod and Elaine Cassel
Drunk on Power: Bush, Power and the
Pathology of the Dry Drunk
Hammond
Guthrie
Bombastic Promise Keeping
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/09
May
8, 2003
Julie
Hilden
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Z.
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Zepezauer
Evil is as Evil Does
David Lindorff
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Spinoza
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Ben
Tripp
The Other "F" Word
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Madarasz
God in the Service of the Security
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Pushovers
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Bush's War Web Log 5/08
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May
7, 2003
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Krieger
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Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/07
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The Truth About Bush's Military Records
May
6, 2003
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de Rooij
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John
Stanton
Bush's War on Jesus
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A Roadmap to Nowhere
Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/06
May
5, 2003
Gary
Leupp
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Mariscal
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Reed
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Perry
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Smith
Coalition of the Shilling
May
3, 2003
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Jacobs
Tears of Rage: Remembering May 1970
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May
2, 2003
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Gordon
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Burston
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Question Those Writing History
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Steve
Perry
Bush's War Web Log 5/02
Website
of the Day
Moussaoui's
Quiz
May
1, 2003
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Santorum: That's Latin for Asshole
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Boal
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Greed Air: Airline Workers Agree to Pay Cuts, While Bosses Stuff
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Bush's War Web Log 5/01
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Under Uncle Sam's Thumb: a History
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Shooting Schoolboys: Preliminary Thoughts on the Fallujah Massacre
Robert
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Fighting Alienation in the USA
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The Four Horsemen of Propaganda
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Bush's Strategic Myopia About the Middle East
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Iraq, the US and the End of the European Coalition
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A Nobel Laureat's Letter to Bush:
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May
16, 2003
Those Who Don't Count
Remembering
the Civilian Victims of the War on Iraq
By MARK ENGLER
Since the invasion of Iraq has ended, a tone of
vindication and bravado has seeped into the national mood. Television
newscasters and the Department of Defense agree: America is delighted.
Soldiers are giving high-fives. Those of us who opposed the president
and his generals should be ashamed in the face of a brilliantly
successful war.
There is one question, above others,
that this prevailing self-satisfaction works to silence. Amidst
the atmosphere of recrimination, few will risk asking, "What
was the cost?"
On televisions overseas, the Marine blitz
and Air Force bombs extracted a human price. While Donald Rumsfeld's
talking head became the singular icon of war in the United States,
the rest of the world held up photos of Ali Ismaeel Abbas, the
12-year-old boy who lost his parents and eight other relatives,
along with both of his arms, in the bombing of Baghdad.
No doubt some have exploited such images
for propagandistic purposes. No doubt the pursuit of carnage
at times became tasteless sensationalism. But what was the impact
for Americans of seeing so few, if any, of those who died?
There are estimates available of the
number of civilians killed in the war. A group of 19 volunteers
in England, the creators of a Web site called "IraqBodyCount.net,"
estimate that there were a "minimum" of 2,050 deaths.
This total reflects the lowest numbers provided in news reports
of deadly incidents. A more complete tally would have to add
the hundreds, maybe thousands, whose deaths were never reported
by any source -- those buried quietly in the rubble, or those
who were wounded and later died in one of Iraq's overflowing,
and ultimately looted, hospitals.
No country, "coalition" or
otherwise, has undertaken this reckoning. "A Swiss government
initiative launched in the middle of the war," says John
Sloboda of IraqBodyCount, "was abandoned under political
pressure."
The dilemma this presents is an old one,
and a dangerous one, too: What is the weight of a life? How many
before it matters? Few can offer good answers. Those who look
only at the bloodiest moments of war discount other lives. Hundreds
of thousands of Iraqi citizens died as a result of the decade-long
sanctions, for which Saddam Hussein bears much culpability, but
which the United States had the power to lift all along. Many
more would have died if sanctions were prolonged. And we have
no way to know how many will be killed in future invasions inspired
by Iraq's conquest, or in resultant acts of retribution.
Washington, of course, kept careful track
of the 166 U.S. and British troops killed in action. It shunned,
however, the idea of a civilian body count. Many journalists,
particularly on television, took this official position as their
marching orders.
Even in the most responsible of our newspapers,
one idea became a mantra: "a precise number [of civilians
who were killed] is not and probably never will be available,"
said The New York Times. "The final toll may never be determined,"
said The Washington Post. Again and again, reporters noted the
difficulty of making an exact tally.
It was, on face, a statement of humility,
an honest acknowledgement of the chaos inherent in military conflict.
Yet, at some point, this tendency -- this refusal to count, or
to even try -- grew into something else.
It became a form of political denial.
The rare dispatches that scratched through
the surface of the government's stance on civilian deaths revealed
a human side of war -- in which young soldiers feared for their
lives and relied on quick, difficult decisions -- but also, at
the same time, a startling desensitization to human life. In
one oft-cited report by The New York Times, a Sergeant Schrumpf
recalled an incident in which Marines fired on an Iraqi soldier
standing among several civilians. One woman was killed. "I'm
sorry," the sergeant said, "but the chick was in the
way."
Another Times reporter wrote of a situation
in which Marines attacked a caravan of vehicles approaching them
from the distance, not knowing if these might be filled with
enemies or, as it actually turned out, with innocents:
"One by one, civilians were killed.
Several hundred yards from the forward Marine positions, a blue
minivan was fired on; three people were killed. An old man, walking
with a cane on the side of the road, was shot and killed. It
is unclear what he was doing there; perhaps he was confused and
scared and just trying to get away from the city. Several other
vehicles were fired on.... When the firing stopped, there were
nearly a dozen corpses, all but two of which had no apparent
military clothing or weapons. "Two journalists who were
ahead of me, farther up the road, said that a company commander
told his men to hold their fire until the snipers had taken a
few shots, to try to disable the vehicles without killing the
passengers. 'Let the snipers deal with civilian vehicles,' the
commander had said. But as soon as the nearest sniper fired his
first warning shots, other Marines apparently opened fire with
M-16s or machine guns.... "[A] squad leader, after the
shooting stopped, shouted: 'My men showed no mercy. Outstanding.'"
The number of civilians killed in the
actual fighting does matter, if only to remind us that invasion
is not a video game. It matters, because it shows that however
sophisticated its tools, war will always claim its "collateral
damage," its innocent bystanders.
A callous indifference toward such lives
is not limited to the sergeants and squad leaders on the front
lines. It is the position fostered by a government that does
not count its victims, even as it lines up more conquests: next
Syria, then on to Iran.
It is an attitude that survives outside
of wartime, guiding our prejudices against those living in countries
whose names we never learned to pronounce, countries that our
shock-jocks call "turd world" nations.
In order to break the cycle of war and
deprivation, hatred and terrorism, the United States some day
must start counting not only the dead from this conflict, but
all those whom we perpetually disregard. And it must start holding
itself accountable to them. For as it does, we will learn that
this is not a matter of two thousand, or even two hundred thousand.
The majority of this world will rise
to be counted.
Mark Engler,
a writer based in New York City, can be reached at engler@eudoramail.com.
T his article first appeared on TomPaine.com.
Research assistance provided by Katie Griffiths.
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