The Facts of War

This week the United States’ Administration has made two startling admissions. President George Bush, with his ratings plummeting dramatically, went on the offensive to claim that given everything that has happened in Iraq, he would still have made the decision to declare war because the removal of Saddam Hussein has been a good thing. Some weeks ago in my blog “Messages from God” I noted that the lowest estimates of civilian deaths in the continuing Iraq War were just over 24,000. In the course of his argument for supporting the War the President admitted publicly for the first time that American sources put Iraqi civilian casualties at 30,000. Given my experience of American announcements of casualties during the Viet Nam War when I was a student in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I personally believe that the actual number of deaths at this juncture of the war will ultimately turn out to have been significantly higher.

The President’s defence of his warmongering was made while I was travelling back to New Zealand for Christmas. One of the national dailies, The New Zealand Herald, has a column on ‘numbers’ and yesterday’s numbers relate to the Iraqi situation and make for interesting reading:

The cost to the US of the war to date: $204.4bn
World Bank estimate for reconstruction: $35,819,000,000
Allied troops killed: 2339
US soldiers wounded in action: 15,955
Civilian deaths: 30,000
Insurgents killed: 53,470

Iraqis who feel less secure now: 67%
Iraqi children starving: 8%
Iraqis with inoperative sewage system: 70%
Iraqis ‘strongly opposed’ to US troops: 82%
Inflation rate: 20%

Average monthly salary for Iraqi soldier: $343
Average monthly salary for US soldier: $4160

Journalists killed: 66 (83 in Viet Nam War)
Foreigners kidnapped: 251
Daily attacks by insurgents, November: 90
Casualties from mines per month: 20

Weapons of Mass Destruction found: 0

It is of course many months now since the President triumphantly announced that the war was over. Ninety-four percent of US deaths and injuries have occurred since the ‘end’ of the war. Far from being over, some of us believe the war has hardly begun. The Iraq elections taking place today as I write are being hailed by the Coalition partners as a triumph for democracy whereas in fact what has been installed is an oppressive American colonial regime. Nor is there much hope being expressed over the post-election situation. The Kurds have already virtually become an independent region with control over their own oil revenues, and given the long history of enmity with neighbouring Turkey, everyone expects that hostilities will break out between the two. The big winners in the election are likely to be the Shiite Muslims who will inevitably work to ensure that the country which had under Saddam Hussein become the most secular in the Arab world will be placed under Sharia law and become as repressive as its sister regime in Iran. An Iran/Iraq political alliance would constitute a real danger to both middle-east and global politics. And let’s not forget the five million strong Sunni community which used to run Iraq but now constitute the bulk of the so called insurgency. Today many of them appear to be opting for a political solution by participating in the election, although several I saw interviewed on TV said that they are doing so in order to return Iraq to Iraqi control and rid themselves of the occupying forces. However, once the Shiites and Kurds have divided the country between them, a Sunni return to large-scale and permanent insurgency seems almost inevitable. The lasting achievement of President Bush and his allies looks like being a radically destabilised and increasingly volatile Middle East. The principle at work here is as old as humanity itself, as an ancient biblical sage commented, “Sow the wind; reap the whirlwind”.

The second startling announcement from the Administration was that it has caved in to overwhelming international and domestic pressure about the treatment of prisoners. Last week Condoleezza Rice was given a very rough ride during her visit to European governments as more and more information was uncovered about the CIA’s practice of transiting prisoners through European countries to prisons in countries where interrogation through torture is a frequent occurrence. The initial US reaction was along the lines of ‘Hey, we are all in this war together and sometimes the extracting of information calls for unconventional methods’. But this in no way placated the Europeans. Domestically 100 Republicans joined Democrats in Congress to demand a ban on torture and now the Administration has accepted tough new rules for the US forces’ dealings with prisoners which include a ban on torture and other inhumane treatment to be written into the US forces’ Code of Justice. Hopefully this means that the regime in Guantanamo Bay will begin to reflect the values of a liberal democracy rather than those of Stalinism.