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One Million Killed in Iraq
Back in February I roughly extrapolated the Lancet study on excess death calculation on Iraq.
By end of June 2007 the estimated number of war-related dead will have exceeded 1,000,000.
The folks at Just Foreign Policy have done a more thorough review and as of this writing their counter shows:
1,000,938 Iraqi Death Due to U.S. Invasion
Craig Murray has the dignity to acknowledge that We Killed One Million People – Yes, You and I Did
Not one of us has done enough to stop it.
Craig in his piece seems to restrict the guilt to the people of the U.S. and the UK. But even though I’m not part of either (and have quite problem with his christian concept of guilt anyway) I’ll pick up my share here.
I could have done more than I did to stop this. And I should have done more.
Craig continues:
Of course we don’t know the exact number of Iraqi dead. Nobody does – dead civilians are not considered important enough to count by the occupying forces. I don’t care if the estimate of a million is 50% out, either way. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people have died a terrible death, and we caused it. Not one of us has yet done enough to stop it. The guilt lies heaviest on Bush, Blair and Cheney.
But it lies on you and me too.
Many more will die before this is over but we must do more to lower the final number.
The song "Bestow Us Peace Graciously" (don’t watch, just listen) was written by Heinrich Schütz in 1648, the end of the 30 years of war that killed a third of my people, most of them children, and millions beyond.
We are in danger to lose the lecture payed with that very hefty due – the lecture of the Westphalian Peace and its promise of sovereignty, equality and non-intervention between nations.
That seems to be out of mode today and sticking to it does include to sometimes look away from evil happening somewhere.
Still, if you research a bit on the singular event of that war, and the reasons why these laws were instituted to end it, you will see that its purpose was and is to prevent worse: pseudo religious/humanitarian war campaigns for the profit of few at the expense of many.
The Westphalian peace contract effectively rejects legitimacy to egoistic marketing campaigns that promote to Safe Kanukistan/Eliminat Whateverism by bombing the shit out of this or that country.
History proves that this is less costly in human terms than to prevent some bloody internal strife in this or that realm.
We need to get back to that agreement. I hope without paying such a hefty due again.
But the price to pay depends on you and me.
Debs is dead, I agree with you that the analysis isn’t fair: it can’t be fair because it’s a categorical judgment that doesn’t allow for nuance or exception–and the crucial fact about this country is its openness to nuance and exception qualifying the categorical judgment in question. The War of Independence, the effort to liberate the slaves, not to mention our productivity in the arts and sciences–these are exceptions, all, to the categorical judgment proposed, and should be taken as signs of its unfairness.
So why take the chance of being unfair?
We are in the grips of a “machine” far more powerful than any government, political party, or political movement. We need to take the measure of ourselves as a “war machine”. It’s a thing of which we are largely unaware, if only because no mind can begin to comprehend its magnitude. A pie-chart–whose website is called “The Federal Pie-chart”–argues that 51% of our federal budget is committed to military expenditures (it arrives at this figure by including benefits for veterans). I, for one, can only take a magnitude of this size on faith; I cannot comprehend it or imagine it. Nor, for that matter, can I comprehend any smaller pie-charts arguing for smaller sums. The whole thing is too big for my mind. And not just with respect to dollars, but with respect to our institutional investments: for example, I know of no major American university that could survive the elimination of its support from DOD.
How shall we take the measure of something so incalculably huge–as indeed we have to do? What does this entail?
Well, we have to allow for the possibility that the thing itself is structural, and that it can be found, built into the enterprise, from the moment we hit the ground. Robert Lowell, in the little poem I cited above, has decided to do exactly that: he finds a background–an Anglo-European background that launched the enterprise from the other side of the Atlantic–that is theological in nature; it stems from a notion of “election,” Calvinist in origin and style, that gives the “elect” the green light to kill other people in the name of the Lord. Luther never does this, and in fact the Roman Catholic church doesn’t do it either. Calvin and his European followers do. I think Lowell’s insight is taken well, and so I’ve adopted it as my own “point of departure” (he got it, of course, from Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Thoreau and Emily Dickinson, to mention a few of his favorites).
We were killing Indians from the get-go, largely from a lust for property (“Our fathers fenced their gardens with the Red-man’s bones”). This is a fact, military in essence, preceding the “War of Independence” by almost two centuries. Something rooted as deeply as this–much as we may deplore it–can be said to exercise its control over our thoughts and our deeds.
To close with an example ( one that I’ve mentioned hereabouts from time to time): can you name a single American, currently holding, or running for, elective office, who has denounced the war in Iraq as a crime against our fellow man, one for which we should be held accountable? With no “ifs,” “ands,” or “buts”? I’ve looked for that person at every level of government for the past four years, and I haven’t yet found him or her. I take this to mean that either no elected official considers the war to be a crime, or that none would dare to denounce it as such: to denounce it would require an insupportably searching analysis of our history, our structure, our ways of being who we are. I therefore turn to our unelected authors for some guidance in the matter, and the guidance is there for those of us who seek it. Call it a starting-point, if you will–one that gives us some room to breathe.
Posted by: alabama | Aug 11 2007 16:57 utc | 9
I agree with all that comrade r’giap has written.
It should be noted that 1 Million people in Iraq translates to 12 Million people in the US. 12 Million people killed in four years — imagine that. That’s about 10, 000 people a day, 200 people per day in an average state of six million, 1000 people per day — day in, day out — in California. Imagine the number of bombs dropped, missiles fired, doors kicked in, men tortured and interrogated, women raped and forced to whore to survive. Imagine the number of tanks that would be rolling down OUR streets every day and every night.
Of course, we would have 25 Million dislocated, another 25-50 Million injured, and countless more suffering from permanent psychological damage, what they call PTSD these days, and also countless more suffering from birth defects, DU poisoning, etc. Then there are those dying of disease, suffering from lack of water and sub-par food. All in all, around 100 Million people would be dead, injured, or dislocated. Of course the invaders would occasionally discuss in their media whether it was 4 or 6 million that had been “adversely affected.” But most of the time, when you turned on their media, they would be discussing some particular starlet’s problem with the law, or drugs, or her boyfriend. At best, you might see people driven to buying a plastic bracelet as a fetish to guard against them having to think about starving people.
Imagine city after city — Boston, St. Louis, Seattle — encircled, all power and water cut, all hospitals closed down and surrounded by snipers atop buildings, while day after day, the bombs and the phosphorus drop from the air all around you. All men are rounded up and taken away, women without men are imprisoned and tortured, all houses standing searched, 1/3 left in rubble. Imagine snipers on your very own corner, eyeing your house with deepening suspicion. This has happened to twelve or more cities in Iraq; in the US it would be about 150 different cities, almost a city a week. See if you can even sit down and name 150 cities.
Imagine that your family is starving to death and your father is dying of very treatable high-blood pressure, and the only people hiring are the invaders.
Imagine our big sporting arenas closed down during the World Series and the Superbowl so that our dead could be unceremoniously buried in the soft soil beneath the green tended grass.
Now imagine up to 50,000 people a day (yes, the math is correct) fleeing across our borders into Canada and Mexico. How stupid do our little immigration spats look compared to an event of that magnitude? Imagine bands of a million people or more roaming across the country looking for some safety. Imagine temporary tent cities set up of up to 1 Million people, and imagine living there for year after year, winter after winter (yes, it does get cold in a tent in the winter in Iraq).
There would not be a single person in this country who did not know someone, a relative perhaps, a friend or a brother or a sister, who had died in this war. We would not be thinking summer vacations in Europe; we would be thinking about surviving until tomorrow, only to repeat the same exhausting process day after day after day — if we are lucky enough.
How stupid does it look after imagining all of this to be debating whether what is happening in Darfur constitutes genocide and whether we should invade that country, too, as a solution. Does what has happened in Iraq — when now translated to a US scope, scale, and detail — not seem like an obvious GENOCIDE which should and must be shouted from the rooftops to everyone you meet each and every day, even after they tell you that you are kooky and disturbing their day?
How stupid does it look under these circumstances, to argue about the picayune political or religious beliefs of those who risk their lives, and their sanity should they be captured and tortured, to stand up to the invaders, against all odds, and protect you?
How ridiculous would it seem to you to have some Chinese people (for example) arguing endlessly whether or not “things might get worse” if the invaders, and snipers, and bombers, and tanks, which smash right over parked cars, left?
Perhaps I should have taken my little dust-up with markfromireland over to this thread. I have read that blog, “Today in Iraq,” and now “Iraq Today” for perhaps 80% of the days since our criminal invasion began. It is my Kaddish; it is my daily taking stock in actions that I am directly responsible for. Yeah, it’s painful and it’s a repetitive waste of my precious time in the summer, but it is what I do to stay in touch with the horror. That was why I was so angry that the blog had been taken over and everyone locked out.
Anyway, sorry I got you little discussion off track on that last thread. If anything happened to this blog I promise not to waste valuable space on another blog discussing it. Best not to disturb the “thread.”
Posted by: Malooga | Aug 12 2007 1:37 utc | 28
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