[Marxism] Iraqi war casualties: US imperialism causes murder, death, terrorism and cancer

["Jurriaan Bendien" <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Little has been reported about how many Iraqi military personnel
died. I also did not consider the number of wounded, but of course, there
are also an enormous number of people maimed for life, which is another
untold story. Normally in wars of the 20th century, the number of wounded
exceeded the number of deaths. The term "war casualty" was normally
applied to both deaths (fatal casualties, fatalities) and wounded
(casualties),
but these days the term "casualties" is more often applied to deaths.
There was a report in the NYT  in which the US armed forces
stated specifically that they would not count the dead and in fact they
thought it was impossible to do so (but I have to locate the whole article
again). See however
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30A16FE3D5F0C738DDDAD0894DB4
04482 . Unfortunately, with the NYT if you don't download the article when
it is published, you have to pay for it, them is the breaks.

I did not yet mention these studies:
http://www.comw.org/pda/0310rm8.html
http://hrw.org/reports/2003/iraq1003/

Which people may wish to consult if interested in the methodological side of
estimation. Mark Burgess, a researcher at the Center for Defense Information
in
Washington, a private research group, said once that "the war in Iraq
presented
unusually difficult problems in estimating the dead because few Iraqi
military units fought in an organized manner." Dan Bartlett, the director of
White House communications, noted that Fedayeen "means something like
'dying for a noble cause' ""a status that the U.S. government wants to deny
(NYT, Apr 20, 2003, pg. B14, Elizabeth Bumiller, "Even Critics of War Say
the White House Spun It With Skill"). Instead of 'invasion,' the US
government deliberately talked about "regime change" as a marketing
concept - regime sounding more dictatorial than 'government.'
George W. Bush's advisors spent many hours discussing "the
question of how might you have regime change thought of as liberation rather
than occupation?".

Through their use of "smart" bombs and digitally controlled "strategic"
strikes, the U.S. can now invade other countries with
relatively little money  and very few US deaths. So long as the media can be
controlled, people can pretend massacres did not happen.

To illustrate the American mentality, the pilot of the plane that dropped
the Hiroshima bomb on August 6th 1945 ("Little Boy") was interviewed by
Studs Terkel (a second bomb nicknamed "Fat Man" was dropped on Nagasaki on
August 9th 1945 after the Japanese government failed to offer their
unconditional surrender).  The Hiroshima bomb was dropped from the Enola Gay
(the name of the bomber plane) with a parachute and the bomb exploded
several hundred feet above the ground. "A bright light filled the plane,"
the pilot Lt. Col. Paul Tibbets reported. "We turned back to look at
Hiroshima. The city was hidden by that awful cloud...boiling up,
mushrooming." For a moment, no one spoke. Then everyone was talking. "Look
at that! Look at that! Look at that!" exclaimed the co-pilot, Robert Lewis
while pounding on Tibbets' shoulder. Lewis said he could taste atomic
fission; it tasted like lead. Then he turned away to write in his journal.
"My God," he asked himself, "what have we done?".

Studs Terkel specifically asked Paul Tibbets in 2002 "One last thing, when
you hear people say, "Let's nuke 'em," "Let's nuke these people," what do
you think?". The answer of Tibbets is noteworthy: "Oh, I wouldn't hesitate
if I had the choice. I'd wipe 'em out. You're gonna kill innocent people at
the same time, but we've never fought a damn war anywhere in the world where
they didn't kill innocent people. If the newspapers would just cut out the
shit: "You've killed so many civilians." That's their tough luck for being
there." God Bless America (sic.).

The Guardian article is at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,769634,00.html
For a story about Major Claude Eatherly who guided Paul Tibbets to his
target, see  http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/1999/02.18/eatherly.html
The official Paul Tibbets site is at: http://www.theenolagay.com/
Other info at: http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWtibbets.htm

Personally, I get really irritated when President Bush tries to assure
American families of some hundreds of dead American soldiers that they did
not die in vain, because apart from the insanity of Iraq war itself, he acts
as though the Iraqi war dead just do not exist. But the American losses of
human lives are actually very small, compared to the Iraqi losses. In
Anglo-Saxon sexual ideology, "dead" also has a sexual significance, but
sometimes the allegorical way in which this is used in war reporting is I
think terrible, in the sense of being an affront to the most basic human
morality I can think of, namely that life is worth living. The Zionists may
babble about Auschwitz, but this war in Iraq and the way it has been
reported again suggests humanity has not progressed beyond Auschwitz.

Auschwitz is history, Iraq is actual. If you cannot take a clear and
strong moral position on the war in Iraq, all stories about Auschwitz
are just a piece of shit, in my opinion. The reason why you need to
quantify war dead is to help evaluate priorities for the living, in all
sorts
of areas of human life. It is not that I think you should have a macabre
fascination with mortality statistics, but I think in this case it is
important
knowledge which could indeed help save lives in future or at least
help us understand the quantitative proportions of actions taken.

Somebody might nevertheless object, why bother with this horrible topic,
but the fact is, that the most basic datum about a war is that people die.
If we fudge even that most basic datum, then even if we (sic.) accept
that violent military wars are necessary, we are in no position to evaluate
morally the conduct of the war itself, and that leads to the idea that
no moral precepts apply in war. No socialist inspired by Marx could
however accept that. It is good to see though that many
Americans do not agree with the war and the
attempt to shove the massacre under the carpet see e.g. -
http://www.counterpunch.org/mahajan04052003.html

Jurriaan




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