[Marxism] Another perceptive article by Naomi Klein

["Jurriaan Bendien" <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Conspicuously absent from Kerry's tally are the lives of Iraqi civilians
lost as a direct result of the invasion. Dean suffered from the same myopic
maths. "There are now almost 400 people dead who wouldn't be dead if we
hadn't gone to war," he said in November. In January he updated the number
to "500 soldiers and 2,200 wounded".

But on February 8, while Kerry was campaigning in Virginia and Dean was in
Maine, the number of Iraqi civilians killed since the invasion reached as
high as 10,000. That number is the most authoritative estimate available,
since the occupying authorities in Iraq refuse to keep count. It comes from
Iraq Body Count, a group of respected British and US academics that bases
its figures on cross-referenced reports from journalists and human rights
groups in the field.

John Sloboda, co-founder of Iraq Body Count, told me that the passing of the
grim 10,000 mark received "scandalously little attention in the US, even as
Democratic candidates were hammering Bush over his faulty intelligence". If
the war was fought on false pretences, Sloboda says, "then every death
caused by the war is a death on false pretences. And if that's the case, the
most urgent question is not who knew what when, but who owes what to whom?"

In international law, countries that wage wars of aggression must pay
reparations. Yet in Iraq, this logic has been turned on its head. Not only
are there no penalties for an illegal war, there are prizes, with the US
actively and openly rewarding itself with huge reconstruction contracts.
When the reconstruction spending has attracted controversy, it has not been
over what is owed to Iraqis for their tremendous losses, but over what is
owed to European corporations and to American taxpayers. "This war
profiteering is poison to America, poison to Americans' faith in government
and poison to our allies' perception of our motives in Iraq," John Edwards
said in December. True, but he somehow failed to mention that it also
poisons Iraqis - not their faith, or their perceptions, but their bodies.

Complete article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1152089,00.html

Naomi concludes: "so long as Bush's opponents cast themselves as the primary
victims of his war, the real victims will remain invisible. The focus will
be on uncovering Bush and Blair's lies - a process geared towards absolving
those who believed them, not on compensating those who died because of
them."

J.










_______________________________________________
Marxism mailing list
Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism