Reality in Iraq
by Chris 4 comments Leave a comment June 24th, 2008
Juan Cole compiles the numbers for us:
By now, summer of 2008, excess deaths from violence in Iraq since March of 2003 must be at least a million. This conclusion can be reached more than one way. There is not much controversy about it in the scientific community. Some 310,000 of those were probably killed by US troops or by the US Air Force, with the bulk dying in bombing raids by US fighter jets and helicopter gunships on densely populated city and town quarters.
“But violence has dropped,” you say. Not so fast:
…over 500 a month dead in political violence is appalling enough. The Srebenica massacre in 1995 killed 8,000. At the average rate of death in Iraq this winter and spring, a similar massacre will have been racked up in 2008. In the Northern Ireland troubles over 30 years, about 3,000 people died, and it was widely considered a bad situation. That death toll is still being achieved every 6 months in Iraq according to the official May statistics.
If that weren’t bad enough, there are the wounded to worry about:
In these situations, typically 3 persons are wounded for every one killed. In Iraq, I suspect it is higher, because US bombings and guerrilla bombings are such a big part of the violence. But let us be conservative.
That would mean 3 million Iraqi wounded in the past five years.
Thankfully a lot of Iraqis were able to escape the disaster we created. Unfortunately a large refugee population creates its own set of problems:
As for the displaced (i.e. homeless), they amount to a startling 5 million persons. There were 1.8 million internally displaced in January of 2007, and by December it had risen to 2.4 million…
Some 1.4 million Iraqis are stuck in Syria, many becoming increasingly penniless. Another 500,000 to 800,000 have been displaced to Jordan, which has now closed its borders to them. Please read this excellent piece of reporting, which points out that the US has done diddly squat for these millions of people upon whom it has visited a world class catastrophe, neither allotting meaningful amounts of aid nor admitting more than a token number as immigrants. Sweden has admitted 40,000 Iraqis, nearly 4 times what the US even plans to. Please write the Senate and the Congress and demand that something be done for these, our victims.
It’s difficult to firmly grasp the levels of destruction, pain and death we’ve visited on the Iraqi people all in the name rooting out phantom weapons. What’s even harder to understand is how there are people still willing to defend our invasion on moral grounds. After a million killed, 3 million wounded and 5 million displaced, how can this war possibly be justified?
I don’t think it has ever been tried to be justified. I mean, they admitted there were no WMD’s, so why are we over there? What is the real reason?
As the female voice, I would try to argue that our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan have improved women’s rights. But because so much of the mistreatment of women are justified by their faith and culture, I can not legitimately claim this. Additionally, I think being a displaced refuge from a homeland of an unstable and violent government trumps women’s rights. The atrocities have snowballed to so that the most basic and simple human rights are violated on a daily basis. No wonder why the World hates us.
I think the question comes down to who is benefiting from the war. As Sheepy points out, its obviously not the Iraqi people. Or at least in the short term and for the foreseeable future, they aren’t. The American people aren’t gaining anything here. We get saddled with the debt from the war and its not like gas prices have shifted in a positive direction. Congress didn’t benefit. Those people who voted for the war have been losing elections (See: a handful of Republicans who lost their seats and Hillary Clinton). Bush isn’t even seemingly benefiting. His approval ratings went down the tubes which has had some effect on his ability to press his domestic agenda since Congress shifted to the Democrats (”some”). He also has suffered greatly in how foreign countries are willing to deal with him. For example, Saudi Arabia embarrassed him back in May by refusing his request for more oil and have made clear they are waiting for his replacement. The only people I see benefiting from this war are private contractors who get all these contracts in Iraq. While I am sure that this was always part of the intended outcome, I don’t think it was the primary reasoning for going to war. Am I missing something? I mean, it just looks like one massive mistake on the part of the Bush Administration with no real underlying intentions. If there were underlying intentions, they don’t seem to be clear right now or they were complete failures.
I think they were complete failures. We did have decent intentions going into the war. Aside from the WMD’s, we took down a ruthless dictatorship and our aim was to improve the quality of the Iraq people’s lives. We did, to some degree, assist the Afghanis in rebuilding public infostructures and advancing their society. The failure came in the reconstruction of the government, which fueled and aided the cause for terrorist movements. And keep in mind that we are fighting people (a lot of people) who absolutely hate us and think that our way of living should be abolished and destroyed in the most brutal way possible.