by Scott Ritter
The full scale of the human cost already paid for the war on Iraq is only
now becoming clear. Last week's estimate by investigators, using credible
methodology, that more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians - most of them women and children - have died
since the US-led invasion is a profound moral indictment of our countries.
The US and British governments quickly moved to cast doubt on the Lancet
medical journal findings, citing other studies. These mainly media-based
reports put the number of Iraqi civilian deaths at about 15,000 - although
the basis for such an endorsement is unclear, since neither the US nor the
UK admits to collecting data on Iraqi civilian casualties.
Civilian deaths have always been a tragic reality of modern war. But the
conflict in Iraq was supposed to be different - US and British forces were
dispatched to liberate the Iraqi people, not impose their own tyranny of
violence.
Reading accounts of the US-led invasion, one is struck by the constant,
almost casual, reference to civilian deaths. . . .
The fact that most bombing missions in Iraq today are pre-planned, with
targets allegedly carefully vetted, further indicts those who wage this war
in the name of freedom. If these targets are so precise, then those
selecting them cannot escape the fact that they are deliberately targeting
innocent civilians at the same time as they seek to destroy their intended
foe. . . .
But we all are moral cowards when it comes to Iraq. Our collective inability
to summon the requisite shame and rage when confronted by an estimate of
100,000 dead Iraqi civilians in the prosecution of an illegal and unjust war
not only condemns us, but adds credibility to those who oppose us. The fact
that a criminal such as Osama bin Laden can broadcast a videotape on the eve
of the US presidential election in which his message is viewed by many
around the world as a sober argument in support of his cause is the harshest
indictment of the failure of the US and Britain to implement sound policy in
the aftermath of 9/11. The death of 3,000 civilians on that horrible day
represented a tragedy of huge proportions. Our continued indifference to a
war that has slaughtered so many Iraqi civilians, and will continue to kill
more, is in many ways an even greater tragedy: not only in terms of scale,
but also because these deaths were inflicted by our own hand in the course
of an action that has no defence.
FULL TEXT
[Scott Ritter was a senior UN weapons inspector in Iraq between 1991 and
1998 and is the author of Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and
the Bushwhacking of America]
"Iraq Civilian Body Count Passes
6,000," Reuters, July 9, 2003
Denis Halliday, "The UN Failed the Iraqi
People," Socialist Worker Online, September 5, 2003
[. . . the researchers reported in a paper released early by the
Lancet, a British medical journal.--Rob Stein, "100,000 Civilian Deaths Estimated in Iraq," Washington Post, October
29, 2004]
Naomi Klein, "In
Iraq, the US does eliminate those who dare to count the dead," Guardian,
December 4, 2004
Rory McCarthy, "Blair
rejects call for count of Iraqi deaths: Scale of killing obscured by refusal
to collect data," Guardian, December 9, 2004
Scott Ritter, "Criminals
the lot of us," Guardian, January 27, 2005
[The truth is that you cannot even begin to make a justification for the war
unless you take into account the lives of innocent Iraqis lost as a result
of it.--Gary Younge, "Two
years on, the occupiers justify the war by embracing the irrelevant and
ignoring the inconvenient," Guardian, March 21, 2005]
[Unlike the respectful applause granted the Congolese study, this one,
published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet, generated
a hail of abusive criticism. The general outrage may have been prompted by
the unsettling possibility that Iraq's liberators had already killed a
third as many Iraqis as the reported 300,000 murdered by Saddam Hussein in
his decades of tyranny. . . .
Sprey calculates that deaths inflicted to date as a direct result of the
Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq could be, at best estimate,
183,000, with an upper 95 per cent confidence boundary of 511,000.--Andrew
Cockburn, "How
Many Iraqis Have Died Since the US Invasion in 2003?," CounterPunch,
January 9, 2006]
[However, the report notes, this is a conservative estimate, and the total number killed
in the three countries "could also be in excess of 2 million, whereas a figure below 1
million is extremely unlikely."
Furthermore, the researchers do not look at other countries targeted by U.S.-led war,
including Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Syria, and beyond.--Sarah Lazare, "Body Count Report Reveals At Least 1.3 Million Lives Lost
to US-Led War on Terror," commondreams.org, March 26, 2015]