| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"TimeForAChange" |
| Date: |
02 Nov 2004 06:31:50 PM |
| Object: |
We didn't find any WMD, but we did find 100,000 dead civilians. |
Who's the real war criminal?
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The war on Iraq has made moral cowards of us all
More than 100,000 Iraqis have died - and where is our shame and rage?
Scott Ritter
Monday November 1, 2004
The Guardian
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. Soldiers and marines speak of
destroying hundreds, if not thousands, of vehicles that turned out to be
crammed with civilians. US marines acknowledged in the aftermath of the
early, bloody battle for Nassiriya that their artillery and air power had
pounded civilian areas in a blind effort to suppress insurgents thought to
be holed up in the city. The infamous "shock and awe" bombing of Baghdad
produced hundreds of deaths, as did the 3rd Infantry Division's "Thunder
Run", an armoured thrust in Baghdad that slaughtered everyone in its path.
It is true that, with only a few exceptions, civilians who died as a result
of ground combat were not deliberately targeted, but were caught up in the
machinery of modern warfare. But when the same claim is made about civilians
killed in aerial attacks (the Lancet study estimates that most of civilian
deaths were the result of air attacks), the comparison quickly falls apart.
Helicopter engagements apart, most aerial bombardment is deliberate and
pre-planned. US and British military officials like to brag about the
accuracy of the "precision" munitions used in these strikes, claiming this
makes the kind of modern warfare practised by the coalition in Iraq the most
humanitarian in history.
But there is nothing humanitarian about explosives once they detonate near
civilians, or about a bomb guided to the wrong target. Dozens of civilians
were killed during the vain effort to eliminate Saddam Hussein with
"pinpoint" air strikes, and hundreds have perished in the campaign to
eliminate alleged terrorist targets in Falluja. A "smart bomb" is only as
good as the data used to direct it. And the abysmal quality of the
intelligence used has made the smartest of bombs just as dumb and
indiscriminate as those, for example, dropped during the second world war.
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. Some would dismiss these civilians as "collateral damage". But we must
keep in mind that the British and US governments made a deliberate decision
to enter into a conflict of their choosing, not one that was thrust upon
them. We invaded Iraq to free Iraqis from a dictator who, by some accounts,
oversaw the killing of about 300,000 of his subjects - although no one has
been able to verify more than a small fraction of the figure. If it is
correct, it took Saddam decades to reach such a horrific statistic. The US
and UK have, it seems, reached a third of that total in just 18 months.
Meanwhile, the latest scandal over missing nuclear-related high explosives
in Iraq (traced and controlled under the UN inspections regime) only
underscores the utter deceitfulness of the Bush-Blair argument for the war.
Having claimed the uncertainty surrounding Iraq's WMD capability constituted
a threat that could not go unchallenged in a post-9/11 world, one would have
expected the two leaders to insist on a military course of action that
brought under immediate coalition control any aspect of potential WMD
capability, especially relating to any possible nuclear threat. That the US
military did not have a dedicated force to locate and neutralise these
explosives underscores the fact that both Bush and Blair knew that there was
no threat from Iraq, nuclear or otherwise.
Of course, the US and Britain have a history of turning a blind eye to Iraqi
suffering when it suits their political purposes. During the 1990s, hundreds
of thousands are estimated by the UN to have died as a result of sanctions.
Throughout that time, the US and the UK maintained the fiction that this was
the fault of Saddam Hussein, who refused to give up his WMD. We now know
that Saddam had disarmed and those deaths were the responsibility of the US
and Britain, which refused to lift sanctions.
There are many culpable individuals and organisations history will hold to
account for the war - from deceitful politicians and journalists to
acquiescent military professionals and silent citizens of the world's
democracies. As the evidence has piled up confirming what I and others had
reported - that Iraq was already disarmed by the late 1990s - my personal
vote for one of the most culpable individuals would go to Hans Blix, who
headed the UN weapons inspection team in the run-up to war. He had the power
if not to prevent, at least to forestall a war with Iraq. Blix knew that
Iraq was disarmed, but in his mealy-mouthed testimony to the UN security
council helped provide fodder for war. His failure to stand up to the lies
used by Bush and Blair to sell the Iraq war must brand him a moral and
intellectual coward.
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.
· 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
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5052226-103550,00.html
--
They Knew...
Despite the whitewash, we now know that the Bush administration was warned
before the war that its Iraq claims were weak
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/they_knew_0802/
--
U.S. Report Finds Iraq Was Minimal Weapons Threat in '03
By DOUGLAS JEHL
WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 - Iraq had essentially destroyed its illicit weapons
capability within months after the Persian Gulf War ended in 1991, and its
capacity to produce such weapons had eroded even further by the time of the
American invasion in 2003, the top American inspector in Iraq said in a
report made public today.
http://tinyurl.com/3p3q9
(http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/06/international/middleeast/0
6CND-INTE.html?hp=&oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=)
=====================================
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In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site
is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest
in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml.
.
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| User: "Schism" |
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| Title: Re: We didn't find any WMD, but we did find 100,000 dead civilians. |
02 Nov 2004 07:37:34 PM |
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More than 100,000 Iraqis have died - and where is our shame and rage?
Who's ***** is this number being pulled out of? I keep seeing it mentioned.
.
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| User: "~ BUSH is an OIL NAZI ~" |
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| Title: Re: We didn't find any WMD, but we did find 100,000 dead civilians. |
02 Nov 2004 07:39:28 PM |
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Schism wrote:
More than 100,000 Iraqis have died - and where is our shame and rage?
Who's ***** is this number being pulled out of? I keep seeing it mentioned.
If someone posts the source
will you feel bad
and admit Bush's oil war Iraq
is genocide?
.
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| User: "Schism" |
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| Title: Re: We didn't find any WMD, but we did find 100,000 dead civilians. |
03 Nov 2004 04:50:08 AM |
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"~ BUSH is an OIL NAZI ~" <Fry_BUSH@Justice.net> wrote in message
news:mFWhd.292$VI3.235@sam.nntpserver.com...
Schism wrote:
More than 100,000 Iraqis have died - and where is our shame and rage?
Who's ***** is this number being pulled out of? I keep seeing it
mentioned.
If someone posts the source
will you feel bad
and admit Bush's oil war Iraq
is genocide?
Whether you do or not, no, I do not believe it is, and I do not believe near
that many have died, but perhaps showing some sources to back up your
position might possibly change my view a little.
.
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| User: "~ BUSH is an OIL NAZI ~" |
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| Title: Re: We didn't find any WMD, but we did find 100,000 dead civilians. |
02 Nov 2004 07:40:26 PM |
|
|
Schism wrote:
More than 100,000 Iraqis have died - and where is our shame and rage?
Who's ***** is this number being pulled out of? I keep seeing it mentioned.
If someone posts the source
will you feel bad
and admit Bush's oil war in Iraq
is genocide?
.
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