© GettyAn injured child in Iraq. body really knows how many civilians have been killed in the country
Sixteen years after Bush Snr launched his so-called 'war on terror' an untold number of civilians have been killed by disease, illness and by the US and UK-led military campaignIn February 2003,
Elliott Abrams, a
US official convicted of lying to Congress over the Iran-Contra affair but cleared by President George HW Bush,
spoke to the media about the impending invasion of Iraq,
ordered by Bush's son.
Abrams claimed in his remarks about "humanitarian reconstruction" - six priorities had driven the planning. "The first is to try to minimise the displacement and the damage to the infrastructure and the disruption of services," he said. "And the military campaign planning has had - has been tailored to try to do that, to try to minimise the impact on civilian populations."
It didn't turn out that way. Sixteen years after Bush launched his so-called "war on terror",
millions of people's lives have been turned upside down, Isis has been allowed to fester and spread, and Iraq is a nation at risk of fracturing apart. Moreover, an untold number of innocent civilians have been killed - by disease, illness, in gruesome tortures performed by local and foreign insurgents, and by the US and UK-led military campaign that Abrams and others vowed would be surgical.
In recent days, the US has been again forced to address the painful issue of civilian casualties following the publication of a investigation by the
New York Times, which
found that, contrary to the claims of the Pentagon,
as many as one-in-five coalition air strikes on Isis targets in Iraq in 2014, resulted in civilians deaths. That figure was 31 times higher than what the US has acknowledged.The Pentagon has hit back at the report; it
insists it takes great care in preparing for and carrying out military strikes, and investigates all claims of civilian casualties.
It says it believes 786 civilians have been unintentionally killed by coalition strikes since the operations against Isis started in June 2014.
"The unfortunate death of civilians is a fact of war that weighs heavy on our hearts," said Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon.
Asked about the total of civilians killed since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Pahon told
The Independent he doubted he could provide such a figure. He referred inquiries to the Combined Joint Task Force Operation Inherent Resolve, the name of the operation against Isis. There was no immediate response.
The truth is that nobody knows how many civilians have been killed in Iraq since George W Bush and Tony Blair launched an invasion that was sold to the world, not as a means to simply topple Saddam Hussein, but to seize the weapons of mass destruction they claimed he had. That is one of its many enduring tragedies.
The militaries of both the US and Britain kept painstaking records of its soldiers killed in both Afghanistan and Iraq - 2,280 and 4,491 for the US, and 455 and 179 for Britain. Yet, they have never tried to make an overall tally of Iraqi civilian deaths or those killed in other theatres.
Over the years, there have been various attempts to come up with a figure. One of the first was the
Iraq Body Count (IBC), a British project that maintained a tally of casualties based on media reports. Yet as the IBC has admitted, its figures are based on reports in the media, which were themselves limited in scope and detail.
Two reports conducted by the Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health, used extrapolation based on epidemiology, and were published in
The Lancet. The first,
published in 2004, estimated that at least 100,000 Iraqis had been killed as a result of the war.
The second,
published in 2006, suggested the figure had risen to near 650,000. The British and US governments criticised the findings but those involved defended the methodology. In 2015, a report by Physicians for Social Responsibility suggested the total may have passed one million.
The truth of the matter is that nobody knows.
The figure could be one million, it could be two million.And when you add the civilian casualties in Afghanistan and other places where the "war on terror" has played out - Yemen, Pakistan, Mali, Niger, Somalia and the Philippines - it becomes even more of a guessing game. In many of these places, there are not even the rudimentary efforts, such as that attempted by the IBC.
One thing that is so striking about what was said in 2003 and what is being said now, is the language employed by US officials. Pahon, the Pentagon spokesman,
stressed how everything was done to "limit harm to non-combatants and civilian infrastructure".Back in 2003, Abrams had vowed: "We hope to discourage population displacement through - partly through an information campaign, and partly by efforts to provide aid rapidly and restore public services rapidly."
War has always been a dirty, dangerous business. People should not pretend otherwise.
Comment: It is only natural that the US and UK militaries have no idea about civilian deaths. Their purpose in invading the Middle East was to steal and plunder; the pretense of minimising human casualties was mere Public Relations management. They did it in Iraq and Libya, and tried it in Syria via proxy terrorist armies, along with their NATO friends and their allies of the Middle Eastern axis of evil: Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Israel.
Naturally, making living conditions unbearable creates mass migration and refugees - and where should all these displaced people go if not Europe? Now Europe has a problem, but they should have thought about that before taking part in US-led imperial adventures.
On the
New York Times report on civilian casualties,
Albawaba reports:
While official figures indicate that only one in 157 airstrikes caused a civilian fatality, the report published Thursday [by The New York Times] claims as many as one in five resulted in civilian death.
So why, presuming the second figure is the more correct one, was the coalition allowed to get away with lying?
The high numbers of civilians dying have sometimes been reported in international media. For instance, coalition airstrikes on the Jadidah district of Mosul which killed "up to 200 civilians" on March 17 gained coverage.
The Guardian reported on March 25 that the coalition had "launched a formal investigation into reports of civilian casualties."
According to Airwars, an NGO which monitors civilian casualties, that probe found that a U.S. strike had killed between 105 and 141 civilians. Locals, meanwhile, gave estimates as high as 600 dead.
Still, despite the initial outrage, there was no follow up by the press. The results of that investigation were not published or interrogated by mainstream outlets.
The reason for this, the New York Times report suggests, is that most of the coalition's process for analyzing civilian deaths "is hidden" meaning that "its thoroughness is difficult to evaluate independently."
What a load of mumbo-jumbo jargon. For all we know, "hidden" means they are not counting at all.
Another reason that the coalition has not been held accountable by the media is that local reporting is weaker than elsewhere. Chris Woods, director of Airwars, told the New York Times that his organization "may be significantly underreporting deaths in Iraq" as a result.
Another reason is that the moral standards and profesionalism of Western media, such as the
New York Times, which pushed the 'weapons of mass destruction' narrative back in 2003, are weak and do not dare to speak truth to power.
Still, despite this weakness, Airwars itself has claimed that 3,000 Iraqi civilians have died in coalition airstrikes since 2014. That is, six times as many as the 466 civilian deaths the coalition has publicly acknowledged.
In fact, the New York Times investigation found "a consistent failure by the coalition to investigate claims properly or to keep records that make it possible to investigate the claims at all."
Because they are not interested in the truth - much less in letting the truth be known.
In reaction to reports of civilian deaths as a result of the March 17 strike, U.S. Central Command released a statement saying: "Our goal has always been for zero civilian casualties"
It continued by blaming "ISIS's inhuman tactics terrorising civilians, using human shields and fighting from protected sites such as schools, hospitals, religious sites and civilian neighbourhoods."
The New York Times report, however, disputed coalition claims that casualties were hard to avoid because ISIS was embedded within the civilian population. That investigation found that "in about half of the strikes that killed civilians [there was] no discernible ISIS target nearby."
"In the eyes of the coalition, its diligence on these matters points to a dispiriting truth about war" the report says. "Supreme precision can reduce civilian casualties to a very small number, but that number will never reach zero."
Perhaps the same mentality is why the media did not ask more questions before now. Civilian casualties of U.S. wars are seen as inevitable - and the loss of Iraqi lives is no longer news.
Oh, but on many occasions the US
did take care about who and how to target - that is, to target
away from ISIS. See:
As Russian MoD releases evidence of US military cooperation with ISIS, Lavrov slams illegal US presence in Syriawhere we read:
Lavrov also highlighted a statement from the Russian Defence Ministry which unequivocally accuses (with accompanying photographic evidence) the US of failing to target ISIS fighters in Syria while allowing them safe passage away from oncoming Syrian Arab Army liberators.
Syria has repeatedly stated, including at the United Nations, that US troops and airmen in Syria are not actually fighting ISIS but are merely playing an obstructionist role to the inevitable Syrian victory, one which includes the arming and financing of terrorist groups. [...]
"The US side categorically refused to carry out airstrikes against Daesh terrorists, claiming that the militants were 'voluntarily surrendering' and now fell under the provisions of the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War."
Comment: It is only natural that the US and UK militaries have no idea about civilian deaths. Their purpose in invading the Middle East was to steal and plunder; the pretense of minimising human casualties was mere Public Relations management. They did it in Iraq and Libya, and tried it in Syria via proxy terrorist armies, along with their NATO friends and their allies of the Middle Eastern axis of evil: Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Israel.
Naturally, making living conditions unbearable creates mass migration and refugees - and where should all these displaced people go if not Europe? Now Europe has a problem, but they should have thought about that before taking part in US-led imperial adventures.
On the New York Times report on civilian casualties, Albawaba reports: What a load of mumbo-jumbo jargon. For all we know, "hidden" means they are not counting at all. Another reason is that the moral standards and profesionalism of Western media, such as the New York Times, which pushed the 'weapons of mass destruction' narrative back in 2003, are weak and do not dare to speak truth to power. Because they are not interested in the truth - much less in letting the truth be known. Oh, but on many occasions the US did take care about who and how to target - that is, to target away from ISIS. See:
As Russian MoD releases evidence of US military cooperation with ISIS, Lavrov slams illegal US presence in Syria
where we read: