Iraq, six years on: the human consequences of a dirty war

The Iraq war began on 20 March 2003 and ‘ended’ (according to President George Bush) on 1 May of the same year, only to be followed by an unfolding story of death and destruction unprecedented even in the Middle East. The invasion, code-named Operation Iraqi Freedom, was mounted by a self-styled ‘coalition of the willing’ led by the United States under the paper-thin pretexts of bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq and eradicating weapons of mass destruction (Bamford 2004; Rampton & Stauber 2003). We now know that these pretexts were false and that the invasion was inspired by a grandiose imperialistic vision of world domination as articulated in the infamous neo-conservative blueprint, ‘The Project for a New American Century’ (Kristol, n.d.). The invasion of Iraq was discussed by President Bush and his colleagues at a specially convened meeting on the evening of 11 September 2001. The attacks on the World Trade Centre in Manhattan had given the new administration all the justification it needed to mount what turned out to be an ill-fated war against a country that posed no immediate threat to the United States or its allies. International legal scholars were united in their opposition to the war, asserting that the invasion breached international law and failed to meet even the most basic requirements of a ‘just war’ (Sands 2005; Willis 2004; Frame 2004). Additionally, the war went ahead despite the mass protests of millions of people around the 20world, culminating in a march on 15 April 2003 when tens of millions of people protested against the impending war (Hil 2008).

Much has happened in Iraq since 2003. The initial phases of occupation were relatively calm as the coalition leaders basked in what looked like a rapid ‘shock and awe’ victory over a brutal enemy. But what became apparent very quickly – despite the attempt by the newly appointed “viceroy” of Baghdad, Paul L. Brenner, to claim a “new Iraq” (that was “open for business”) – was that military and political leaders in the US and elsewhere had no post-invasion plan (Fisk 2003; Cockburn 2006). To make matters worse, Brenner – in the face of desperate pleas by his own advisers – embarked on a disastrous policy of ‘de-Baathification’ that resulted in thousands of former Saddam loyalists being thrown out of work (Chandrasekaran 2008). Such policies gave rise to deep resentment and contributed to a rising tide of insurgency against the US-led forces. Additionally, Iraq was plunged into bloody internecine violence as various gangs, ethnic and religious groups settled scores or fought for geopolitical supremacy. All this contributed to the accumulated misery of the Iraqi people that had resulted from a devastating war with Iran in the 1980s, the first Gulf War in 1991 and years of cruel and debilitating sanctions. The post-2003 scene was described variously as the “Iraq holocaust” and “a mess” that had returned Iraq to a “pre-industrial age” (Dyer 2007; Polya 2007a; Rihani 2004).

This chapter maps some consequences of the Iraq war in terms of its impact on civilians. Given the nature of the conflict, it was not always easy to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants. Certainly, the data on the dead and injured – derived largely from NGO sources – rarely separated civilians from non-civilians, combatants from non-combatants. In general terms, such data could be regarded only as broad indicators of the extent of civilian death and injury. Before looking briefly at some of these figures it is worth considering the way in which a key US strategy – the so-called US troop ‘surge’ of 2007 – was talked about by US military and political chiefs, if only to provide some useful insights into how the question of civilian casualties was addressed. 21

A web of illusions

For the US military and political leadership, the troop surge of 2007 came to symbolise hope in the face of carnage and destruction. Yet despite some notable successes resulting from this strategy, it also revealed the illusory and self-serving nature of US policy in Iraq. Prior to the surge the US military had become bogged down in bloody, urban warfare with a determined and increasingly well-resourced enemy. The death toll of US troops began to rise at an alarming rate and the White House was faced with growing public opposition to the conflict. The President’s popularity began to head south. Damaging comparisons were being drawn between Iraq and Vietnam and the prospect of the unthinkable – defeat – set off the alarm bells in Washington. President Bush came out fighting on 10 January 2007 in a live TV address to the American people in which he admitted that:

Having consulted with the bi-partisan Iraq Study Group, members of Congress, military commanders and diplomats, President Bush announced that:

After an initial period of heightened violence, especially in Baghdad, there were signs that the levels of insurgency had diminished to a point where US commander, General David Petraeus, and President Bush could assert with some confidence that Iraq had gained a semblance 22of peace and stability thanks to the surge (Al Jazeera 2008). We were told by military and political leaders that the ‘rate’ of killing had decreased significantly and that Iraq had become a more stable place, even in the major conurbations (Reuters 2007; CNN 2008). This, of course, turned out to be perverse reasoning given that even though the death rate among Iraqi civilians had indeed declined (that is, in the latter half of 2007 after an initial six months of terrible bloodletting), it did so only to a rate that vastly exceeded the pre-invasion death rate.

Publicly at least, the US military was reluctant about undertaking civilian body counts. The precedent was set in early 2002 during the Afghan campaign when General Tommy Franks of the US Central Command (who later headed all operations in the Middle East) said, rather dismissively, that “we don’t do body counts” (cited in Epstein 2003) which, perhaps unintentionally, became a symbol of US indifference both to Afghani and Iraqi fatalities. The reality, however, was that the US military occasionally undertook body counts – the resulting data of which they sought to suppress – even though their methods of data collection were highly suspect (Whitaker 2004). The military bean-counters (located mainly in the bowels of the Pentagon) were reluctant to count dead civilians because they asserted that local conditions and customs did not allow for such a process or that in the heat of combat it was not possible to count the dead. Perhaps not surprisingly, the question of civilian body counts became an “invisible issue” as far as the US was concerned (Epstein & Mathews 2005; Thomas 2003). When it came to the question of those injured in hostilities, our reluctant empiricists devoted even less of their collective energies. Had they done so – using the crude yardstick of three casualties to every fatality – the injury rate among Iraqi civilians would have been (circa mid-2007) in the region of three and a half million. To complicate matters, many of the civilian deaths acknowledged by the US military were attributed to criminal acts committed by thugs, paramilitary gunmen, ‘terrorists’ or ‘insurgents’ (Jackson 2003; Krane 2006) or put down simply to accidents, lapses or general aberration. Speculation was rife in this area.

When figures were drawn from NGOs and respected academics who conducted most of the more meaningful empirical studies, US leaders 23tended to rely on the lower estimates. This exercise in strategic ignorance revealed a desperate attempt to screen out the full and ugly realities of war. It was also designed to massage public opinion and to deflect attention from the awkward spectre of the mounting dead and injured. A similar attempt to deflect public awareness of the dead also applied to US troop fatalities. Until recently (in fact, under the Obama presidency) public disclosures of the US dead were discouraged and photographs of flag-draped coffins banned altogether. US troops in Iraq were made up largely of young conscripts pulled from the more marginalised sections of the community, mainly young blacks and Hispanics, the unemployed and thousands of ‘illegal’ migrant ‘volunteers’ signed up on the promise of a green card and more (Hil 2005). This rag-bag army, a sort of latter day colonial expeditionary force, suffered terribly at the hands of its opponents.

Over four thousand US troops died from 2003 up to March 2009 – a daunting figure that fuelled even greater international opposition to the war and placed great pressure on the increasingly unpopular US Presidency. But the deaths of US troops, as we shall see, paled in significance against the number of innocent Iraqis who have perished since 2003. We will never know the precise scale of death and injury to the Iraqi people or how many of the population of twenty-five million may – or may not – survive the next few years. The continuing lack of a functional health service, enduring violence, unexploded munitions and depleted uranium, and the sheer scale of the existential tragedy are enough to guarantee that death (already a widespread occurrence) will continue at an alarming rate.1

Body count: no place to hide

By controlling the outflow of news and regulating the activities of ‘embedded’ journalists, the US military was able to present – officially at least – a sanitised view of the conflict. Even in the midst of the most brutal assaults, as in Fallujah in late 2004, the ‘news’ was either partial (mainly obtained through independent Iraqi journalists) or non-existent.

24Yet faced with copious news coverage on the Internet, Iraqi blogs, and Arab TV news, it was becoming increasingly obvious that there were competing versions of reality when it came to the question of Iraqi body counts. The Pentagon went into full propaganda mode in early 2007 following President Bush’s announcement of a troop surge that would finally subdue Iraqi insurgency – even though for Al Qaeda the prospect of more bloodletting of US soldiers was precisely what they wanted. Falling troop and civilian death rates coupled with elections eighteen months earlier had, according to President Bush, demonstrated the gradual restoration of democracy in Iraq. There were also signs that the Iraqi government was taking the necessary steps to achieve lasting political change and that the embryonic Iraqi army was reaching the awkward early threshold of autonomy. There was more good news: some militias announced a ceasefire or, lured by financial inducements, turned their guns on Al Qaeda instead of the US military. The rate of kidnappings (a major business enterprise in Iraq) and car bombings both declined from mid-2007 onwards. This development, publicised by British NGO Iraq Body Count (2008), was seized upon by the Pentagon and the Western corporate media as evidence of the success of the troop surge (RNIF Alternative News 2007). (Iraq Body Count was the favoured source of the US military since their comparatively modest estimates of the dead were based only on verified news reports.) In early 2008 parts of Baghdad even had their street lights turned on for the first time in five years – a sign that stability had begun to emerge. This was in fact a false dawn.

Unfortunately for the US leadership, the illusion of growing peace and stability in Iraq took several unwanted turns for the worse in 2008. On 24 March the four-thousandth US soldier was killed. On the same day sixty Iraqi civilians lost their lives, roadside bombs exploded in several parts of the country and there were shootings in a Baghdad market and a number of mortar shells landed square in the Green Zone (Colvin 2008). This was too much like the pre-surge bad old days.

The illusion was further shattered on the fifth anniversary of the 2003 invasion. The International Committee of the Red Cross (2008) issued a report which concluded: 25

In April, Amnesty International (2008) issued a report entitled Carnage and despair: Iraq five years on in which they described Iraq as “one of the most dangerous countries in the world, with hundreds of Iraqi civilians killed every month”. This was not good news for the White House. But surely there were signs that the Iraqi government was introducing the required changes to make Iraq a better, safer and more secure place? Unfortunately not, according to the Iraq Study Group (cited in Wright 2008), who described political changes in Iraq as “slow, halting and superficial”.

Of all the unwelcome news perhaps the most harmful (or irritating) to the US leadership was the growing public concern over the number of Iraqi civilian deaths. The first major bout of unwanted news came early in 2006 when a team of respected US epidemiologists from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore estimated that the death toll since the 2003 invasion was 654,965 (Roberts 2006). The derivative figure of 650,000 stood as a major benchmark in the grim catalogue of death in Iraq. It was a figure that could not easily be swept aside, despite all the attempts by Downing Street and the White House to do so. The UK Ministry of Defence Scientific Adviser, Sir Roy Anderson, noted – much to the embarrassment of his own government – that the methods used by the researchers to come up with this figure were “robust … close to best practice” (cited in Bennett Jones 2007). Although there was considerable debate over the methods used by the Johns Hopkins researchers, the fact remained that the civilian death toll was considerably higher than most reports had hitherto indicated (Ahmed & Jamail 2008). The study served to further undermine the data on which the US leadership and Western media had relied; namely, that emanating from Iraq Body Count (IBC). The methods used by IBC and its subsequent modest 26figures of Iraqi civilian dead were now exposed, at best, as extremely limited (Pilger 2008).

But things got even worse for the leaders of the ‘coalition of the willing’. In September 2007, a well-respected British polling company, ORB (2007), put the figure of Iraqi dead at 1,220,580. Others, like Australian researcher Gideon Polya (2007b), also stated that more than a million civilians had died. Alarmingly, if these figures were correct, then more Iraqi people had died since 2003 than all the combined fatalities during the Hussein period of government. The figure was higher than the genocide committed in Rwanda in 1994 and approached the death toll in the Cambodian killing fields (Holland 2007).

If the number of Iraqi dead made for grim reading, the news was equally depressing when it came to the actual financial and other costs of the conflict. The Nobel prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, and academic Linda Bilmes (2008), put the financial costs of the war – factored in terms of hardware, maintenance, replacement and the costs of welfare and health care for the over 100,000 injured US military personnel – at around $3 trillion. In mid-2007, according to Stiglitz and Bilmes, the war was costing about $12 billion per month. Significant by any standard, this figure takes on even greater proportions when ‘hidden’ or ‘opportunity’ costs of the conflict are taken into account. The biggest impact has been on the world’s poor and needy – including those in the heartlands of coalition countries. Back in the comparatively cheap days of 2004, the Portland Independent Media Centre (2004) estimated that the amount of money expended by the US on the Iraq invasion and occupation could have done a lot to alleviate the plight of the world’s poor – a point that resonates in light of the recent global financial crisis to which Stiglitz and Bilmes say the Iraq war contributed.

In effect, the invasion of Iraq was a war mounted against a sovereign nation which, as it turned out, posed no direct threat to the US, Britain or Australia, and a proxy war against the world’s poor. Arguably, had the funds expended on the war been devoted to addressing disease, hunger and poverty, millions of lives could have been spared and peace may have come to Iraq and other parts of the globe. As it turned out, the war resulted in death and destruction on a biblical scale, contributed to a failing world economy (with all its current disastrous consequences), 27involved incalculable hidden costs, and produced greater instability in the Middle East and beyond (Dyer 2007). Moreover, the US, Britain and Australia – leading ‘multinational’ partners in the assault on Iraq in 2003 – have become pariahs in the Arab world.

What is to be done?

Armed with knowledge of the injurious scale of the Iraq conflict, the task facing academics and the many non-government organisations who have chronicled the death and destruction in Iraq is to continue with this invaluable work. The more pressing issues are to do with what can be done to assist the Iraqi people to rebuild their shattered lives and how the instigators of the invasion in 2003 can be held to account. Professor Stuart Rees from the Sydney Peace Foundation at the University of Sydney has called for monetary compensation to be given to the Iraqi nation, the return of its assets, rebuilding of its economy in a similar way to the Marshall Plan, the installation of a truth and reconciliation commission, and the formation of an Arabic peace-keeping force once the coalition forces have left Iraq (Rees 2008). These are sensible proposals to which one might add the need for a form of democratic governance that represents the interests of all Iraqi people and not the interests of foreign powers or particular factions and groupings within Iraq. It might also be suggested that the stripping of Iraq’s economy – in contravention of the Geneva Convention – be subject to some sort of trenchant legal action. But there are other questions around justice and accountability that need to be addressed: when and how might the political, military and corporate leaders who presided over an illegal and unjust invasion be held to account before an international forum? Are the existing international legal institutions anywhere strong enough (or sufficiently uncoupled from the interests of the US) to enact such a process? If not, what system of reform can be put in place to ensure that this happens?

And reform is certainly needed. The calls for ‘never again’ are made more in hope than reality given that history has endlessly repeated itself since both world wars. Perhaps the best we can hope for when naked self-interest and duplicity raise their heads is that the international legal institutions are strong enough to uphold international law. The evidence 28relating to the invasion of Iraq is that they are not. Unilateralism should be a crime in a world increasingly cognisant of its vital interconnections. One of the most eloquent and impassioned commentaries on the invasion of Iraq was made by the 2005 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter. His words have been quoted often, mainly I suspect because they so eloquently capture the passion that people feel when they talk about the invasion of Iraq. It is for this reason that his words are worth citing again:

Pinter might have added John Howard, Alexander Downer and Robert Hill to the list of political leaders to be charged under international law for war crimes. Others could include the many coalition politicians who gave support to the invasion, military leaders and possibly corporate chiefs who profited from this bloody conflict.

In seeking to build peace throughout the world it is necessary to have in place a system of international law and legal institutions to ensure that 29leaders of powerful states cannot unilaterally invade sovereign nations. It is with this optimism that we might view the actions taken by the International Criminal Court against the President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan and former Serbian leader, Radovan Karadzic. Though such cases are difficult to prosecute, this should not deter the pursuit of justice for wrongs done against innocent people.

The Iraqi people – like other oppressed peoples around the world – deserve the full protection of international law. In common with the people of Cambodia, they may require a process of healing that includes the application of legal principles in a case where a great harm has been done to innocent people.