|
Comment on this article |
Email this Article
|
|
The War in Iraq has Made Moral Cowards of Us All |
Current rating: 0 |
|
by Scott Ritter |
02 Nov 2004
|
. 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 |
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?
By Scott Ritter
The Guardian
1 November 2004
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1340688,00.html>
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. |
This work is in the public domain |
