Casualties of the Iraq insurgency.
If there is a truly indespensible website out there right now, for anyone even remotely left-leaning or incredulous about the Iraq War and its aftermath, it's Juan Cole's Informed Comment. Cole, a history professor at the University of Michigan, specializing in 18th and 19th Century religious thought in the Muslem world, provides a comprehensive, nuanced, non-sanctimonious but devastating running commentary on developments in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East and the Islamic developing world. Even as a single-issue blog, Informed Comment does as good a job at capturing the essence of informed liberalism as any site out there (and Cole may not even consider himself a liberal.) Just as a taste of what I mean, back in April he produced what I think is the best blog post to date in 2005, on the death of Pope John Paul II and how liberals should look back on his career (particularly his role in Middle Eastern and interreligious affairs) and, especially, why.
Yesterday, Cole weighed in on the new figures from Iraqi Interior Minister Bayan Jabr who claims that 12,000 Iraqi civilians have died in insurgent attacks over the past 18 months (according to roughly comparable figures from Iraq Body Count, the total killing since the invasion in March of 2003 is between 22,000 and 25,000):
The Baath Party was in power for about 35 years. If it had killed 8000 civilians per year, that would be 280,000 persons. That is about what is alleged, though it is probably an exaggeration. (The deaths in the Iran-Iraq war cannot all be laid at Saddam's feet, since he began suing for peace in 1982, but was rebuffed by Khomeini, who insisted on dragging the war out until 1988 in hopes of taking Baghdad and putting the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in power there. Likewise, Mr. Rumsfeld's offer of support to Saddam and greenlighting of the use of chemical weapons prolonged the war).
In other words, Bayan Jabr's figures suggest that in US-dominated Iraq, people are dying so far at about the same rate as they did under Baath rule. (If he is underestimating the civilian casualties, then it is possible that many more are dying per year than under Saddam!) In any case, Saddam's killing sprees were largely over with by the late 1990s, so the rate of death in Iraq now is enormously greater than it was in, say, 2001.
Back in its 2004 World Report, Human Rights Watch argued that the Iraq intervention could not be justified on humanitarian grounds (which, HRW argues, have to maintained as a strict definition so that the term "humanitarian intervention" can't be abused to justify international conflicts):
In considering the criteria that would justify humanitarian intervention, the most important, as noted, is the level of killing: was genocide or comparable mass slaughter underway or imminent? Brutal as Saddam Hussein’s reign had been, the scope of the Iraqi government’s killing in March 2003 was not of the exceptional and dire magnitude that would justify humanitarian intervention. We have no illusions about Saddam Hussein’s vicious inhumanity. Having devoted extensive time and effort to documenting his atrocities, we estimate that in the last twenty-five years of Ba`th Party rule the Iraqi government murdered or “disappeared” some quarter of a million Iraqis, if not more. In addition, one must consider such abuses as Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers. However, by the time of the March 2003 invasion, Saddam Hussein’s killing had ebbed...
But if Saddam Hussein committed mass atrocities in the past, wasn’t his overthrow justified to prevent his resumption of such atrocities in the future? No. Human Rights Watch accepts that military intervention may be necessary not only to stop ongoing slaughter but also to prevent future slaughter, but the future slaughter must be imminent. To justify the extraordinary remedy of military force for preventive humanitarian purposes, there must be evidence that large-scale slaughter is in preparation and about to begin unless militarily stopped. But no one seriously claimed before the war that the Saddam Hussein government was planning imminent mass killing, and no evidence has emerged that it was. There were claims that Saddam Hussein, with a history of gassing Iranian soldiers and Iraqi Kurds, was planning to deliver weapons of mass destruction through terrorist networks, but these allegations were entirely speculative; no substantial evidence has yet emerged. There were also fears that the Iraqi government might respond to an invasion with the use of chemical or biological weapons, perhaps even against its own people, but no one seriously suggested such use as an imminent possibility in the absence of an invasion.
Compared to, say, Hussein and al-Majid's Anfal genocide (up to 182,000 Kurds killed under Baath auspices between 1986 and 1989), the number of Iraqis being killed in the current insurgency (even when you add in inadvertant civilian deaths from US forces and the deaths of the insurgents themselves) isn't so horrifying. It's not a genocide. Nor does the ethnic and political Iraqi conflict look anything close to as bleak and hopeless as the territorial and demographic conflict going on between the Israelis and the Palestinians. And there's polling evidence that, as late as six months ago, vast majorities of non-Sunni Iraqis still thought they were better off without Saddam and found their post-War lives relatively secure. But in the two years since "mission accomplished" (another one of those liberal cliches, but irresistable), life in Iraq -- measured in its rawest form: life lost -- is not, it turns out, any better than it was in the last years of Saddam's rule. Nor is it easy to imagine an enduring civil society taking root if guerrilla-inflicted civilian deaths continue to average 20 per day in a country that hasn't had anything really approximating accountable, representative government since before WWI. And if Iraq doesn't achieve something close to the Western idea of a civil society, it will be pretty much impossible for its proponents (liberal and conservative as well as Bushie and Blairite) -- after controlling for the myriad tangible and intangible costs of the war -- to claim it as a moral, let alone tactical, success (although you can believe some of them will keep trying).
Yesterday, Cole weighed in on the new figures from Iraqi Interior Minister Bayan Jabr who claims that 12,000 Iraqi civilians have died in insurgent attacks over the past 18 months (according to roughly comparable figures from Iraq Body Count, the total killing since the invasion in March of 2003 is between 22,000 and 25,000):
The Baath Party was in power for about 35 years. If it had killed 8000 civilians per year, that would be 280,000 persons. That is about what is alleged, though it is probably an exaggeration. (The deaths in the Iran-Iraq war cannot all be laid at Saddam's feet, since he began suing for peace in 1982, but was rebuffed by Khomeini, who insisted on dragging the war out until 1988 in hopes of taking Baghdad and putting the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in power there. Likewise, Mr. Rumsfeld's offer of support to Saddam and greenlighting of the use of chemical weapons prolonged the war).
In other words, Bayan Jabr's figures suggest that in US-dominated Iraq, people are dying so far at about the same rate as they did under Baath rule. (If he is underestimating the civilian casualties, then it is possible that many more are dying per year than under Saddam!) In any case, Saddam's killing sprees were largely over with by the late 1990s, so the rate of death in Iraq now is enormously greater than it was in, say, 2001.
Back in its 2004 World Report, Human Rights Watch argued that the Iraq intervention could not be justified on humanitarian grounds (which, HRW argues, have to maintained as a strict definition so that the term "humanitarian intervention" can't be abused to justify international conflicts):
In considering the criteria that would justify humanitarian intervention, the most important, as noted, is the level of killing: was genocide or comparable mass slaughter underway or imminent? Brutal as Saddam Hussein’s reign had been, the scope of the Iraqi government’s killing in March 2003 was not of the exceptional and dire magnitude that would justify humanitarian intervention. We have no illusions about Saddam Hussein’s vicious inhumanity. Having devoted extensive time and effort to documenting his atrocities, we estimate that in the last twenty-five years of Ba`th Party rule the Iraqi government murdered or “disappeared” some quarter of a million Iraqis, if not more. In addition, one must consider such abuses as Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers. However, by the time of the March 2003 invasion, Saddam Hussein’s killing had ebbed...
But if Saddam Hussein committed mass atrocities in the past, wasn’t his overthrow justified to prevent his resumption of such atrocities in the future? No. Human Rights Watch accepts that military intervention may be necessary not only to stop ongoing slaughter but also to prevent future slaughter, but the future slaughter must be imminent. To justify the extraordinary remedy of military force for preventive humanitarian purposes, there must be evidence that large-scale slaughter is in preparation and about to begin unless militarily stopped. But no one seriously claimed before the war that the Saddam Hussein government was planning imminent mass killing, and no evidence has emerged that it was. There were claims that Saddam Hussein, with a history of gassing Iranian soldiers and Iraqi Kurds, was planning to deliver weapons of mass destruction through terrorist networks, but these allegations were entirely speculative; no substantial evidence has yet emerged. There were also fears that the Iraqi government might respond to an invasion with the use of chemical or biological weapons, perhaps even against its own people, but no one seriously suggested such use as an imminent possibility in the absence of an invasion.
Compared to, say, Hussein and al-Majid's Anfal genocide (up to 182,000 Kurds killed under Baath auspices between 1986 and 1989), the number of Iraqis being killed in the current insurgency (even when you add in inadvertant civilian deaths from US forces and the deaths of the insurgents themselves) isn't so horrifying. It's not a genocide. Nor does the ethnic and political Iraqi conflict look anything close to as bleak and hopeless as the territorial and demographic conflict going on between the Israelis and the Palestinians. And there's polling evidence that, as late as six months ago, vast majorities of non-Sunni Iraqis still thought they were better off without Saddam and found their post-War lives relatively secure. But in the two years since "mission accomplished" (another one of those liberal cliches, but irresistable), life in Iraq -- measured in its rawest form: life lost -- is not, it turns out, any better than it was in the last years of Saddam's rule. Nor is it easy to imagine an enduring civil society taking root if guerrilla-inflicted civilian deaths continue to average 20 per day in a country that hasn't had anything really approximating accountable, representative government since before WWI. And if Iraq doesn't achieve something close to the Western idea of a civil society, it will be pretty much impossible for its proponents (liberal and conservative as well as Bushie and Blairite) -- after controlling for the myriad tangible and intangible costs of the war -- to claim it as a moral, let alone tactical, success (although you can believe some of them will keep trying).
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