Matt Carr 02 April 2015. Posted in News
A
new report claiming the numbers killed by 'the war on terror' globally may be
as high as 2 million has been met with almost total silence.
IT'S
ONE of the essential tenets of the new age of humanitarian war that war is not
as bad as it used to be, or at least that it’s not so bad that the costs
outweigh the gains.
War,
or western war at least, is no longer the grim rider on the pale horse,
bringing chaos, death and random destruction.
High-tech
precision weapons, precision targeting enabled by lawyers, new ethical norms,
population-centric counterinsurgency – all this has made it possible to
vaporise the bad guys only, neatly severing the infrastructural linkages that
hold rogue states and dictatorships together, so that the whole business is
over before anyone even realises it.
Once
this is accepted then it becomes natural for powerful countries equipped with
this weaponry to think of war as a first choice rather than a last resort, and
also to convince their populations that war will not only be cost-free for
them, but that its effects on the countries on the receiving end of it will
also be minimal and ultimately beneficial.
This
is what we have been told ever since the US invasion of Panama and the first
Gulf War and throughout the last fourteen years of the ‘war on terror,’
whenever the US and its allies are considering who next to bomb.
One
of the ways in which these governments have attempted to ensure popular
acceptance is by ignoring or downplaying any evidence that contradicts this new
mythology of war.
Last
month a joint report Body Count: Casualty Figures after 10 Years of the ‘War on
Terror’ produced by the medical-political peace organization Physicians for
Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival, and International
Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War concluded that 1.3 million people
have died as a direct or indirect of wars fought in three main theatres of war
in Iraq (1 million), Afghanistan (220,000) and Pakistan (80,000).
These
figures do not include the death toll in other countries where western military
operations have taken place in Yemen, Somalia and Libya. They are nevertheless way higher than any
calculations made by the US or any of its allies, or the much lower figures
from ‘passive’ reporting of casualties based solely on reported combat deaths
in the media of the type that Iraq Body Count (IBC) has specialised in.
The
report also claims that 1.3 million is a ‘conservative estimate’ and that the
real figure globally may be as high as 2 million. These statistics not only include victims of
violence perpetrated by the different state and non-state protagonists involved
in these conflicts; they also consider those who have died as a result of the
indirect consequences of these wars, such as hunger or malnutrition, lack of
clean water, medicine and access to hospitals, a deterioration in living
conditions, diseases caused or intensified by the destruction of
infrastructure, and weaponry containing toxic materials.
I
am not an epidemiologist or a statistician, so I am not in a position to pass a
verdict on the quality of the methodology involved in this research, but if
respected and internationally-recognized medical organizations and
professionals reach conclusions like this, then I am certainly going to take
them seriously unless I have a very good reason not to do so.
One
might also expect, in democratic societies,
that governments, political parties and journalists would also want to
consider and evaluate these findings too, because if they are accurate then
they call the whole notion of a ‘humanitarian’ war against ‘terror’ into
question. They might also be a starting point for a wider debate about the
justifications and rationalisations for the great swathe of global violence
unleashed in response to the 9/11 attacks.
Yet
the response to the Body Count report has been almost total silence. No US or British government official has
commented on the report or referred to it.
The mainstream media has not mentioned it either. The report has only been picked up by the
usual suspects (RT, Telesur, Press tv), and various leftist or antiwar Internet
sources. This silence is not entirely
surprising. As the report notes:
‘A
politically useful option for U.S. political elites has been to attribute the
on-going violence to internecine conflicts of various types, including
historical religious animosities, as if the resurgence and brutality of such
conflicts is unrelated to the destabilization caused by decades of outside
military intervention. As such, underreporting of the human toll attributable
to ongoing Western interventions, whether deliberate, or through
self-censorship, has been key to removing the “fingerprints” of
responsibility.’
This
is absolutely right. Because for our
governments, there can be no such fingerprints.
Our wars are good, clean wars, and any brutality, violence and death
that occurs in them or as a result of them is always the responsibility of the
alien Other.
And
when our governments are presented with evidence that contradicts these
assumptions, they may attribute it to ‘bad apples’, or ‘collateral damage’ or
they may try and undermine the organizations that produce such evidence, as the
Bush and Blair administrations did with the Lancet Report.
And
at other times, they will simply ignore such evidence completely, in the
knowledge that if they do, the ‘fourth estate’ will dutifully do the same, and
then the public will never know it ever existed.
Source:
Matt Carr's Infernal Machine
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