DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Playing the numbers game with
death By Tom Engelhardt
Recently, speaking of his war in Iraq, US
President George W Bush put the Vietnam analogy
back in the public eye. He was asked by the
American Broadcasting Co's George Stephanopoulos
whether New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman
was on the mark in suggesting that what "we might
be seeing now is the Iraqi equivalent of the Tet
Offensive".
Bush's reply: "Mm-hmm. He
could be right. There's certainly a
stepped-up level of
violence. And we're heading into an election."
The nationwide Tet Offensive has, of
course, long been seen as
the turning point in the
Vietnam War, the moment when the US political
establishment lost both the media and the American
public in its Vietnam venture. That's what Bush
was certainly alluding to, though the present
chaos in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq hardly
qualifies as a "Tet Offensive" and, as the polls
indicate, the American public had already been
lost to his war.
Nonetheless, for Bush,
who (like the rest of his administration) had
previously avoided Vietnam-analogy admissions like
the plague, it was certainly a sign that he feared
he had lost the war he had fought most fiercely
since September 12, 2001 - the war to pacify the
American public and the media. No US
administration in memory has devoted more time to
thinking out and polishing its language, its
signature phrases and images, in the pursuit of
war; so, for instance, the announcement that the
president is now "cutting and running" from his
own signature phrase "stay the course" - one-half
of the linguistic duo (the other being, of course,
"cut and run") with which he and top adviser Karl
Rove had clearly planned to drive the Democrats
into retreat in the mid-term election period - is
no small matter. (White House press spokesman Tony
Snow: "[Stay the course] left the wrong impression
about what was going on. And it allowed critics to
say, well, here's an administration that's just
embarked upon a policy and not looking at what the
situation is, when, in fact, it's just the
opposite.")
If this is, in any sense, a
turning-point moment, then it's important to take
another look at aspects of the war on the home
front that this administration has fought so
relentlessly these last years and is now losing -
the first being its image wars in regard to Iraq
and the second, the numbers games it has played
when it came to deaths in Iraq.
Breaking up is hard to do When
it finally began to penetrate the Bush
administration that things were going badly in
Iraq, the imagery came fast and furious on the
home front. First there were those "tipping
points", along with the "landmarks of progress",
such as the official turning over of sovereignty
to the Iraqis in June 2004 or the various
elections, especially the purple-finger one of
January 2005. The "landmarks" have by now
crumbled. "Progress" is a word largely restricted
to the hallucinatory world of Dick Cheney, and as
for those "tipping points", it's not that they're
gone, it's just that these days they're all
tipping the other way.
Former Bush State
Department official Richard Haas, for instance,
claimed only the other day that "we are reaching a
tipping point both on the ground but also in the
political debate in the United States ... about
Iraq. We are reaching the point ... where simply
more of essentially the same is going to be a
policy that very few people are going to be able
to support." Similarly, Chris Wallace asked
Senators John Warner and Joe Biden on Fox News
Sunday: "Have we now reached a tipping point
in Iraq where President Bush's open-ended
commitment to creating a unified, stable,
democratic Iraq has to be reconsidered?" (Time
magazine caught the irony of an administration
image switching teams this way in a headline: "A
tipping point for Iraq - here at home".) Gary
Samore, Haas's colleague on the Council on Foreign
Relations, tipped the image even further: "We are
now way past the tipping point on the ground in
Iraq. But it is doubtful there will be any change
of course until we see the results of the mid-term
elections." Think of us, then, as at a blowback
tipping point.
For a while, in 2004-05,
administration officials and US military officers
also spoke of "turning the corner" in Iraq - an
image that edged, however unconsciously, right up
to the dark entrance to the Vietnam era's infamous
"tunnel" at whose end, it was always hoped, you
would see "the light". All such imagery was
invariably linked to mini-schedules of progress.
It was usually said that the next three to six
months or even a year would be crucial in
determining whether the tipping point had truly
tipped or the corner had actually been turned. But
when the allotted time passed - sometimes far
earlier - and around each corner proved to be but
another armed disaster, all these images wore out
their welcome.
Then, in late 2005, the
Bush administration suddenly began falling back to
new, far more alarming, far less optimistic images
(though with the same mini-schedules attached). As
panic spread after the blowing up of the Golden
Mosque in Samarra last February and an internecine
struggle already long under way at a low level
suddenly ratcheted up, they began to insist,
defensively, that Iraq had not yet reached the
point of civil war. And yet they found themselves
at, or near, or heading for "the precipice" (or
"the brink") from which you could stare down into
the ominous Iraqi "abyss" (or the "chasm") of
full-scale civil war. In those months, if we had
indeed reached that precipice and glanced down, we
were also reassured that we had "stepped back",
and that time - those same coming months - would
only tell whether we had stepped back for good.
Of course, the months passed and it turned
out that if we had stepped back, the Iraqis
hadn't. So, in the spring of 2006, a new
administration image arrived on the scene. With
the installing of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki,
we had, it was said, a "last chance" in Iraq, a
brief window of opportunity - call it six months -
to turn things around. Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice's party, on visiting Baghdad last
April to pressure the new prime minister, was
caught by a New York Times reporter, making
exactly this point. Now, six months later at the
brink of America's own "tipping point" mid-term
elections, with the Battle of Baghdad, the "key"
to the president's "victory strategy", suddenly
proclaimed a failure by a US military spokesman in
that capital, another fallback position in the
endless war of images has been reached.
Journalist John Burns of the New York
Times quoted some of those anonymous military men
who seem to swarm the corridors of Washington and
Green Zone Baghdad this way: "Senior officers have
spoken of the [Baghdad] campaign in ‘make or
break' terms, saying that there would be little
hope of prevailing in the wider war if the bid to
retake Baghdad's streets failed."
So we're
now at the make-or-break moment. Here's Kenneth
Pollack, former Central Intelligence Agency
official and a leading proponent of toppling
Saddam Hussein: "My real fear is that we've
already passed the make-or-break point and just
don't realize it. Historians in five or 10 years
may look back and say 2006 was the year we lost
Iraq. That's my nightmare." Another right-winger,
John Hawkins, in urging conservatives not to
desert the president on foreign policy, writes
that "2007 will be the make-or-break year in
Iraq".
Given that the US has been breaking
things in Iraq for some years now, this isn't the
first time the image of breaking has arisen. Most
famously, even before the 2003 invasion, there was
then-secretary of state Colin Powell's warning to
the president that came to be known as "the
Pottery Barn rule": "If you break it, you own it."
As it turned out, it wasn't true - neither of the
Pottery Barn (a US retail chain) nor of Iraq.
The Bush administration has in essence
succeeded in breaking Iraq, and yet, as events of
recent weeks have shown, to the eternal
frustration of its top officials, it doesn't own
any of it except Baghdad's heavily fortified
city-within-a-city, the Green Zone. The rest of
Iraq seems to own them and, in the end, may
destroy both Rovian dreams of a generation-long
Republican lock on US politics and Bushian dreams
of dominating the world for at least as long.
In frustration, some influential officials
are giving serious thought to officially busting
up Iraq. Like ancient Gaul, it is to be divided
into three parts. As Texas Republican Senator Kay
Bailey Hutchison put it recently, she is willing
to "consider the wisdom of somehow breaking up
Iraq". No one, of course, finds it strange here
that Hutchison or Senator Biden, or any other US
official, should feel so free to suggest the
dividing of Iraq into Kurdistan, Shi'astan and
Sunnistan. No one asks whether it's "ours" to
divide. Whatever, as they say. In any case, rest
assured that, if breaking up Iraq was relatively
easy, breaking it up will be, as the old song
goes, hard to do.
There oughta be a law,
of course. But as long as the Bush administration
has no intention of setting a serious date for, or
timetable for, departure from Iraq, the shadow war
of images will only continue from fallback
position to fallback position with no enemy in
sight.
The latest Bush administration
shuck is to present not itself, but the less than
functional Iraqi "government" with a timetable -
in the form of a set of "benchmarks" for
confronting the militias running rampart in Iraq
and deeply embedded in the police. That will,
theoretically, offer another few months of delay
before the results - already foreordained -
officially come in.
In the meantime, it
just continues. This Monday, for instance, Michael
R Gordon, author of the best-selling Cobra
II, had a front-page piece in the New York
Times, "To stand or fall in Baghdad". In it he
quotes Major-General J D Thurman, senior commander
of US forces in Baghdad, this way: "It is a
decisive period. [The Maliki government] either
seize[s] the opportunity or they don't. If they
don't, then our government is going to have to
readjust what we are going to do, and that is not
my call." According to "American commanders",
however, "the viability of the strategy [of
focusing military efforts on pacifying Baghdad]
could not be properly assessed before the year's
end".
Thus, thanks to yet another bogus
mini-schedule, the final testing of Bush
administration hopes always stays just beyond
reach in the future. And without a genuine change
of course, it always will; while the breaking, the
burning, the torturing, the looting, the killing
go on.
Numbers game with the dead
From the first, the issue of the Iraqi
dead has been part and parcel of the Bush
administration's image wars. For a long time (even
after they started counting), administration and
military officials, along with the president,
remained on the page first bookmarked by
then-Centcom (US Central Command) commander Tommy
Franks during the early phases of the war in
Afghanistan. "We don't do body counts," the
general said.
We officially didn't do
them, any more than we did "body bags" or returned
the US dead from Iraq in the light of day on
camera. This was all part of the administration's
anti-Vietnam-War approach to Afghanistan and Iraq.
We would not make those mistakes again. Instead,
we would ensure success on the home front, where
Vietnam-era officials were believed to have lost
their war, by playing an opposites game.
Last December 12, however, Bush was faced
with a reporter's question: "Since the inception
of the Iraqi war, I'd like to know the approximate
total of Iraqis who have been killed. And by
Iraqis I include civilians, military, police,
insurgents, translators."
To the surprise
of many, the president responded for the first
time with an actual number: "How many Iraqi
citizens have died in this war? I would say
30,000, more or less, have died as a result of the
initial incursion and the ongoing violence against
Iraqis." When asked for the president's sourcing,
press spokesman Tony Snow responded two days later
with "media reports, which have cited information
that suggests that some 30,000 people, Iraqi
citizens, may have been killed".
As it
happens, the White House has had something of a
predilection for the pleasantly round number of
30,000. In 2003, before the invasion of Iraq, in
the president's State of the Union address, he
used that very number for Saddam's mythical stock
of "munitions capable of delivering chemical
agents"; and, post-invasion, for police put back
on patrol in the streets of Iraq. In 2005, that
number was cited both for "new businesses" started
in Iraq and new teachers trained since the fall of
Baghdad. In 2006, in the president's "Strategy for
Victory", that was the number of square miles of
their country that Iraqi forces were then
primarily responsible for patrolling.
Last
week, the president was challenged again at his
news conference because of a recently published
study in the respected British medical journal The
Lancet that offered up a staggering set of figures
on Iraqi deaths. Based on an actual (and
dangerous) door-to-door survey of Iraqi households
among a countrywide cohort of almost 13,000
people, the rigorous study estimated that perhaps
655,000 "excess deaths" had occurred in Iraq since
the invasion, mainly due to violence. (Its lowest
estimate of excess deaths came in just under
400,000; its highest above 900,000, a figure no
one in the US cared to deal with at all.) When
asked whether, given the Lancet study, he stood by
the number he had previously cited of 30,000 Iraqi
deaths, Bush responded: "You know, I stand by the
figure. A lot of innocent people have lost their
life - 600,000, or whatever they guessed at, is
just - it's not credible." The reporter answered,
"Thank you, Mr President," and all and sundry
turned to other matters.
And yet such a
statement is little short of the darkest of jokes.
Start with the fact that, by last December, 30,000
was already a ludicrously low-ball figure for the
Iraqi dead of the war, occupation, insurgency, and
incipient civil war. Early on, to give but one
example of a study completely ignored in the US
press, a group of Iraqi academics and political
activists tried to research the question of
civilian casualties, consulting with hospitals,
gravediggers and morgues, and came up with the
figure of 37,000 deaths just between March and
October 2003, when they stopped because of the
dangers involved. The cautious website Iraq Body
Count, which now offers death statistics ranging
from a low of 44,661 to a high of 49,610, was at
that time in the 27,000-30,000-plus range, but
that was only for "media-reported" civilian
deaths, not all Iraqi deaths, which, as the US
military surely knew, were far higher. An October
2004 Lancet study had estimated more than 100,000
excess deaths.
Then, consider that between
December 12, 2005, and his news conference last
week, even Bush has admitted that Iraq has been
going through an exceedingly violent period. We
know, for instance, that in just July and August,
according to a United Nations report based on
counts from the Baghdad central morgue and various
hospitals, 5,106 Iraqis died, almost totally by
violent means, often torture of the most hideous
sort followed by execution on the killing grounds
of the 23 or more militias US officials have
counted in the capital. For the rest of Iraq add
another 1,493 dead souls (while noting that the
July count lacks a single death from al-Anbar
province, the very heartland of the Sunni
insurgency, where assumedly there simply were no
officials willing to report them). All over the
country, it's evident that bodies go officially
unreported. The Washington Post's Ellen Knickmeyer
recently pointed out, for example: "Bodies are
increasingly being dumped in and around Baghdad in
fields staked out by individual Shi'ite militias
and Sunni insurgent groups. Iraqi security forces
often refuse to go to the dumping grounds, leaving
the precise number of bodies in those sites
unknown."
So for Bush to "stand by" his
almost year-old figure in the casualty wars -
especially after this particular almost-year -
while claiming that the Lancet study's figures
weren't "credible", is, on the face of it, absurd.
It's hardly less absurd that nothing significant
was made of this in the media, that Bush was not
called on the carpet for a figure that, even based
on his own previous testimony, is close to
criminally negligent.
The president said
something else striking, while taking up the
banner for 30,000 dead Iraqis. He certainly meant
it to be the highest compliment he could bestow.
"I applaud the Iraqis for their courage in the
face of violence," he commented at his press
conference. "I am amazed that this is a society
which so wants to be free that they're willing to
- that there's a level of violence that they
tolerate."
In fact, there's no evidence
whatsoever that Iraqis "tolerate" levels of
violence that would horrify any society. For most
Iraqis, life under such conditions is obviously
hell on Earth. It's Bush who "tolerates" such
levels of violence in the pursuit of his policies,
so perhaps he should simply applaud himself.
The fact is that the Lancet figures have
largely been avoided because most Americans,
including most reporters, can't entertain the
possibility that their country might actually be
responsible for a situation in which almost
400,000, or about 655,000, or possibly
900,000-plus "excess" Iraqis have died. At the top
end of that continuum, you would have to think of
the recent wars and serial slaughters in the
Democratic Republic of Congo or the genocide in
Rwanda. At 655,000, you're talking about slightly
more than the dead of the American Civil War. With
the bottom figure, you're already at well over 100
times the dead of September 11, 2001, almost seven
times the US dead of either the Korean or the
Vietnam War, and more than three times the dead of
atomized Hiroshima. And let's keep in mind that
any of these figures are purely provisional, since
Bush has more than two years to go in office and
has sworn not to pull US forces out of Iraq before
he departs, even if, according to the Washington
Post's Bob Woodward, only his wife and dog still
back him on the subject.
The Vietnam
analogy, never far from the American
consciousness, has been back in the press
recently, but here's an apt Vietnam quote that
seldom seems to rise to memory anymore. General
William Westmoreland, commander of US Forces in
Vietnam, offered the following explanation for
similarly staggering Vietnamese body counts (an
estimated 3 million Vietnamese died in that
country's French and American wars): "The Oriental
doesn't put the same high price on life as does a
Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the
Orient."
It's hard to avoid the thought
that a similar attitude toward Iraqi lives and
deaths is at work in the US government and in the
media. After all, the kinds of denatured
discussions now taking place about Iraqi deaths
would be inconceivable if American deaths were at
stake. Just consider, for instance, that the
recent discovery of scattered human remains ("some
as large as arm or leg bones") overlooked at
Ground Zero in New York City has raised a furor
and demands that all construction at the site be
halted while it is thoroughly searched. Try to put
that sort of concern for the dead back into the
Iraqi situation or into such perfunctory, daily,
inside-the-newspaper passages as:
In addition, about 50 bodies were
collected Sunday around Baghdad, the capital, a
figure considered high weeks ago but now
routine. An Interior Ministry official said many
of the victims had apparently been shot at close
range and bore signs of torture.
How,
then, do you even begin to grasp such losses in a
war of "liberation" launched by your own country?
How do you even begin to imagine such levels of
suffering, death, and destruction, or the
increasingly chaotic and degraded conditions in
which so many Iraqis now live and for which we are
certainly responsible?
Tom
Engelhardt is editor of Tomdispatch and the
author of The End of Victory Culture. His
novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has
recently come out in paperback. Most recently, he
is the author of Mission
Unaccomplished: Tomdispatch Interviews
with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters
(Nation Books), the first collection of
Tomdispatch interviews.
