What
You're Missing in our subscriber-only CounterPunch newsletter
Did Oprah Pick Another Fibber?
Truth and Fiction in Elie Wiesel's Night
In his special
report Alexander Cockburn interviews former Wiesel colleague
and Holocaust survivor Eli Pfefferkorn. What Raul Hilberg, the
Holocaust's greatest historian, really thinks about Wiesel's
"Night". Also
in this special issue: Is Hugo Chavez Hitler or Father Christmas?
Larry Lack tells the full story of Venezuela's hand-outs to Uncle
Sam's Shivering Poor. Plus, Jeffrey St Clair profiles the Endangered
Visigoth and traces the rise and possible fall of Rick Pombo,
destroyer of nature.CounterPunch
Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember,
we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition
of CounterPunch. Please
support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter,
which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or
by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions
are tax-deductible.Click
here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please:Subscribe
Now!
Well over a year ago Johns Hopkins Bloomberg
School of Public Health released a report documenting 100,000
Iraqi dead as a consequence of the US invasion and occupation.
At the time, they did not include the thousands of deaths in
Falluja as part of their study because they did not want to skew
the results upwards. Now, more than a year after the study,
there are undoubtedly many thousands more Iraqi deaths. A recent
article on CounterPunch by Andrew Cockburn argues that the real
death figure may approach 500,000.
It is obvious why the Department
of Defense refuses to keep count, they do not want to provide
evidence for future war crimes tribunals. The US anti-war movement
has rightly condemned the DoD for its disgraceful policy and
has widely publicized the massacre of civilians carried out by
the US military.
At the same time, the DoD has
undercounted the number of American casualties by not adding
soldiers whose wounds are inflicted in Iraq, but who die of their
injuries later on German or American soil. As is also widely
known, the Bush Administration has refused to allow the media
to photograph coffins being unloaded at American airports, and
the corporate media has largely played along with the administration's
strictures against showing the real carnage in Iraq. Thus, the
American public is being presented with a whitewashed version
of the war.
The anti-war movement has been
united in condemning this practice. However, there are some
in the anti-war movement who seem reluctant to publicize all
the dead in Iraq. This week, United for Peace and Justice put
a "legislative alert" on their website's front page,
written up by its legislative working group, which lists the
following casualty figures in Iraq:
* over 28,000 Iraqi civilian
lives (and some estimates are as high as 100,000 lives)
* over 2,300 U.S. military
lives
* over 4,000 Iraqi police and
military deaths
* over 16,500 U.S. troops wounded
in combat
* $251 billion spent to date
* $1.3 trillion estimated long-term
bill
UFPJ's legislative working
group's figures raise a couple of questions. First, the 28,000
total for Iraqi civilian casualties is a full 5,000 short of
what www.Iraqbodycount.org
lists as the absolute minimum number of deaths. So where does
UFPJ get its 28,000 figure for civilian deaths and why is that
figure prioritized over the Johns Hopkins study (which was conducted
as a national survey, based on a scientific sampling of households
all over Iraq), which is presented as only an "estimate?"
Secondly, certainly it is proper
to count the number of Iraqi police and military deaths in order
to get an idea of the price being paid by these Iraqis for the
American strategy of "handing over security operations,"
otherwise known as creating a puppet army. The stated US strategy
is to push poorly trained and ill equipped Iraqis, who are desperate
for a paycheck, into the front lines against the resistance.
The poverty draft is alive and well in Iraq.
However, one group is suspiciously
absent from the legislative working group's figures, namely,
the number of Iraqi resistance fighters killed by the American
military and the puppet Iraqi army. Certainly one does not have
to agree with the military tactics pursued by every resistance
group in Iraq in order to believe that their dead have as much
right to be counted as those American soldiers who are used as
cannon fodder for an illegal and unjust occupation.
So, why doesn't the legislative
working group list the thousands (or tens of thousands) of resistance
fighters killed? They might argue that there are no reliable
numbers. This is true enough, but certainly at least an educated
guess of "thousands" could be included with an explanatory
note. I believe the real answer to this question lies in the
so-called "peace legislation" the legislative working
group is supporting, which prominently includes Rep. John Murtha's
"strategic redeployment" plan.
Far from being a "peace"
proposal, it is an argument for a different kind of war based
on Marine special operations, a heavier reliance on the Iraqi
puppet army and an escalation of the air war. None of this has
anything to do with peace for the people of Iraq. It has everything
to do with the Democratic Party trying to find a way to tap into
the rising opposition here in America to the war so that they
can ride the wave to mid-term victories in November. At the
same time, the
Democrats want to make it plain to the oil corporations that
they are every bit as committed to dominating the Middle East
as the Republicans, even if they are willing to consider different
military means to the same ends. They want to have their cake
and eat it to.
Many member groups of UFPJ
are strongly opposed to Murtha's proposal, but the legislative
working group is supporting it and prominently promoting it.
If they believe that a strong anti-war movement can be built
by tailoring the facts of the occupation to the sensibilities
of hawks like Murtha (which explains leaving out the Iraqi resistance
casualties and highlighting the Iraqi puppet army casualties),
they are setting in motion a repeat of the 2004 fiasco. Then,
the anti-war movement demobilized in order to get behind John
"Reporting for Duty" Kerry. In 2006, the line is to
support John "Air War" Murtha. In 2008, the ground
will be prepared to take a dive for Hillary Rodham "Let's
Bomb Iran" Clinton.
Anti-colonial rebellions are
brutal and bloody, and their suppression is even more brutal
and bloody. From the American Revolution to the Algerian and
Vietnamese wars for national self-determination, military occupations
force those resisting it to fight asymmetrical battles, with
only a fraction of the firepower at the disposal of the occupier.
Thus, as the resistance leader in "The Battle of Algiers"
told the French press corps when asked why they disguised bombs
in baby carriages, "if the French air force will lend us
their jet bombers, we will happily lend them our baby carriages."
The whole truth needs to be
told about Iraq. Some elements of the resistance are sectarian
and target civilians, but the majority of the young fighters
who are dying in their thousands are no different than the American
Minute Men of 1775 or the Algerian or Vietnamese National Liberation
Front fighters. They fought and are fighting because a foreign
colonial power has seized their homeland, abuses their families
and terrorizes and tortures their communities.
We need to end the war. We
need to bring our troops home now (not slip them over the border
to occupy Iraq's neighbors) so that no more young Americans are
killed or maimed. To do that, we need an anti-war movement that
tells the whole truth. This war against the Iraqi people did
not begin with George W. Bush. His father began this war in
1991. Bush I killed an estimated 200,000 Iraqis, civilian and
soldiers. Bill Clinton killed thousands more in hundreds of
bombing raids and missile strikes. Far more deadly were the
starvation sanctions imposed by the Clinton administration, which
targeted only civilians, and killed 1,000,000 of them. Now,
Bush II is continuing the killing. In order to end it, we need
to recognize that the people of Iraq have the right to run their
own country, and that the Democrats do not have the rights to
the anti-war movement's votes.
Todd Chretien is running for US Senate against Sen.
Dianne Feinstein on the Green Party ticket in California. www.Todd4Senate.org
Finally
Available
from CounterPunch Books!
The Case
Against Israel
By Michael Neumann
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.