Mortality in Iraq Associated with the 2003–2011 War and Occupation | Hacker News Reader

Mortality in Iraq Associated with the 2003–2011 War and Occupation

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110 pointsgruseom88 comments

According to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Saddam_Hussein'..., estimates of Iraqis killed by Saddam range from a quarter million to a million, and estimates of Iranians killed in the Iran-Iraq are in a similar range. So, let's call his death toll a half million to two million.

About a decade after the Gulf War, which had pretty much put a stop to Saddam's killing spree, the US decided to invade Iraq again, on the pretext that Saddam was building weapons of mass destruction. The evidence was quite flimsy, and it turns out not to have been true. In the process, the US and allies, plus the destabilization of the country after, managed to kill another half million Iraqis.

Think about that for a minute. A half million people, killed based on a flimsy pretext, that anyone with half a brain could see through (and no, I don't just say this in hindsight, I thought the justification was flimsy at the time as well). Somewhere between a quarter as many and as many people killed by the Iraq War as Saddam himself had killed.

How did we come to this? How is it possible that we have gone so far astray that we are slaughtering as many people as someone we vilify as part of the "axis of evil"?

Because of the sanctions in the 90's there were also up to half a million excess deaths of children aged under 5. It was called genocide by both men who were in charge of it, both of whom resigned in protest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_Iraq#Estimate...

I also find it interesting that many people who deny that this many people were killed in Iraq since the 2003 invasion will have no problem believing the 100,000 figure of people who were killed in the Syrian Civil War so far, which has been a much smaller conflict than Iraq.

>>Because of the sanctions in the 90's there were also up to half a million excess deaths of children aged under 5

Saddam wanted to get rid of the sanctions, it was in his direct interest to inflate the statistics. (There were reports of e.g. multiple funerals for a given dead child, too.)

His regime also had "extra" income from smuggling, which could have been used to alleviate suffering of civilians under his boot. These resources weren't used for that, as far as I've read.

I never got a good answer to my standard point, when this was a hot subject:

It is arguably bad to give in to extortion from dictators. In this case a dictator isn't using his resources to alleviate the suffering of civilians in his own country!

To let dictators get their will through by the suffering of their own civilians is obviously a very, very bad precedent.

Let us not play politics on deaths, that too of Children. It is plain truth that the illegal invasion of Iraq by US in 2003, and the sanctions prior to that exterminated millions and millions of lives - on what basis can we defend loss of innocent lives?? On what basis can anybody defend violence - war? When will we see a civilized humanity and not war mongering nations and industrial complexes?

>>exterminated millions and millions of lives

Wow, many times more than the Wikileaks data and even the most extreme academics.

HN is going downhill :-(

>His regime also had "extra" income from smuggling, which could have been used to alleviate suffering of civilians under his boot.

Because he was a horrible dictator who had little regard for human life. Would you expect him to put any of his people's needs ahead of his own? If not, then it's a bit stupid to pretend it's not your fault if when you reduce the resources available to Iraq, children die and Saddam's control gets even tighter.

If you hear that someone is abusive to their 5 children, is your solution to cut their wages in half?

>>If you hear that someone is abusive to their 5 children, is your solution to cut their wages in half?

My point was that it is very, very bad to let dictators use their own civilians' suffering as an argument.

But you knew that.

Edit: To the downvoting idiot -- if you check my history, there is a comment I made yesterday on another subject that is not too old, so you can still downvote it :-)

You can justify anything that way; just find somebody bad who's against it.

The reason not to do something bad is that it's wrong. How a dictator feels about it is beside the point.

You misunderstand what I wrote, it seems? I argue trivial game theory.

If brutal dictators can get their way by hurting their own civilians, it will be very bad for a lot of civilians.

For a parallel, there would be very few kidnappings if no ransom was paid.

It is funny when you present an argument, like I did a few times here, to a bunch of True Believers which can't disprove it -- and they instead down vote you. :-)

You're funny enough to be worth the Karma, idealists. You do make me a bit sad.

Let me tell you how serious people, with at least a smattering of science education, think:

We know most of our opinions are wrong and that these positions will be updated repeatedly during life, so they are less and less wrong. The trick is to identify with the process of learning, not to identify with a certain position.

Well, Western responsibility for the slaughter is less direct than Saddam's killings (although that doesn't help the victims much).

Yes, Iraq seemed to have been selected as a military target for reasons not disclosed to the public.

Actually, the reasons were disclosed:

[1] http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm

[2] http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses...

[3] http://www.newamericancentury.org/Bushletter.htm

You might find the signatories of [1] particularly interesting.

It's incorrect to say the evidence on WMD was flimsy, it was very solid. That is to say that it was almost certain that Iraq had no usable WMD. The "evidence" to the contrary were fabrications, obvious at the time, without the benefit of hindsight. As was widely pointed out then.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant)

I clearly remember how all that WMD stuff was obvious propaganda at the time. Some of it ("we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud") was even laughable.

Nor did the US or other Western intelligence agencies believe it. Analysts tried to submit good reports, but they were overridden. People have often spoken of an "intelligence failure", but there wasn't such a failure; what there was was a success in politicizing intelligence on the part of political leaders. That of course did not stop them from blaming the analysts later for "failure".

Careful observers have noted signs of significant pushback from the intelligence community in response to political pressure since then.

>>I clearly remember how all that WMD stuff was obvious propaganda at the time.

Interesting, do you have references?

To me, it seems really hard to distinguish "obvious propaganda" from low details due to protection of intelligence sources.

You would naively/cynically assume that if the US army/etc knew they wouldn't find any remaining WMD programs, they would be planted?

Planted? No, they did something much easier--they changed the subject. The "OMG they've got WMD" rhetoric was replaced by something about the freedom of the Iraqi people.

  >>I clearly remember how all that WMD stuff was obvious 
  propaganda at the time.

  Interesting, do you have references?

LA Times opinion piece explicitly calls out the evidence about Iraq as propaganda:

http://articles.latimes.com/2003/jan/05/opinion/op-marshall5

The Christian Science Monitor discusses propaganda that was used to sell the first Gulf War, and warns us about the dangers of propaganda about the situation with Iraq in 2002:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0906/p25s02-cogn.html

The Guardian reports that much of the British evidence for invasion is based not on new intelligence, but cherry picked academic articles and years old intelligence. This is before the invasion:

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/feb/08/politics.iraq

Hans Blix reports that no evidence of proscribed activities has been found in Iraq. While he qualifies it that Iraq has not been as cooperative as wished, he believes that the disarmament plan can be completed within a few months given the recent extra pressure. This is also before the invasion:

http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/03/07/sprj.irq.un.transcript.blix...

  You would naively/cynically assume that if the US army/etc 
  knew they wouldn't find any remaining WMD programs, they 
  would be planted?

It's not exactly that there were people who knew they wouldn't find any remaining WMD programs, and went ahead anyhow. It's that strong incentives were set up to find evidence that there were WMDs in Iraq, so the evidence presented was weighted much more heavily towards that which found evidence of WMDs or attempts by Saddam to make or buy WMDs.

This was written shortly after the invasion, about how the Bush administration didn't like the intelligence it was getting from the CIA, so it set up its own Office of Special Plans, specifically tasked to find evidence of WMDs in Iraq and ties to Al Qaeda:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/05/12/030512fa_fact

Well, when the entire purpose of your organization is to find evidence of a particular fact, you will probably find such evidence. That doesn't mean it's true; just that enough dedicated people can find evidence for it. And since you can never conclusively provide evidence of the absence of a WMD program, especially since Saddam wasn't always fully cooperative with inspectors, it was fairly easy to get carried away providing evidence that he had or was developing WMDs, without paying sufficient attention to any counter intelligence.

And of course there's the Downing Street Memo, from July 2002 (nearly a year before the invasion) that reveals that the decision to invade was a fait accompli and the main point of the intelligence and inspections after that point that were just used to provide better political support for the invasion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downing_Street_memo

Also, not that the didn't have to plant evidence of WMDs in Iraq after the invasion; people found out that there were no WMDs, found out about the Downing Street Memo, and yawned. The media didn't care; the US media barely reported on the Downing Street Memo. The public and politicians didn't care; after September 11th, there were still enough people who thought that "something had to be done", and people who thought that Saddam had ties to Al Qaeda, that there was very little political push against the war.

That's what gets me the most about this; how very apathetic the American public and American politicians have been about the mass slaughter of Iraqis (including thousands of civilians), torture, indefinite detention without trial in Guantanamo, extrajudicial assassination on US citizens, and so on and so forth. It's chilling to think that so few people care.

> That's what gets me the most about this; how very apathetic the American public and American politicians have been about the mass slaughter of Iraqis (including thousands of civilians), torture, indefinite detention without trial in Guantanamo, extrajudicial assassination on US citizens, and so on and so forth. It's chilling to think that so few people care.

But 'they' (speaking in generalisations) never did care iraq is just the latest of a very long series of events where the US slaughters civilians, it's pretty much a consistent theme in US history and ALL of it's conflicts.

I realised I perhaps didn't provide much in the way of citation:

Hiroshima/Nagasaki: Upto 250,000 deaths [1]

Vietnam+Cambodia: 100,000 + 400,000 maimed or killed by agent orange + 500,000 children born with birth defects (also from agent orange [2]

Korean War: 1.5 million civilians killed (both sides (difficult to delineate), 20% of the north koreans population killed. [3]

Gulf War 1: 15000 civilians killed [4]

You then have Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan drone strikes. Paints a fairly compelling picture.

Those of you with the attitude of "That is just a fact of war, civilians die". Given you know this before a war, you therefore know you are going to kill civilians making the action ethically worse, than if you didn't know this "Fact of war".

This isn't even going into the blatant disregard for human life the US demonstrated with slavery (~10 million african slaves killed, admittedly western europe in general shares the blame for that)[5], trail of tears[6] (4000 cherokees killed), etc...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_an...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_casualties#Deaths_c...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio#Korean_...

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio#Coaliti...

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade#European_c...

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears

Blix I know about of course, a good source. But he did work for the UN, where quite a few of the parts still are taken over by dictators not criticising each others. (See UNHRC on Wikipedia, for instance. It is the less bad successor of what existed 2001...)

The other claims... well, they couldn't know. The real information was (is?) stamped secret. Downing Street wouldn't release that.

>>Also, not that the didn't have to plant evidence of WMDs in Iraq after the invasion; people found out that there were no WMDs, found out about the Downing Street Memo, and yawned. The media didn't care; the US media barely reported on the Downing Street Memo.

Uh, no.

There is still credibility problems, e.g. recently regarding claims about chemical weapons in Syria. They had to send the UN team there; the claims about listening in to Syrian army communications, etc were not accepted.

I am willing to believe the Bush administration didn't care if they kneecapped the credibility of the next few president administrations. But pure incompetence do seem more likely.

And don't forget the Downing Street Memorandum.

WMD was bullshit, and everyone knew it was bullshit.

what, Iraq wants to join chemical arms ban organization? can't have that

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/world/to-ousted-boss-arms-...

As a country, it would appear that we lost our minds in the wake of 9/11.

Widespread government surveillance. Armed drones. Massive bills passing through Congress without being completely read. Amazingly intrusive security at airports, now filtering down to train and bus stations. Indefinite suspension of prisoners of war.

Yes, we have gone astray. For those of you old enough, could you imagine such things happening in the 70s, 80s or even the 90s?

> Massive bills passing through Congress without being completely read.

I expect that to be the norm in the 70s, 80s, and 90s as it is the norm today and will continue to be in the future, for the same reasons.

I imagine armed drones coming into use essentially as fast as they're developed; I don't believe any past government would have abstained.

I'm with you on the widespread government surveillance, absurd "security" at airports and train and bus stations, and indefinite suspension, though to be fair, I'm not really old enough to have much of an opinion on what things were like (except for airports... truly, these are the end times :( )

"I expect that to be the norm in the 70s, 80s, and 90s as it is the norm today and will continue to be in the future, for the same reasons."

Well, I think it's safe to assume that we've always had some amount of idiots in Congress: individuals whose lack of deep intellect and substantive accomplishments in life were offset by their ability to charm others. It seems reasonable that there have been many, many votes in the Senate and House in which the full language of the bills hasn't been read by the people doing the voting.

That said, I don't know if bills as massive as the Patriot Act, TARP bailout, or ACA are just "business as usual" for Congress. If you consider the sheer amount of lobbying that takes place today, along with the ease of cutting-and-pasting huge blocks of text into a document and the level of apathy the general public has these days towards all things political, I bet these bills couldn't have existed in decades past.

I think in the past, the corruption took place one small-to-moderate-sized bill at a time, with regular frequency. Now, it's a feeding frenzy that is shoved through all at once in the hope that nobody reads the fine print.

Well, I live in Brazil, you never went astray after 9/11, you just became more obvious in your obviously oppressive ways against anyone that stands in the way of profit.

Everything that happened so far was very predictable...

By the way, when 9/11 happened, although obviously people were upset with the amount of life loss, many people here also became very happy because finally someone had the balls to drive the point home on US that they cannot keep screwing around and expect no punishment.

When the US started to irritate lots of countries because of Snowden, many people here were wishing the offended countries were strong enough to actually hit back (instead of just complaining on the UN assembly and whatnot)

There were over two dozen foreign intelligence agencies that agreed that Saddam either had or was attempting to build or purchase weapons of destruction. Nuclear weapons are extremely difficult to hide anywhere on earth, but many other types of weapons of mass destruction aren't difficult to dispose of.

That's not to say that the invasion turned out to be a good idea, or that we were justified in the attempt, but those agencies represent thousands of really smart people in positions of authority around the world agreeing that Iraq had them or was attempting to develop them, so its hard to argue that anyone with half a brain could have known the truth. If we were wrong, its because a good percentage of all western civilizations were wrong, not just the United States.

You also have to factor in the theory that Saddam himself wanted the world to think that he had them, in an attempt to dissuade Iran from thinking Iraq was vulnerable. Iraq's strange behavior that lead to the invasion can really only be explained in two ways: either he was pretending to hide weapons that didn't exist, or he successfully hid real weapons.

Finally, half a million people were killed in Iraq. Clearly every combatant on the battlefield shares a part of the blame, but that includes the enemy combatants. The overwhelming majority of American Soldiers attempt to avoid civilian casualties, often to their own detriment, yet the organizations we have been fighting against in Iraq deliberately target anyone they can. The larger the body count, the better. They view their fellow Muslims as traitors for failing to take up arms against the United States, and so they target them just the same as Americans.

"had or was attempting to build or purchase" is a pretty weak standard. Do I qualify if I put an ad on craigslist asking if anyone has some spare anthrax? How about if I doodle a nuclear weapon design on a napkin?

I don't doubt Saddam was trying to develop or purchase WMD. But absent the capability of doing so, such attempts mean nothing.

Regardless, it was obvious that Iraq was not a threat to the US. Even if Iraq had had a hundred nuclear bombs, there was no way to deliver them. If you're on the other side of the planet, WMD doesn't matter without ICBMs or long-range bombers to take them to the target.

Did two dozen foreign intelligence agencies go so far as to agree that Iraq was an imminent threat that needed to be stopped by overwhelming force? Somehow, I'm guessing they did not.

One can debate the specific details, but one can't really debate the question of whether Iraq was a threat to the United States in 2003. They were not, and it was patently obvious to anyone paying the least bit attention.

I thought it was obvious, but out of those two dozen intelligence agencies, some of them thought that he had weapons of mass destruction, and some of them thought that he was merely trying to acquire them. Perhaps I should have worded it more clearly.

That being said, I wasn't attempting to evaluate whether the evidence we had was strong enough to go to war or not. I was simply stating that a good portion of the world's intelligence agencies came to the same conclusions that we did about Saddam's capabilities and intentions.

I also didn't claim that anyone else opted to start a war, clearly they didn't.

The number of death is probably more an effect of the general destabilization of the country (which gave ample room, as an example, for various exactions on minorities in Irak besides the war, in particular on Christians) rather than direct casualties.

I don't doubt for a moment that American and other Western soldiers were trying hard to avoid civilian casualties. It's deeply unfair to blame them for things they didn't do or for decisions they didn't make and never would have made had it been up to them. That being said, there are a couple problems with your argument. First, it's not the case that dozens of intelligence agencies believed the WMD propaganda. They would have been utterly incompetent if they had. They're far from perfect, of course, but no way are they that stupid and certainly not on that scale.

Rather, what happened is that political leaders pressured the leaders of the intelligence agencies (essentially political positions in their own right) into delivering reports that gave the "right" (i.e. the wrong) answers irrespective of what their professional analysts really thought. Few intelligence agencies could withstand the overt political pressure that was applied to the CIA and others (largely out of the Vice President's office, as I understand it) in the run-up to that war—after all, ultimate power resides with the political leaders in a democracy for obvious reasons. Note, however, that when the same leaders tried to do it again a few years later, enough of the professionals' real opinions was leaked to make a repeat manipulation impossible. I have in mind the unanimous assessment of US intelligence agencies in 2007 that Iran was not seeking nuclear weapons (an assessment that still stands, incidentally, and is still unanimous, though you'd not guess it from the news). When political pressure started to be applied to distort that opinion, someone leaked a summary of it to the press, and that put an Iran war off the table for the rest of the GWB administration. Bush writes about that in his memoirs.

The other problem with your argument is that by the Nuremberg standards, war of aggression is understood to be the "supreme international crime" that encompasses all the evils that take place as a result of the war [1]. That is, the Nuremberg standard of justice considers all the secondary consequences of war (such as Iraq underwent with bombings, civil war, etc.) to be subsumed under the original crime of a war of aggression. This arguably makes sense, since without the invasion, there wouldn't have been a civil war. By this standard, soldiers are not responsible for atrocities they didn't commit, but the leaders who started the war in the first place actually are. Since that is the standard of justice that we (rightly) apply to others, we ought not to reject it or minimize it when it applies to ourselves. (The standard won't be applied in this case, of course, but that's a separate issue.)

The above is how I understand it from the sources I've read, anyway. Factual corrections are more than welcome.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_aggression

>>since without the invasion, there wouldn't have been a civil war.

Uh...

This happened: A starts a war W with B. As a follow on effect, some groups inside B starts a civil war W2 with others in B.

You say that A is responsible for the second war W2 too, which they didn't start and even actively tried to stop?!

After the war, when does A stop being responsible for everything bad that happens to B, done by B themselves? After 10 years? 100?

You just blame A for everything, including the weather? :-)

(It is easy to make a good argument that the W2 war would probably have happened anyway, at some point. Or that Saddam was already doing a continuous civil war with his army/police against everyone but his supporters, to keep power. You might even argue, but not with your definitions, that USA is responsible for all those killed by Saddam when they didn't topple him in the first Gulf war...)

Edit: Clarity.

Yes - A is responsible. If I set fire on half of a fireworks factory, I definitely could be hold responsible if the other half burns down to.

Saddam was keeping Iraq relatively stable. The toppling of the regime was done so clumsy with so little idea what to do next that it enabled the sliding down of Iraq into the madness that culminated in 2006-7

Greatly oversimplifying the situation with that terrible metaphor.

I'd argue the US contributed to "W2" through "De-Ba'athification," disbanding the Iraqi military, and the incompetence of the occupation (eg insufficient troops to enforce martial law/secure weapons caches). This isn't simply claiming the benefit of hindsight because there were many people warning about these decisions at the time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_End_in_Sight

I answered someone arguing that legally -- someone that starts a war is absolutely responsible for the effects. But then he turned around and wrote that one group was responsible for starting a war they weren't really involved in, except for trying to stop it.

There is a contradiction in there, if you think about it.

(People do make lots of mistakes in war, but the Bush administration did make a new face for f-ckups while handling the Iraq occupation. They did get lots of help from the Iranians to trip up, the guy arguing for disbanding the Iraqi military was working with them.)

> I answered someone arguing that legally -- someone that starts a war is absolutely responsible for the effects. But then he turned around and wrote that one group was responsible for starting a war they weren't really involved in, except for trying to stop it.

So let's consider this story. Germany invades Poland and tries to resolve the tension between itself and France and Britain. France and Britain declare war on Germany.

Who is the aggressor? Are we to agree, in the end, with Reichspresident und Grossadmiral Karl Doenitz and recognize that who is the aggressor is a political determination (presumably dependent on who wins the war)? Or do we accept that since the situation seems reversed in Iraq we should hold ourselves accountable?

It seems to me that this is largely confirmation that Doenitz was right, that "aggressor" is a term to be decided by the victor. I suppose we can say that aggressors never win wars ;-)

Wasn't there an ultimatum re WWII that if you start this war -- then we are part of it?

That is, joining an attacked ally in an existing war.

How do you differ from "If you don't censor your newspapers about the Archduke's death, we will invade?"

>> How do you differ from "If you don't censor your newspapers about the Archduke's death, we will invade?"

If you make a bad argument, admit it. Don't equate declaring a defence alliance with making threats of war, that is just stupid.

(To the downvoting idiot: There is another comment in my history you can find and downvote.)

But Germany essentially went to war in WWI to defend their allies, who had suffered what was quite arguably an act of war, namely a terrorist attack on their dignitaries on foreign soil, and which the nationalities involved were, according to them, not very cooperative. Now if you argue that is not the same, then the US invasion of Afghanistan is also a US war of aggression.

I don't see any relevance. I showed your Poland argument wrong, re WWII.

Since you lack better arguments, you're going to make me drag up definitions for casus belli and discuss this a long time, I take it?

But I don't need to do discuss Afghanistan since I only showed there were logical inconsistencies in an argument.

Edit: Removed the rest, not relevant or interesting enough.

I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that it is what the Nuremberg principles say (as I understand them) and that this has not even seemed controversial in the past, as long as it was we who were applying the principles to others.

It's hardly fair to make those the principles of international justice when we are doing the judging but suspend them in the case of our own activities.

"This happened: A starts a war W with B. As a follow on effect, some groups inside B starts a civil war W2 with others in B.

You say that A is responsible for the second war W2 too, which they didn't start and even actively tried to stop?!"

Well, let's see, the argument at Nuremberg was that Germany invaded Poland and sought diplomatic efforts to avoid conflicts with Britain and France, but those two attacked them over the invasion of Poland, which was Germany's war of aggression.

So, it seems to me that if Germany was in a war of aggression against Britain, then the same applies to the US being in a war of aggression against the insurgents.

There is no doubt that Iraq did have chemical weapons [1], that chemical weapons are classified as weapons of mass destruction [2]. There's also no doubt that the nebulousness of the term was used by both sides in the debate to steer conversation. The ridiculous assertion at one point that Hussein was trying to acquire nuclear weaponry [3] muddied those waters even more.

Iraq did have chemical weapons (WMDs). They had demonstrated a willingness to use them on civilian populations [1]. Iraq possibly still had active WMDs at the end of the 1998 inspections. Chemical weaponry tends to have a fairly short shelf life, though, and stockpiles need to be constantly replenished. We did not ever find WMDs in iraq after the 2003 invasion, but we did find the labs to make them and the evidence that they had been manufactured at some point. This was not news, because we knew that Iraq had WMDs. It was considered insane by most western agencies that a dictator as mad as Hussein was would willingly disarm; Willingly let the stockpiles he was known to have had of WMDs simply wither and rot. Every major intelligence agency believed that Hussein had WMDs.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destru... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapon_of_mass_destruction#Evol... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries

"Every major intelligence agency believed that Hussein had WMDs."

Just because you write that sentence - does not make it so. [1]

[1] http://www.salon.com/2007/09/06/bush_wmd/

Salon...pfft. Salon makes it true? I don't think so.

same article in the guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/sep/07/turning...

Here in Brazil when the USA started its war movements, I do not met a single person that believed the "intelligence" agencies around the world, people here believed that it was all fake to steal more oil...

When they found no WMD on Iraq, people here was like: "A ha! I told you! US people are just evil liars that steal from people!"

In fact, I really, really, really do not understand how someone can believe that bullshit. Or your countries out there have incredibly stupid people on intelligence agencies, or your population is incredibly stupid and believe agencies that lie all the time. To us here the behaviour of US population supporting whatever crap CIA says is just baffling.

At the 1975 OPEC meeting in Algiers a new treaty was agreed on for the Iran-Iraq border. This was in Iran's favour, and, in those days Iran was a US client. The deal was that Iraq would cede territory in the Shatt al Arab area and in exchange Iran would stop arming Iraqi Kurds. This on-going border dispute (which had gone on for centuries) was important to what happened next.

In 1979 a lot of stuff happened. There was the Iranian revolution. Also, around this time, not fully understood at the time, there was also the hostage crisis, Iran-Contra scandal and an election in the USA.

On 4 September 1980 Iran shelled Iraq, marking the start of the war. On 22 September Iraq full on invaded Iran along the whole length of the border on the assumption that it would be a good idea to do so given that the 'revolutionary' Iran would have so much internal turmoil etc. that their defences would be down. Hence, Iran 'started it' so that particular war wasn't exactly Saddam's devising.

You will find this Wikipedia article on the Iran Iraq war to be quite an eye opener:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq_...

Read it carefully and I think you will see that, much like WW1, the Iran-Iraq war started for silly reasons but then developed into a situation where those that sought to profit through arms perpetuated the war. As they say, 'war is a racket'. Sure Saddam was there commanding conscripts to their deaths and it was all his fault, but it is not as simple as that, is it?

In England we know what these sorts of shenanigans are as we are the grand masters of it. We call it 'divide and rule'.

Sometimes you have to look at a situation and ask 'who benefits?'. As ever in war, the arms companies, their financiers and those that run off with the loot.

P.S. Why are people on first name terms with Saddam, even in his death? People aren't chummy in quite the same way with Barack, Vladimir, Dave, Angela or even Adolf for that matter. Why is the former Iraqi President afforded first name status when every other Great Leader gets to have a surname?

In regards to your P.S.

Because Hussein, Saddam's last name, is attributed to a greater person (where the name originated from): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hussein_ibn_Ali

Just a hypothesis though..

Well, Vladimir, Dave, and Angela are fairly nondistinctive names (and in fact, I have no idea who you mean by "Dave").

But in general if I were looking for why something went by a certain name, I'd expect the answer to be "that's how it was learned in the beginning". People hate changing the name they use for things, and even just words for things can persist for so long that there is no knowledge of their origin other than "it's always been that way". (Obviously, they usually don't... but they can. The english word "wheel" is a good example, with an incredibly long line of descent straight from PIE; contrast the word "cycle", which descends from the same PIE root, but has the straightforward (?) origin "borrowed from the Greek".) I'm pretty sure you're referring to the guy as "Saddam" because you've observed that that's normal practice. It might be very difficult to find an example where that wasn't the entire justification.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Cameron, presumably.

To be fair, he's eminently forgettable.

Regarding your PS, it's because Saddam is his name, Hussein is his father's name, it's not a family name. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein#Youth or http://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/sep/22/israel for details.

Since you mentioned the Iranians killed in the Iran-Iraq war, the US and other western countries were an ally of Iraq while they knew Saddam was gassing Iranians with chemical weapons, their hypocrisy is astounding.

There is a bit of a conceptual leap from "started a civil war that got a bunch of people killed" to "slaughtered." The question of "how did we come to this?" obviously has a different answer in the two contexts. In the former, more accurate, characterization, it can simply be explained as: Americans are an optimistic bunch that continually underestimate how deeply dysfunctional Middle Eastern society happens to be and how deep the fissures within run.

The US fighting Iraq was more about being able to defeat a tangible foe and make it look like something was being done in the wake of the WTC attacks - punching ghosts in Afghanistan wasn't providing the balm the politicians were looking for.

The invasion of Iraq was more about that "Mission Accomplished" banner for the domestic market than actually doing anything for Iraqis and their neighbours.

that's the best tl;dr summary.

How did "we" come to this? You're asking the largest military wielder and prison population and the only nation to have used nuclear weapons on real people, people going about their contained lives wanting to wake up to see another day, how "we" came to this.

- Hiroshima

- Nagasaki

- Vietnam

- Constant US policy to support genocidal dictators around the world who mass slaughter "their" people, so long as US corporate interests gain over sovereign interests.

Millions of killings later directly and indirectly from US hands, entire lands and societies literally poisoned into waste at US policy over the past 70 years, and one asks how invading Iraq (and Afghanistan) on imaginary and unjustified pretexts was possible. The answers are shocking and simple.

There are a couple classic "American ways" in spirit. The first has some idealistic value (e.g. individual freedom, can-do attitude). Then the second is one that silences all else: hear no evil, see no evil, support our troops (i.e. in reality, support the political monsters who use them). The simplest answers to your question are related to deeply rooted combinations of nationalism, racism, pride, intolerance, regional proximity to other nations, and systems of governance that are both insufficiently compartmentalized and that run on forced funding (taxation). Guaranteed funding, especially with only the masking of "democracy," was a fast path for a super power that thinks itself a "super hero" in the world's eye -- and largely was seen as such to those who didn't face the brunt of its violence -- to guarantee its continued exploits and an accelerating industry of war. Elections put little if any checks/balances upon a congressional network of plunderers who mostly serve the same corporate and violent interests, policies, and strategists, but through lightly varying vocabulary come election. Paranoia that the US could reasonably claim in that last 'new century' and into this one is dismissed by policies that become brutal and offensive.

1. Google the American timelines and legacy of its direct and proxy imperialism: https://www.google.com/search?q=us+imperialism

2. Oliver Stone's Showtime series, "Untold History of the United States," is quite worth watching in full. Sure, we can all find faults with it. It's not intended to give a "balanced" account. Rather, it's a crash course in provoking thought about the seldom discussed or even known aspects of US policy compared to the general public and its vapid historical accounting of its negative actions. It's 10 episodes. http://www.sho.com/sho/oliver-stones-untold-history-of-the-u...

"Largest prison population" sorry but China wis that award.

Certifiably false.

USA imprisons ~6x more of its citizens than China does [1], as a matter of percentage. Considering that the USA has ~1/4 the population of China [2], we can determine that the USA has more people in prisons than China, by a factor of roughly 1.5 USA prisoners per 1 Chinese prisoner.

---

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populatio...

Even if it were true that China cages more people relatively, that would be a laughably low standard to flaunt.

I'm curious why you leave Pol Pot, Rwanda, the Soviet Union out of your statement. The US doesn't have a monopoly on killing people or supporting bad actors. I also see no criticism of the EU that has supported their share of dictators. The anti-American tripe that constantly gets brought up by people that have actually never lived under true oppression is just silly without applying context. You mention Hiroshima -- what about the Nanjing Massacre? You mentioned Vietnam.. The reeducation camps run by the Communists were pretty brutal. Know anything about the Cultural Revolution in China? What about human experimentation conducted by Germans and Japanese? What about 1989 in China? How about the Turks and Greeks? Chechnya? Serbia? Kosovo?

Your one-sided rant reads like a freshman regurgitation of a Robert Jensen lecture. You can't blame America for everything, despite your desire to do just that.

I'm curious why you think acknowledging the US's ills is equivalent to overlooking the countless ills of many other extremely violent nations and despots. The difference between us, perhaps, is that I care about and acknowledge all aspects of global atrocities.

These debates always seem to descend into a pointless argument about moral equivalence that has both sides talking past each other.

>I'm curious why you leave Pol Pot, Rwanda, the Soviet Union out of your statement.

That's like asking why someone left Cheetos out of their discussion of Twinkies. 1) Irrelevant, 2) Not a flattering comparison.

It does tell us who you think the United States' peers are. I wouldn't think to compare the US to machete-wielding Hutus or the horrific Japanese invasion of China during WWII; you seem to think that's pretty fair.

I still remember the chill that ran through relations between Canada and the U.S. after Paul Martin refused to join the war in Iraq (despite still be embroiled in the war in Afghanistan). U.S. pop culture mostly ignored Canada, as per usual, but what few mentions there were soon lumped Canada into the same boat as "French surrender-monkeys", again in spite of the fact that Canadian troops were fighting and dying in Afghanistan. Bush pursued a policy of economic protectionism that could easily be confused for retaliation against Martin's government if it wasn't that in fact. This is how the U.S. treated its closest ally and biggest trading partner. A decade of madness indeed! The continued expansion of the TSA and homeland security as well as the NSA scandals indicate the insanity has dug itself in deep.

yep, thank god Harper wasn't PM then or we would be still in Iraq

Or Ignatieff. Honestly, I suspect Harper's stand was just one of the usual efforts of the opposition party to differentiate themselves from the ruling party despite having basically zero real platform differeces. It would be great if this country's politics started being more about policies than personalities again!

It was actually Jean Christian who refused to go to Iraq

*Jean Chretien

"95% uncertainty interval 48,000–751,000"

I understand the value in trying to quantify this, but it's difficult to really conclude anything useful when your upper and lower confidence intervals vary by 15x

I agree, although I feel like it gives a slightly better feel of the uncertainties to look where that figure came from:

> The wartime crude death rate in Iraq was 4.55 per 1,000 PY (95% UI 3.74–5.27), more than 0.5 times higher than the 2.89 ((95% UI 1.56–4.04) death rate during the 26-mo period preceding the war. By multiplying those rates by the annual Iraq population [43], we estimate total excess Iraqi deaths attributable to the war through mid-2011 as about 405,000 (95% UI 48,000–751,000).

That happens after most wars. At least it wasn't deliberate policy as with the world wars. The real crime was that that war even happened. I remember how laughable the propaganda leading up to it was. GWB couldn't go two sentences without saying "weapons of mass destruction" or "Al-quada". Right down the memory hole. Pretty sad.

It's nice to see some scientific work going into the causality count in the Iraq war. Most of the surveys/official estimations are way off, the Opinion Research Business survey reported over a million deaths while most US sources stated around 100k mark.

This report is somewhere in the middle, which is most realistic.

There have been very serious studies done on Iraqi war mortality for quite some time, starting with Roberts and Burnham, who did two very credible epidemiological surveys of mortality in 2004 and 2006 (published in the Lancet) using a similar approach as the study referenced above. The later study estimated somewhere around 600,000+ (95% confidence interval of 392,979 to 942,636) had already died by 2006 (and this before the renewed sectarian violence and US offensive in 2007).

It's notable that even this new study's lead author thinks their half-million figure is an underestimate:

""We think it is roughly around half a million people dead. And that is likely a low estimate," says Hagopian. "People need to know the cost in human lives of the decision to go to war."

I remember that This American Life did a piece on the Lancet studies when they came out. They focused on how the widespread reaction (in the West) to their numbers was one of stubborn disbelief, despite the fact that these were the most credible researchers in the field and that they used standard techniques.

I remember this hilarious reality check from the Iraq Body Count project. I never saw it answered... Do you have a link?

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/beyond/reality-checks/

This was also quite funny:

http://lancetiraq.blogspot.com/2010_03_01_archive.html

>>stubborn disbelief

I thought it was fun how many people on the left knew how it was, with so wildly varying data.

But of course, it never happens that researchers cheat on research papers. Or interviewers in another country "fix" the answers. Or a hundred other things.

If I have a thesis in life, it is that paid shills and idealists lie. The idealists "know" how it is, so the problem is how to get people to think "correctly".

Perhaps you know much more about this than I do. My memory is that the Lancet authors were serious, qualified researchers who had done much similar work in the past and whose objectivity had not previously been disputed. If there's a critique to be made of their work, a snarky "that can't be right" blog post certainly doesn't cut it. The authors of the new PLoS study say that they've taken into account criticisms of earlier work; I am sure they have the Lancet articles (among others) in mind, but I do not know the details.

The Iraq Body Count project has bothered me for years because they only count individually confirmable deaths. There is nothing wrong with that as documentary work, but there is something terribly wrong with citing the number of deaths so counted as anything like a credible total for the war, when it is obviously a severe lower bound. War is random and chaotic. Very many people die whose paperwork does not get filled out. It is painfully obvious that statistical techniques are required to arrive at a good estimate under such circumstances. Thus to cite the Iraq Body Count as the total number of deaths in the war is dishonest, yet that is exactly how it has routinely been cited, and I don't understand why they (or at least the people who quote them in media pieces) have not been called out on this more often.

Uh, I can't see how that is relevant to the specific points I raised. (It isn't relevant to talk about someone else using the IBC data in a way IBC don't recommend. And there were lots of criticism before, see the first Lancet report. It is not good with a political motive either -- timing reports to influence an election.)

1. So you have no answer to the Iraq Body Count reality check and just ignore it? (E.g. where is the conspiracy needed to hide all the missing maimed -- and make their prostheses?!)

2. Nothing to say about the scathing criticism of lacking integrity in the second link?

3. Considering your lack of answers on 1 and 2, you might want to retract the claim that others put their heads in the sand. :-)

4. And a new point: You are aware of that Beth Osborne is a Lancet Report critic? She has documented integrity since she got problems from "too high" mortality values in the first Gulf war... And many other heavyweights in exactly the right field?

5. A second new point: Wikileaked papers also contradict the numbers -- and there is no sign of a big conspiracy in WikiLeaks to hide point 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War_documents_leak#Total_d...

Since you have just ignored my references and arguments, I guess there is nothing else to say? (The point 1 I have asked about since it was reported, never a relevant answer.)

I'm not having the kind of argument with you that you seem to think I am. I looked at the articles you mentioned. Certainly their criticisms are devastating if, and only if, they are true and fair. Are they? I can't say. I don't have time to read the studies. If you have, and you've arrived at your beliefs based on factual analysis rather than ideology, that's good.

My point about IBC was not intended to dispute what you said, but rather to vent something that has bothered me for a long time. Sorry that wasn't clear. I feel slightly justified by the fact that your second link does the very thing I was complaining about:

these results were anywhere from seven to 14 times as high as other credible estimates, including those made by the non-partisan Iraq Body Count, a consortium of U.S. and U.K researchers, also concerned about the human toll of the war

This is deeply misleading. IBC's number is guaranteed to be a far underestimate: there's no credible scenario under which all or even most of the deaths in a bloody, messy war could be neatly individually documented, not to mention accessible to foreign researchers over the internet. That's like counting individual raindrops and adding only the drops you counted to produce an estimate of total rainfall. A proper statistical study would be expected to come up with a much higher number; an order of magnitude difference is probably not unreasonable. That doesn't prove the Lancet study was proper; perhaps other criticisms are more serious. But this is the only one I feel able to comment on and the fact that they included it without pointing out that it is comparing an apple with a raisin does not give me confidence. (Neither does your description of these documents as "hilarious". I don't see any hilarity there. I do smell an ideological agenda.)

This may be unfair of me, but I can't help feeling suspicious of the fact that IBC hasn't done more to counteract this widespread—I'd even say universal, based on what I've seen—misuse of their data for absurd lowballing of the damage caused by that war. They say their motivation is to do justice to the human tragedy of the war. Shouldn't they be the first to object to dishonest uses of their work which obscure how tragic it was?

You still ignore every argument I wrote. Including the internal documents (Wikileaks).

So I'll not add more arguments, just a quick note:

AGAIN -- IBC write explicitly they are a lower bound.

Claims 7-14 times greater than the IBC do need good papers -- from authors that haven't been criticized on moral grounds, for not releasing data timely and doesn't look to have political motives. That is not the Lancet Report...

(And what an organization specialized in polling write about other subjects is not so interesting anyway, but you lack everything else?)

I might add that Iraq Body Count has a bit funny history.

First, they were criticized by the Bush administration for overcounting. Then by the extreme left for undercounting!

Now the Wikileaks report, which I linked, discuss this -- so the internal US data is out! They are a bit higher than the low counts, still far from the Lancet report.

No signs of the conspiracies needed to hide the missing effects discussed by the IBC reality check (link above).

This change the subject of the discussion.

The question now is: Did the Lancet report authors cheat? Or just the local interviewers? Their data was totally wrong and the authors defended it like a bear mother defends her cub.

If they are honest, you'd expect a mea culpa and discussion about why their data is wrong.

But we won't get any public discussion of the Wikileaks from them -- any more than they discussed the IBC reality check (see discussion above).

As I wrote above -- idealists lie. This is typical when dishonest people finally are disproved, they just stop discussing the subject.

(The Wikileaks show other embarrassing facts which should be a media scandal getting people sacked, it is hardly a planned leak.)

As a last note (and as a last chance for the pathetic down voters that lack better ways of arguing :-) ):

I Googled. There really is some guy that wrote a book and claims that the embarrassing Wikileaked internal US data is a conspiracy! :-)

He had an article up at one of the usual left extremist sites (alternet? zmag?). Sorry, should have written this when I read it.

He also ignored the obvious reality check from IBC and why the needed conspiracies to hide them isn't visible in the Wikileaks documents.

(E.g. where the Hell are all the dead buried?! How could they get most every doctor to keep quiet -- if the Lancet report is correct, any larger hospital morgue in Bagdad should see almost as many dead as the whole country's official statistics!? Why weren't death certificates given out (important in Iraq)? Where are the hundreds of thousands maimed -- and who made their prostheses?! Etc)

Also, I doubt there is discussion of why the Wikileaks lacked information of the conspiracies to influence the other measurements with larger data sets than Lancet. And the conspiracies needed to keep hiding e.g. data about all the maimed, predicted by the Lancet report, after US left. And so on, ad nauseam.

I doubt he covers the serious academic criticism.

And probably no discussion of the simple solution -- idealists lie... Hell, lots of researchers fake results just to get published.

I still predict you will like the book... :-)

What I learned from this discussion: The US extreme left/right are equally crazy.

I still chuckle when I think about your claim that all are in denial, except left extremists... Thanks for that.

I haven't read the whole thing, but is this missing anyone who died in Iraq whose family lives elsewhere?

or entire families that got wiped out.

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