The American Genocide Against Iraq: 4% of Population Dead as result of US sanctions, wars
A new household survey of Iraqis has projected the civilian death toll from the Bush administration’s invasion and occupation of Iraq at roughly 450,000. Passive information-gathering techniques like logging deaths in the Western press have produced estimates closer to 150,000, but such techniques have been proven to miss a lot of people. (To my knowledge no one was counting all the deaths reported in the some 200 Arabic-language Iraqi newspapers in the 2000s, so even the passive information-gathering was limited. And, the Wikileaks US military log of civilian deaths did not overlap very much with e.g. Iraq Body Count, so both of them were missing things the other caught.)
Of those extra deaths beyond those who would have died if the US had never invaded, some 270,000 died violently, with US troops responsible for about 90,000 civilian deaths and militias for another 90,000. Of those killed violently, 60 percent were shot, and 12 percent died from car bombs. Some 180,000 died because of the destruction of the public health infrastructure (lack of access to hospital treatment, e.g.).
Despite the horrific total, this estimate for 2003-2011 is smaller than the Lancet study of some years ago, which was done under wartime conditions. The authors admit, however, that the death toll could have been even higher; this total is a projection based on 2000 interviews.
The US/ UN sanctions on Iraq of the 1990s, which interdicted chlorine for much of that decade and so made water purification impossible, are estimated to have killed another 500,000 Iraqis, mainly children. (Infants and toddlers die easily from diarrhea caused by gastroenteritis, which causes fatal dehydration).
So the US polished off about a million Iraqis from 1991 through 2011, large numbers of them children. The Iraqi population in that period was roughly 25 million, so the US killed or created the conditions for the killing of 4% of the Iraqi population.
If Iraq had killed 4% of Americans, it would be 12 million people dead.
Iraq did not attack the United States. It did attack Iran in 1980, but by 1983 the US was an ally in Iraq’s war against Iran. It also attacked Kuwait, which it occupied quite bestially, but it was out by spring 1991. There was no casus belli or legitimate legal cause of war in 2003. Iraq’s main crime appears to have been to be an oil state not compliant with US demands.
All this is horrible enough. Even more horrible is that the US occupation of Iraq sparked a Sunni Arab insurgency, which is still vigorous. Insurgencies typically take 10 to 15 years to subside. Some 5000 Iraqi civilians have been killed so far this year by that insurgency. US occupation is the gift that goes on giving.
Despite the Bush administration’s violation of the UN charter and its war crimes in Iraq, none of its high officials has faced prosecution. Some of them even have the gall to come on television from time to time to urge more killing.
Posted in Iraq War | 74 Responses | Print |
74 Responses
It’s difficult to add much more to your post, Juan, but the lack of prosecutions goes a long way towards explaining the impunity with which we continue to act.
The increasing rate at which we create our enemies will extract a punishment, one way or the other…
We can thank Pelosi and Obama specifically and by name for that lack of prosecutions.
“Impeachment is off the table”. I would call it the Pelosi-CheneyBush Administration.
Lack of prosecutions and prosecutions of the wrong people: see veteran journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger’s article on the case of Dr. Rafil Dhafir. An Iraqi born Muslim doctor who is serving a 22-year sentence for his crime of compassion – sending food and medicine, through his charity Help the Needy, to starving Iraqi civilians during the brutal embargo on that country: link to newstatesman.com
For the full story of this case see: link to truth-out.org
Keith Alexander and his deputy at NSA retiring. Looks like Snowden kind of spoiled his love for the job.. That and the fact President Obama wants to ‘reform’ the place so it’s more user friendly.
I guess Iraq was even more successful than Rwanda at destroying lives and US soldiers.
I wonder what our good friend Madeleine Albright would have to say on this article.
In 1996,as US Ambassador to the United nations she was asked about the death of these 500,000 Iraqi children. Her reply was,’a very hard choice’, but all things considered,’we think the price is worth it’.
A nit to pick; did you correctly use the term genocide?
From The Holocaust Encyclopedia:
It defines genocide as:
[G]enocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Genocide or crimes against humanity?
And, to others, please understand the point.
That is no nit to pick. Diminishing the true meaning of genocide is very wrong. See my post from earlier this morning.
Isn’t that why we have grand juries ?
to choose the proper charge ?
They were well aware that the sanctions regime they were implementing would cause a humanitarian catastrophe. Once it was in place they knew absolutely that it was causing tremendous suffering and death, and they continued to enforce it anyway.
Intent be damned, if the predictable result of a policy is one of those consequences then it deserves the name.
“Intent be damned,:”
In point of fact, intent is central to the legal definition of genocide.
Words have meaning. They’re not just there to provide emotional oomph.
Yes, it’s certainly wrong, and I really don’t understand the need to use it when not only do the numbers speak for themselves, but the poster rightly criticizes others who do the same.
I would agree with careful use of terms. If our killing level in Iraq was genocide, then the Civil War was genocide against the Confederacy, considering that something like 10 per cent of all men in the Confederate States were killed.
If the Civil War wasn’t genocide, then the Iraq War 2.0 wasn’t genocide either.
Pulled this from wiki , bottom line is that US actions in Iraq might be considered a combination of many of these.
Genocide — under the Genocide Convention, the crime of genocide does not apply to the mass killing of political and social groups. Protection of political groups was eliminated from the UN resolution after a second vote, because many states, including Stalin’s USSR,[5] anticipated that clause to apply unneeded limitations to their right to suppress internal disturbances.[6]
Politicide — the term “politicide” is used to describe the killing of political or economic groups that would otherwise be covered by the Genocide Convention.[7] Manus I. Midlarsky uses the term “politicide” to describe an arc of mass killings from the western parts of the Soviet Union to China and Cambodia.[8] In his book The killing trap: genocide in the twentieth century Midlarsky raises similarities between the killings of Stalin and Pol Pot.[9]
Democide — R. J. Rummel coined the term “democide”, which includes genocide, politicide, and mass murder.[10] Helen Fein has termed the mass state killings in the Soviet Union and Cambodia as “genocide and democide.”[11] Frank Wayman and Atsushi Tago have shown the significance of terminology in that, depending on the use of democide (generalised state-sponsored killing) or politicide (eliminating groups who are politically opposed) as the criterion for inclusion in a data-set, statistical analyses seeking to establish a connection between mass killings can produce very different results, including the significance or otherwise of regime type.[page needed][12]
Crime against humanity — Jacques Semelin and Michael Mann[13] believe that “crime against humanity” is more appropriate than “genocide” or “politicide” when speaking of violence by Communist regimes.[14]
Classicide — Michael Mann has proposed the term “classicide” to mean the “intended mass killing of entire social classes”.[15]
Terror — Stephen Wheatcroft notes that, in the case of the Soviet Union, terms such as “the terror”, “the purges”, and “repression” (the latter mostly in common Russian) colloquially refer to the same events and he believes the most neutral terms are “repression” and “mass killings”.[4]
Mass killing — this term has been defined by Benjamin Valentino as “the intentional killing of a massive number of noncombatants”, where a “massive number” is defined as at least 50,000 intentional deaths over the course of five years or less.[16] He applies this definition to the cases of Stalin’s USSR, the PRC under Mao, and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, while admitting that mass killings on a smaller scale also appear to have been carried out by regimes in North Korea, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, and Africa.[17]
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I’d like to hear the opinion of an epidemiological statistician before I reject the Lancet study.
I think the US government’s sense of the importance of Iraqi suffering was summed up brilliantly by Tommy Franks:
“We don’t do body counts.”
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The US invasion of Iraq was motivated less by oil and more by a desire to protect Israel. Breaking up Middle Eastern states is part of an Israeli agenda (see Oded Yinon essay & clean break strategy).
If the US was a traditional resource motivated imperialist, why not invade Venezuela for its oil?
See also “The redirection” essay written in March 2007 and published in the New Yorker.
I agree that the “War for Oil” theory is weak, but focusing purely on Israel is too narrow.
The relocation of American bases out of Saudi Arabia was a primary purpose for the war, which has nothing to do with Israel.
The establishment of a client state has implications that go well beyond just protecting Israel.
The elimination of a hostile government was also important to the war’s architects.
The best way to describe the Iraq War is as a war to expand the American presence and influence in the region. Israel is certainly a part of that concept, as is oil, but neither tell the whole story.