September the 11th wore on, patience with the testimonies of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker wore thin. Petraeus presented a mélange of statistics meant to demonstrate that a surge-related reduction in violence in Iraq had occurred, and that political progress at the provincial level was in progress. On the same day, 79 Iraqis were murdered and 38 were wounded.

By the end of the previous day’s hearings, seven American soldiers lay dead and 11 had been injured in Baghdad. In what was not “an exceptionally violent day by the standards of Iraq,” reported the Independent, “a suicide bomb killed 10 and wounded scores near Mosul while 10 bodies were found in Baghdad. Three policemen were killed in clashes in Mosul, and a car bomb outside a hospital in the capital had exploded, killing two and wounding six.”

Much less upbeat than Petraeus and Crocker have been the National Intelligence Estimate, the Independent Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq, and the Government Accountability Office. Their pessimistic stock taking of the situation in Iraq was seconded by the Associated Press and the Iraq Body Count, and collated by TPMmuckraker.com.

Accordingly, with the exception of the months May and June, “2007 remains more deadly for Iraqis. In neither count did Iraq experience fewer than 1000 civilian casualties each month in 2007.” The Interior Ministry in Baghdad told columnist Patrick Cockburn that 1,011 people died violently in Iraq in August. “[B]ut an official at the ministry revealed to the US news agency McClatchy that the true figure is 2,890.”

Why even the Heritage Foundation’s assessment suggests that the surge’s claim to success is more serendipity than science. Writes Kirk A. Johnson: “Sectarian casualties are only a fraction of total civilian casualties, and such numbers lack meaning in ethnically or religiously homogeneous communities.” All in all, Coalition Forces “understate total civilian casualties,” because they generally respond to “major security incidents,” and “tend to miss smaller incidents.”

Nevertheless, some progress has been made: The Bush Administration hasn’t always counted civilian casualties in Iraq. In 2003, the Pentagon, assisted by the sainted Colin Powell, succinctly summed up its policy with respect to Iraqi “collateral damage”: “the department ‘has no plans’ to determine the total civilian casualty toll!” Going from discounting Iraqi civilian casualties to miscounting them must surely be counted as progress.

Iraqis are not feeling the upward “cumulative trajectory of political, economic and diplomatic developments,” to quote Crocker. A survey for the BBC, ABC News and Japan’s Television NHK indicates that “70 percent of Iraqis believe security has deteriorated in the area covered by the US military ‘surge.’ [N]early 60 percent see attacks on US-led forces as justified.” “While 88 percent of Sunnis say things are going badly in their lives, 54 percent of Shia think they are going well.”

No wonder the Shia are more chipper than the Sunni. Reduction is sectarian strife in Baghdad, previously a mixed area, is partly because Shiite death squads, often operating within the Maliki government, have expelled most Sunnis from Baghdad. According to the news agency McClatchy, the capital, once 65 percent Sunni, is now 75 percent Shiite.

The surge’s success is a function of brute force and barriers. Baghdad has been partitioned “by sectarian hatred and fear; by concrete walls and barbed wire.” Says Oxfam: “more than two million people are now internally displaced within Iraq, as savage new lines are drawn between communities who were not at war before.” That an additional 2.2 million refugees have fled Iraq may also help explain the alleged salutary effects of the surge: With up to 20,000 of the ungrateful beneficiaries of the surge fleeing weekly to Syria and Jordan, there are fewer victims to prey upon.

Moribund too is the political process. Sunni parties have withdrawn from the government, now dominated by Shiites and Kurds. Prime Minister Nouri Maliki has yet to repeal a law barring Sunnis from office. But even if Maliki were to comply with this benchmark, observes war correspondent Michael Ware, “there’s no Sunni who’s going to be able to go and work for a ministry controlled by the Badr militia or by the Jaish al Mahdi militia, like the Ministry of Interior or the Ministry of Health.” Sunnis will not survive there for long.

True, in the much touted al Anbar province, Sunni tribesmen have turned against al-Qaida, and are working with the US. But the Sunnis of al Anbar—an ethnically and religiously homogenous region—are also mortal enemies of the Maliki government. They consider the PM a minion of Tehran. For its part, the Maliki government views Anbaris as terrorists to be crushed. In al Anbar, the US is essentially bolstering Sunni militia to both combat al-Qaida and countervail the Iranian-influenced central government. In the words of the intrepid Ware, “these are anti-government forces that America is supporting against the government it created.” It’s a desperate and dangerous strategy, at best.

The futility of establishing the rule of law in a place which has no tradition of it, notwithstanding, even if some color is given to the claim that the surge is “working,” it has to be clear that force is a limited weapon against a cause with unlimited recruits. It can cut back the number of insurgents by killing lots, it cannot eliminate the causes fueling the insurgency—these are, predominantly, the religious animus between Shia and Sunni that dates back to AD 680, and the American occupation. Brute force will temporarily curtail the first, but will only inflame the reaction to the last.

© 2007 By Ilana Mercer

   WorldNetDaily.com

   September 14

The post The Petraeus-Crocker Crock appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

After their jerry-built justifications – 1. WMD. 2. Saddam and Osama sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G – fell apart, the neoconservatives had a problem. Why, exactly, did we invade Iraq? It seems we invaded not so much for us as for them. The Iraqi people, that is. How very altruistic. Saddam was a killer, and we put paid to him, delivering liberation in his absence. But you can’t make an omelet – or impose democracy on Muslims – without “collateral damage,” and the human toll of America’s invasion has risen so fast it is no surprise many Iraqis want Saddam back, despite the torture chambers George W. Bush never forgets to remind us about.

The neocons are always fighting World War II (although we’re now up to WWIV by Norman Podhoretz’s count) and Saddam, like Slobodan, was accused of “genocide.” Milosevic’s genocide was long ago exposed as another neocon whopper, but this claim served admirably as a pretext for aggression. Saddam is accused of having killed 250,000 or 500,000 or even a million of his own people over 35 years. Evidence to back up these numbers is somewhat lacking, and the numbers are especially suspect if they include those Iraqis that died while engaged in insurrection against Saddam. (Over a million Americans died because Lincoln put down an insurrection in order to preserve the Union. If we hold Lincoln to the same standard the neocons hold Saddam to, then Lincoln must be universally acknowledged as one of history’s greatest war criminals.)

Be that as it may, let us stipulate for the record that Saddam Hussein was a killer, a wicked man indeed. Yet even the invasion’s most avid supporters cannot but agree that Iraq was not a lawless society prior to our merciful faith-based intervention. In fact, it was rather orderly. Whatever one might say about the al-Tawhid and Jihad (Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s outfit), the Islamic Army, the Khaled bin al-Waleed corps, the Green Brigade, the Islamic Response, Ansar al-Sunna and the Black Banners – they did not have the run of Iraq. Saddam Hussein did. Saddam was a brutal dictator, but he did provide Iraq with one of the foundations of civilization: order.

As opposed to the chaos that now obtains. Both ideological terrorists and the “Ali Baba” element are running rampant because they can. Saddam Hussein’s monopoly over force might not have been to our liking, but it certainly prevented the rampant murder, robbery and assault that have made liberated Iraq a Hell on Earth – 18 months after “Mission Accomplished.”

If Iraqis have not piped up in protest – if they’ve failed to spread the “good news” about their country – it is because they are busy … busy dying at rates at least as high as those claimed by the Saddam = Hitler crowd.

And I am not referring here merely to the unofficial counts of the numbers of Iraqis killed directly by the invasion and its aftermath.

The Iraq Body Count estimates that between 14,000 and 16,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed; the Brookings Institute says between 10,000 to 27,000. Other reliable sources estimate that as many as 37,000 Iraqis have been killed by coalition forces. (Ah, but their deaths, though unfortunate, were unintentional, the neocons respond. Only idiots, however, could deny that the civilian carnage was inevitable and should have been foreseen well in advance, as it continues to be in the assault on Fallujah.)

The numbers noted above are bad enough, but they don’t tell the full horror story.

To fully put us in the picture, much as Picasso’s Guernica put us in the picture as to what happened in one Spanish town in 1937, we now have a study conducted by scientists from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and published by the Lancet.

In the final days of Saddam’s reign of terror, i.e., in the 15 months preceding the invasion, the primary causes of death in Iraq were natural: “heart attack, stroke and chronic illness.” Since Iraq became another neocon object lesson, the primary cause of death has been violence, according to the report.

Since March 2003, Iraqis have suffered from an excess of deaths, if you will. As Dr. Les Roberts, author of the study, told BBC News, “About 100,000 excess deaths, or more, have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.”

According to the study, “The relative risk, the risk of deaths from any cause, [my emphasis] was two-and-a-half times higher for Iraqi civilians after the 2003 invasion than in the preceding 15 months. But “the risk of death by violence [my emphasis] for civilians in Iraq is now 58 times higher than before the U.S.-led invasion.”

To be clear, American forces have not replaced protracted agonizing death by disease with mercifully quick, violent death. If this were the case, no doubt, neoconservatives might be touting the merits of their new Iraqi Health Care Plan.

©By ILANA MERCER
November 17, 2004
Antiwar.com

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The Reign of Terror during the French Revolution was also executed by popular demand. Assembly-line guillotining was voted on by the leadership, which, much like Bush and his grisly henchmen, claimed to represent the Common Will ~ilana

Murder with majority approval is still murder ~ilana

Remember the little Iraqi boy with the charred torso (Ali Ismail Abbas), whose arms were blown away by an American dumb bomb? Not that the news-cable operators would know it, but Baghdad’s hospitals, such that they are, are full of similar small children. Still, the networks have only just awakened to the optics of Ali; Ali has become the face of “collateral damage.” As such, he is the recipient of a very twisted message from American group thinkers. And who better to deliver the message to the docile boy than a CNN anchorwoman who has probably never had an independent thought in her carefully coiffed head?

While conducting an interview with the boy’s befuddled physician, the vapid woman repetitively inquired as to whether Ali had been told why he had been “disarmed.” The boy should be “helped” to understand that it was for a Greater Good that he has two bleeding stumps for arms, the woman doggedly insisted.

The American collectivist calculus is as coarse as that.

The math that goes into winning hearts and minds for an unprovoked, unjust war was even better encapsulated by Victor Davis Hanson, author of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power. Hanson correctly forecast that the civilian deaths would be in the low thousands. He told writer Michelle Goldberg of Salon that for him, the arithmetic was easy. “If you ask, ‘Do you really want to free Iraq at the price of 500,000 dead?’ people will say, ‘Of course not.’ If you ask, ‘Do you want to free Iraq at the price of 2,000 or 3,000?’ more people would say yes.”

This is how it works in the diseased system of democracy. Make no mistake; the president and his Revolutionary Assembly have gone by the polls. The Reign of Terror during the French Revolution was also executed by popular demand. Assembly-line guillotining was voted on by the leadership, which, much like Bush and his grisly henchmen, claimed to represent the Common Will.

Repulsed by majority rule, the American Founding Fathers sought to prevent a descent into democracy, but failed. Our own Revolutionary Assembly now gets to not-so-delicately calibrate who gives up his arms for which political expedients, and how many thousands like Ali luck out.

There are some minor snags, but democracies accommodate them just dandily. While all Americans have no option but to fund the Administration’s adventures, American soldiers, at least, are not conscripted against their will. They voluntarily undertook to level a small desert nation that had done them no harm.

On the other hand, Ali and other dead and disfigured Iraqis are involuntary conscripts—they get to partake of the wonders of American democracy only indirectly. Having been deprived of majority decision making in their own country, the mob in a far-away land has more than compensated them, by deciding their fate. And by golly what a splendid job this mob has done.

Ali will never be a policeman and will never get to hold the woman he loves, but he can rest assured that a distant democratic nation had his welfare in mind, a distant democratic nation that would never allow its leaders to sacrifice 2,000 or 3,000 unwitting American civilians for the so-called Common Good.

The Iraq Body Count, a project that arose because no official agency has committed to providing an account of the cost of this aggression to civilian lives, confirms that the minimum number of collateral disposables is, at the time of writing, 1,878, and the maximum 2,325. (It has since risen to 7918 and 9749 respectively.) The Project doesn’t take into account tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers who were forced to fight because of unprovoked American aggression.

The fighting has almost ceased, but not the death toll. Children are maimed or killed daily by cluster bomblets that litter their neighborhoods. Ali Mustapha, age four, for instance, was blinded when he picked up a cluster bomb near his Baghdad home and it blew up in his face. Iraqis are supposed to pick up the shards of their broken lives, but how can they in a country that has been destroyed, pummeled to the ground. Many neighborhoods are in ruins. The “coalition” disabled water purification plants, the electric grid, and the sewerage services, leaving most residents in Baghdad to battle disease and hunger while fending off bandits.

To survive, the vast majority of Iraqis relied on a steady supply of aid. At the rate the UN is re-establishing it since the end of fighting, it will be a very long time, if ever, before pre-war levels of aid are delivered once again. Most of Baghdad’s economic activity has come to a halt. Hospitals and clinics are closed or inoperable. Staff that isn’t afraid to return to work labors without power, water, medicines or food to save hundreds of people.

But even Americans understand that you cannot operate a respirator or perform surgery without electricity or generators; that you cannot save people in the absence of disinfectants, medicines, anesthetics, and oxygen. 

Balderdash about liberation and democracy notwithstanding, even the insular American public can understand that Iraqis whose lungs are airless, whose hearts are not beating, and whose eyes and limbs are missing are not free and will never be free.

Murder with majority approval is still murder.

©By ILANA MERCER
WorldNetDaily.com
April 23, 2003

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