Crippled Inside

With the United States having failed with its conquest of Iraq to discover any WMD, be welcomed as liberators, or make the country safer; the pro-war apologists have in retrospect latched onto another supposed justification for the war. This new post-war pretext (hereinafter: "The Postulate") has begun to pervade the public conciousness to the degree that it's leached into letters to the editor of major metropolitan dailies, radio talk shows, and, even, the comments form of this-here blog. It goes like this: since the United States killed fewer people during the conquest than Saddam would have killed over the long-term had he remained in power, the war was justified. Let us count the ways in which this newest (and admittedly specious) Postulate fails to cut the mustard.

First, supposing it were true. Does this then give the United States the right to unilaterally mount an illegal invasion? Should it not have acted through legal channels, or at the very least attempted to ascertain whether Saddam's victims desired an American liberation?

Or if it does give us the right to act illegally and without consulting those we intend to liberate, some more questions follow.

Since the United States is imbued with the authority (and, by implication, is morally obligated to exercise this authority) to overturn murderous dictatorial regimes, why did it wait until now before taking out Saddam? Why doesn't it take out the Israeli regime, whose occupation of Palestine has created a Hell on Earth the equal to or probably surpassing Saddam's terrors? Why doesn't it take out the Chinese regime? Why doesn't it take out the Colombian and Turkish regimes? Why doesn't it take out the Saudi and Egyptian regimes? And if, being uniquely capable of processing these matters, it either fails to do so or fails to do so in a timely manner, then should it not be held culpable for its neglect?

On the other hand, if we are to apply the principle uniformly, should not the United States be subject to a punitive bombing campaign to discontinue the misery bought in its name? Approximately 30,000 children per day are killed by starvation and preventable disease largely wrought by IMF-mandated austerity programmes. As the IMF and World Bank are controlled by the United States (to such extent that their programmes are known as the "Washington Consensus"), and by the logic at hand, should not the world undertake a campaign of bombing the United States, being careful to kill only 29,999 children per day, until the U.S. calls off the IMF dogs?

Moving along, we'll recognise that far from "taking out" the above-mentioned regimes, the United States actively supports them -- as it does so many tyrannical regimes. Not only diplomatically and economically, either (though this would be bad enough). The United States is by a wide margin the leading arms dealer in the world -- the vast majority of these arms being shipped off to human rights violators -- and the flow of arms to rights violators has increased since September 11th. A military bombardment and occupation of the United States, resulting in the cessation of these arms flows, would surely greatly lower the level of worldwide suffering -- so would it be thereby justified?

But if The Postulate were true, would we not have expected it to be the Bush Administration's first-rank argument, rather than the latest in a long line of failed attempts to secure world acquiescence to its cause? Would we not have expected 90% of the world's population -- including most vociferously the inhabitants of the region, those who had studied (and would be tasked with picking up after) the likely consequences of war, and those who had witnessed Saddam's depredations first-hand -- to have been in favour of the invasion? Would we not have expected the world's people to have queued up to lend a hand, rather than washing their hands of the United States' deeds?

That the opposite was (and remains) true in these cases should at least give us pause. But let's take a cursory look at the numbers.

First, what should we have expected, should Saddam have remained in power? Should we have expected the summary executions of thousands of people and displacement of hundreds of thousands, as in 1989-90; or the summary executions of scores of people, as in 2002? A grisly, barbarous, wholly unacceptable record either way. But since we're dealing in comparison, the difference should matter. And since we're dealing with the future, the latest behaviour should give us the most accurate expectation of future behaviour. (We might also want, for shits 'n' giggles, to consider the implications of the difference in light of the attenuation of U.S. support of the regime -- or the correlation of U.S. military aid with human rights violations worldwide.)

Keeping this in mind as a baseline, what are the consequences of the United States' war? While we'll never know the precise toll, we do know that a website tracking the civilian death count figures somewhere in the neighbourhood of 2,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed directly -- an all-the-more shocking total given the Bush and Blair Administrations' detestably languid reactions to them. Nobody seems to know how many Iraqi soldiers have been killed, but it surely numbers well into the thousands (the Pentagon has boasted of killing two-to-three thousand on a single day, and apparently thousands are still "missing"), while the onslaught succeeded in maiming and disfiguring thousands upon thousands more civilians and soldiers.

But if the United States needs to forcibly put down the disquieted masses daily telling it to get out of Iraq before "we force you out", we may need to add yet hundreds or thousands more to the total. If a war against the U.S. occupation breaks out, the toll could be especially monstrous. (Five million Indochinese and up to 1.5 million Algerians were killed in their anti-colonial struggles, for example.)

While we don't yet know how many Iraqis will have been directly murdered by the American adventure, so too do we not know how many will have been indirectly murdered. But here again the toll will be sobering at best, but more likely than not terribly nauseating. The country is on the verge of humanitarian collapse, with "hindered" aid agencies begging for help in averting a catastrophe. Supplies of food and clean water are desperately low, and Baghdad's mightily struggling hospitals are "preparing for a possible outbreak of cholera and typhoid". All while the U.S. is blocking UN aid workers from flying into the country, and following the United States' having allowed hospitals to be burned and looted while the Marines were busy protecting the oil ministry.

So by this reckoning, the at least thousands, but likely into the tens of thousands and possibly even into the hundreds of thousands (mostly children) killed in an initial "liberatory" orgy of violence and its immediate aftermath are to be set off against scores killed per year had Saddam remained in power and been left to his own devices. In order for The Postulate to "work", in other words, we would need to assume a return to something like Iraq's pre-Gulf War standard of living and an angelic government in place in Iraq for the whole of the many decades of angelic comportment it would take for the numbers of annual lives "saved" to cumulatively "catch up" with the number of dead bodies created in the initial "investment" -- after which time, The Superbrain's war would begin "paying off" for the brave people of Iraq.

But can we expect an angelic government in place in Iraq? Can we name any other country in which a U.S. or U.S.-orchestrated change-of-government resulted in an angelic (or even improved) polity, especially with regards to human rights? Certainly not Iraq, where Western intervention brought Saddam to power in the first place, nor Afghanistan, where the overthrow of the Taliban brought the despicable "Northern Alliance" back into power. What about Vietnam, or Chile, or Haiti, or Indonesia, or Iran, or Nicaragua, or the Congo, or Brasil, or East Timor? Can we think of even one case?

Are we surprised, then, that the United States is turning to former Ba'ath party officials, "screened" members of Saddam's police force, and "dozens of retired Iraqi military leaders" to help restore order in Iraq? "Saddamismo without Saddam", we might call it. A path trod before in Germany and Japan, among other places: if the consequences of "democracy" aren't to our liking, put the fascists back into power. Are we surprised that the United States has blocked (on the grounds that it would be "illogical") a proposed UN investigation of human rights abuses in post-Saddam Iraq?

At any rate, even if an angelic government were to emerge, and remain in place in perpetuity, the war still wouldn't have saved lives. For to the annual toll also must be added the health and environmental effects of radiological muntions and cluster bombs, which all by themselves will kill many more people per year than would have Saddam's regime. For how long? Well, thirty years later Indochinese peasants are still being blown up by unexploded ordnance (primarily cluster bombs) to the tune of hundreds per year, and Depleted Uranium has a radioactive half-life of 4.5 billion years...

Clearly, then, this Postulate is as sopping wet as were its predecessors. Back to the drawing board.

Incidentally, how to have dealt with Saddam, then? We can't undo having brought him into power in the first place, having supported him through the period of his worst crimes, having destroyed the regime's admirable social welfare gains which had made Iraq's education and public health systems the finest in the region prior to the first Gulf War, having aided Saddam in putting down the popular uprising following the first war, or having strengthened Saddam's grip over the populace with the unconscionable sanctions regime. (We could consider reparations, though...) But UN Resolution 687 (which the Bush Administration is so fond of referencing) gives a good guide-post: region-wide disarmament. Stop flooding arms into the region, and let the people of the region (niggers though they be) run their own affairs. If, as in South Africa (another of the United States' close friends deplored by the rest of the world -- "civilised" and "not"), it were judged by the world community that sanctions not aimed at a country's people but at its government would be an appropriate response to internal repression, then, this too would be in order. So far as banned weapons programmes are concerned: let he without sin lob the first missile. Is it really so difficult to practice what we preach?

Alas, yes. Which is why, whatever the future does hold for Iraq, it's unlikely to be anything resembling sweetness and light -- unless American citizens do something about it. Try as they might, that's one thing the splenetic war-mongers can't hide.

Posted by Eddie Tews at April 23, 2003 06:25 PM