No one knows exactly how many Iraqi civilians have died from the
war’s violence since the invasion of their country. The new study from
public health researchers at Johns Hopkins University estimates that
the number of those deaths is around 601,000, while saying the actual
total could be somewhere between 426,369 and 793,663. Such wartime
figures can’t be precise, but the meaning is clear: The invasion of
Iraq has led to ongoing carnage on a massive scale.
While we stare at numbers that do nothing to convey the suffering
and anguish of the war in Iraq, we might want to ask: How could we
correlate the horrific realities with the evasive discussions that
proliferated in U.S. news media during the lead-up to the invasion?
In mid-November 2002 -- four months before the invasion began -- a
report surfaced from health professionals with the Medact organization
and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. “The
avowed U.S. aim of regime change means any new conflict will be much
more intense and destructive than the [1991] Gulf War,” they warned,
“and will involve more deadly weapons developed in the interim.”
At the time, journalists routinely gave short shrift to that
report -- treating it as alarmist and unworthy of much attention. The
report found that “credible estimates of the total possible deaths on
all sides during the conflict and the following three months range from
48,000 to over 260,000. Civil war within Iraq could add another 20,000
deaths. Additional later deaths from postwar adverse health effects
would reach 200,000. ... In all scenarios the majority of casualties
will be civilians.”
During a live TV debate on Dec. 3, 2002, I cited the report’s
estimates of the bloodshed ahead and then asked: “What kind of message
is that from the Bush administration against terrorism and against
violence for political ends?”
CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer turned to the other guest: “Jonah
Goldberg, do you accept that assumption in that report on these huge
casualties, including a lot of children, if there were an effort to go
forward with so-called regime change in Baghdad?”
Goldberg, a pundit with National Review Online, replied: “Frankly,
I don’t. I mean, I haven’t looked at the exact report, and I think that
there are a lot of groups out there that inflate a lot of these numbers
precisely because they’re against the war no matter what. We certainly
heard a lot of that around on the table last time. Before the Gulf War,
we were told there were going to be tens of thousands of casualties.”
He was playing off a common U.S. media pretense that the
bombardment of Iraq in early 1991 had minimal negative effects. Yet a
fleeting Associated Press story reported on March 22, 1991, that the
six-week war had killed an estimated 100,000 Iraqi people -- a figure
that came from official U.S. military sources.
American news outlets tend to be rather cavalier about the
suffering at the other end of the Pentagon’s missiles, bombs and
bullets. And there’s a strong tendency to brand documented concerns as
unfounded speculation -- a media reflex that suits war-crazed
presidents just fine.
In his major speech on March 17, 2003, just before the invasion,
President Bush used boilerplate rhetoric: “Many Iraqis can hear me
tonight in a translated radio broadcast, and I have a message for them:
If we must begin a military campaign, it will be directed against the
lawless men who rule your country and not against you.”
The day after that speech, Christopher Hitchens came out with an
essay providing similar niceties. He wrote that “the Defense Department
has evolved highly selective and accurate munitions that can sharply
reduce the need to take or receive casualties. The predictions of
widespread mayhem turned out to be false last time -- when the weapons
[in the Gulf War] were nothing like so accurate.”
In fact, Hitchens asserted, “it can now be proposed as a practical
matter that one is able to fight against a regime and not a people or a
nation.”
As a practical matter, journalism like that ends up putting
cosmetics on death.
______________________________
The paperback edition of Norman Solomon’s latest book, War Made Easy:
How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, was published
this summer. For information, go to:
www.warmadeeasy.com
