A Heartfelt Apology to the Iraqi Dead and their Families

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Mon Jan-19-09 12:05 AM
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A Heartfelt Apology to the Iraqi Dead and their Families

There have probably been hundreds of tributes on DU to the American soldiers who died in the U.S invasion and occupation of Iraq. That�s good. Most of them voluntarily risked their lives in a cause that they believed was necessary for the protection of their country.

But I don�t recall seeing an apology or tribute to the Iraqi dead or their families, and I think that one is needed. I am a citizen of the United States � a nation that has killed more than a million Iraqis in the past six years, a tragedy of monumental proportions. This is by far the largest genocide of the 21st Century, and one of larger extent than all but a handful of genocides of the 20th Century. According to this site, it would rank as the 5th largest genocide in the world since the beginning of the 20th Century.

For those who doubt that the invasion and occupation of Iraq constitute genocide, I suggest reading David Model�s �State of Darkness � U.S. Complicity in Genocides Since 1945�, Chapter 10, pages 164-193. A summary of the rationale for calling this genocide is contained on page 191:

The 2003 war and military occupation is an irrefutable case of genocide� The targeted group is the people of Iraq, and by 2007, there is no question that U.S. actions destroyed large numbers of Iraqis, displaced a massive number of people, and further degraded the infrastructure and the capacity of any existing facilities to operate. Whether or not the George W. Bush administration deliberately intended to commit genocide is irrelevant, because the known and easily predictable consequences of their actions could only lead to a huge civilian toll.

Antonia Juhasz� book, �The Bush Agenda � Invading the World One Economy at a Time�, further makes the case for genocide, by showing in great detail what the purpose was of our invasion and occupation of Iraq. Suffice it to say that the purpose was not self-defense or any other reason that is not considered to be a major war crime under international law, according to the Charter of the United Nations. I summarize this issue in detail in my DU post, �The purpose of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq�.

Apologizing for U.S. atrocities is not unprecedented. Five U.S. states, including North Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey, Maryland, and Alabama, have apologized for the U.S. system of slavery that ended with the Union victory in our Civil War. The United States apologized in 1990 for its incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and in 1993 for its overthrow of the government of the sovereign nation of Hawaii in 1893.

There are, of course, many other things that the United States government should apologize for. The act of apologizing is a cleansing act, in that, by admitting wrong-doing, public recognition of the wrong-doing is greatly increased, and that substantially decreases the likelihood of its happening again. At this time, the most important atrocity that the United States could apologize for is its genocide in Iraq, since that is ongoing. That would greatly increase the likelihood of a timely and safe U.S. withdrawal. This post is my own personal apology, as a U.S. citizen.

Numbers of Iraqis killed in the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq

A 2007 poll of US residents asking how many Iraqis had died in the US war against and occupation of Iraq elicited an average response of less than 10,000. The degree of mass ignorance shown by that poll is astounding, since the actual number of Iraqis killed is about one hundred times greater than that. 10,000 dead Iraqis is only about twice the number of U.S. soldiers killed. That would suggest that our war against Iraq constitutes something approaching a fair fight, rather than the mass slaughter and genocide that it is.

We should not put most of the blame on the American people, however. They have been terribly misled by our so-called independent press, which is supposed to serve as a government watch-dog. A book titled �Censored 2009 � The Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007-08�, explains the reasons for the censoring of important stories by our corporate news media about as well as I�ve ever heard it explained:

The undercovered news stories in Censored 2009 reveal an increasingly desperate demand on the part of US corporations for conquest of international resources, as well as the increased reliance on military means to silence and eliminate dissent and achieve compliance. Our list this year shows more clearly than ever that the people�s Will is the main enemy to be violently reckoned with by corporate America. The term �terrorism� is quickly expanding to include even thoughts that run contrary to the US agenda of conquest. Each of this year�s Top 25 is a story of corptocracy � of life under a government of, for, and by large multinational corporations that increasingly diminish the value of life in the quest of profit.

So, what is the actual number of Iraqi deaths caused by the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq? The latest epidemiologic (scientific) study of the Iraqi dead, conducted in September 2007, estimated more than 1.2 million Iraqi deaths (about 5% of the total population of Iraq), with a margin of error ranging from more than 700 thousand to more than 1.4 million. Also important is the fact that this study showed about 80% of these deaths to be perpetrated by US troops. Furthermore, it is likely that the estimate of 1.2 million is an underestimate, because the interviewing of Iraqi families could not be conducted in the most violent regions of Iraq, including Kerbala, Anbar, and Arbil.

Many other estimates of Iraqi deaths due to the US invasion and occupation have been considerably lower, by orders of magnitude, than the 1.2 million noted above. So, which are to be believed? The important thing to consider in assessing the relative merits of the various estimates is that the lower estimates have been based simply on reported deaths, which is a notoriously inaccurate way of estimating event rates because it depends on the completeness of reporting, which typically grossly underestimates the actual number of events, since the vast majority of events tend to be unreported. Therefore, scientific epidemiologic surveys are the most accurate way of assessing numbers of deaths (in the absence of accurate individual records), and this is the method that results in an estimate of over 1.2 million excess (compared to pre-war) deaths in Iraq since the onset of war.

Reasons for the huge numbers of deaths in Iraq since 2003

The huge numbers of Iraqi deaths due to the US invasion and occupation is no accident. The claims of the Bush administration of �surgical� air strikes, and the care that it takes to avoid civilian casualties are no more true than its explanation for its purpose for invading Iraq in the first place. Michael Schwartz summarizes some of the reasons for huge civilian Iraqi death tolls:

The Bush administration military strategy in Iraq assures vast property destruction and lethality on a daily basis. Rules of engagement that require the approximately one thousand US patrols each day to respond to any hostile act with overwhelming firepower � small arms, artillery, and air power � guarantee that large numbers of civilians will suffer and die. But the mainstream media refuses to cover this mayhem, even after the Winter Soldier meetings in March 2008 featured over one hundred Iraq veterans who testified to their own participation in what they call �atrocity producing situations.� �Each patrol invades an average of thirty Iraqi homes a day, with the mission to interrogate, arrest, or kill suspects� Our soldiers are told not to take any chances�

The Iraq Veterans Against the War has made the brutality of the occupation their special activist province. The slaughter of the Iraqi people is the foundation of their demand for immediate and full withdrawal of US troops� Though there was no mainstream US media coverage of this event, the live streaming on Pacifica Radio and on the IVAW website reached a huge audience� with vivid descriptions of atrocities committed by the US war machine.

Maki-Al-Nazzal and Dahr Jamail explain that, although the American people are for the most part totally ignorant of all this, the Iraqi people know what�s going on:

It has been important, politically, for the Bush administration to claim that the situation in Iraq is improving. This claim has been assisted by a complicit corporate media. However, the 1.5 million Iraqis (refugees) in Syria and over 750,000 (Iraqi refugees) in Jordan will tell you differently. Otherwise, they would not remain outside of Iraq.

Apologies to the Iraqi dead

I realize that my apologies for these atrocities, as a single US citizen, won�t mean much to the families of the 1.2 million Iraqi dead. Nevertheless, it�s the best I can do for now. More than 38 years ago, U.S. Senator George McGovern (D-SD) expressed on the floor of the U.S. Senate sentiments similar to the way that I feel about this, but with respect to the Vietnam War. His speech was in response to Senators who spoke of the need for the US military to stay in Vietnam. As described by Rick Perlstein in his book �Nixonland�, those Senators spoke of �the necessity of resolve in the face of adversity, of national honor, of staying the course, of glory, of courage�� McGovern responded:

Every senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending fifty thousand young Americans to an early grave. This chamber reeks of blood� Do not talk about national honor, or courage. It does not take any courage at all for a congressman, or senator, or a president to wrap himself in the flag and say we are staying in Vietnam, because it is not our blood that is being shed. But we are responsible�

The same thing applies to today�s occupation of Iraq. It does not take the slightest bit of courage for our elected leaders to speak of �honor� or �courage� or �resolve� with respect to our need to keep our military in Iraq to continue the plunder and the genocide that have been going on there for the past nearly seven years. To the contrary, it would take a lot of courage to do the opposite.

I fervently hope that our new President reverses our course in Iraq as quickly as possible. But political pressures to continue on our present course there will be great � though it is very difficult for me, as an ordinary citizen, to understand the nature of the political pressures coming from the military industrial complex, the oil companies and other elites of the U.S. corporatocracy. The crux of the problem is described by Tricia Boreta in �Censored 2009�:

A simple change in the faces of (the American) empire in November 2008 will likely result in little more than another media orchestrated ruse. We need change that comes from more deeply knowing, spreading the truth about, and taking responsibility for the social and environmental realities that feed our consumptive American way of life. Please share the following stories. Support independent media and a free Internet. Become active in real change.

I don�t believe that the American people would tolerate what we�re doing to the Iraqi people if they knew about what our military is doing there, and why they�ve been ordered to do it. The key to stopping this is an informed citizenry. The corptocracy that exerts such immense control over our nation�s actions today will be greatly hampered once we attain a critical mass of truly informed American citizens.