[news] Missing In Action In Iraq - by Naomi Klien

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Missing in action in Iraq

Americans hear about their 500 dead soldiers. What about the 10,000
dead Iraqi civilians?

By NAOMI KLEIN
Globe & Mail - Wednesday, February 18, 2004 - Page A19

It was Mary Vargas, a 44-year-old engineer in Renton, Wash., who
carried U.S. therapy culture to its new zenith. Explaining why the war
in Iraq was no longer her top election issue, she told the Internet
magazine Salon that, "when they didn't find the weapons of mass
destruction, I felt I could also focus on other things. I got
validated."

Yes, that's right: war opposition as self-help. The end goal is not to
seek justice for the victims, or punishment for the aggressors, but
rather "validation" for the war's critics. Once validated, it is of
course time to reach for the talisman of self-help: "closure." In this
mindscape, Howard Dean's wild scream was not so much a gaffe as the
second of the five stages of grieving: anger. The scream was a moment of
uncontrolled release, a catharsis, allowing U.S. liberals to externalize
their rage and then move on, transferring their affections to more
appropriate candidates.

All of the front-runners in the Democratic race borrow the language of
pop therapy to discuss the war and the toll it has taken not on Iraq, a
country so absent from their campaigns it may as well be on another
planet, but on the American people themselves. To hear John Kerry, John
Edwards and Howard Dean tell it, the invasion was less a war of
aggression against a sovereign nation than a civil war within the United
States, a traumatic event that severed Americans from their faith in
politicians, from their rightful place in the world and from their tax
dollars.

"The price of unilateralism is too high and Americans are paying it --
in resources that could be used for health care, education and our
security here at home," Mr. Kerry said on Dec. 16. "We are paying that
price in respect lost around the world. And most importantly, that price
is paid in the lives of young Americans forced to shoulder the burden of
the mission alone."

Conspicuously absent from Mr. Kerry's tally are the lives of Iraqi
civilians lost as a direct result of the invasion. Even Mr. Dean, the
"anti-war candidate," regularly suffers from the same myopic math.
"There are now almost 400 people dead who wouldn't be dead if we hadn't
gone to war," he said in November. On Jan. 22, he put the total number
of losses at "500 soldiers and 2,200 wounded."

But on Feb. 8, while Mr. Kerry was in Virginia and Mr. Dean was in
Maine, both of them assuring voters that they were the aggrieved and
deceived victims of President George W. Bush's war, the number of Iraqi
civilians killed since the invasion reached as high as 10,000. That
number is the most authoritative estimate available, since the occupying
authorities in Iraq refuse to keep statistics on civilian deaths. It
comes from Iraq Body Count, a group of respected British and U.S.
academics who base their figures on cross-referenced reports from
journalists and human-rights groups in the field.

John Sloboda, co-founder of Iraq Body Count, told me that while the
passing of the grim 10,000 mark made the British papers and the BBC, it
received "scandalously little attention in the United States," including
from the leading Democratic candidates, even as they hammer Mr. Bush on
his faulty intelligence. "If the war was fought on false pretences," Mr.
Sloboda says, "that means that every death caused by the war is a death
on false pretences."

If that's the case, the most urgent question is not, "Who knew what
when?" but "Who owes what to whom?" In international law, countries that
wage wars of aggression must pay reparations as a penalty for their
crimes.

Yet in Iraq, this logic has been turned on its head. Not only are there
no penalties for an illegal war, there are prizes, with the United
States actively and openly rewarding itself with huge reconstruction
contracts. "Our people risked their lives. Coalition, friendly coalition
folks risked their lives and therefore, the contracting is going to
reflect that," Mr. Bush said.

When the reconstruction spending has attracted scrutiny, it has not
been over what is owed to Iraqis for their tremendous losses, but over
what is owed to American taxpayers. "This war profiteering is poison to
America, poison to Americans' faith in government and poison to our
allies' perception of our motives in Iraq," John Edwards said. True, but
he somehow failed to mention that it also poisons Iraqis -- not their
faith, or their perceptions, but their bodies.

Every dollar wasted on an overcharging, underperforming U.S. contractor
is a dinar not spent rebuilding Iraq's bombed-out water-treatment and
electricity plants. It is Iraqis, not U.S. taxpayers, who are forced to
drink typhoid- and cholera- infested water, and then to seek treatment
in hospitals still flooded with raw sewage, where the drug supply is
even more depleted than during the sanctions era.

There is currently no plan to compensate Iraqi civilians for deaths
caused by the willful destruction of their basic infrastructure, or as a
result of combat during the invasion. The occupying forces will only pay
compensation for "instances where soldiers have acted negligently or
wrongfully."

According to the latest estimates, U.S. troops have distributed roughly
$2-million in compensation for deaths, injuries and property
damage.That's less than the price of two of the 800 Tomahawk cruise
missiles launched during the war, and a third of what Halliburton admits
two of its employees accepted in bribes from a Kuwaiti contractor.

To talk about the price of the Iraq war strictly in terms of U.S.
casualties and tax dollars is an obscenity. Yes, Americans were lied to
by their politicians. Yes, they are owed answers. But the people of Iraq
are owed a great deal more, and that enormous debt belongs at the very
centre of any civilized debate about the war.

In the United States, a good start would be for the Democratic
candidates to acknowledge some collective responsibility. Mr. Bush may
have been the war's initiator, but in the language of self-help, he had
plenty of enablers.

They include Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards, among the 27 other Democratic
senators and 81 members of the House of Representatives who voted for
the resolution authorizing Mr. Bush to go to war. They also include
Howard Dean, who believed and repeated Mr. Bush's claims that Iraq had
weapons of mass destruction. They include, too, a credulous and
cheerleading press, which sold those false claims to an overly trusting
U.S. public, 76 per cent of whom supported the war, according to a CBS
poll released two days after the invasion began.

Why does this ancient history matter? Because so long as Mr. Bush's
opponents continue to cast themselves as the primary victims of his war,
the real victims will remain invisible, unable to make their claims for
justice. The focus will be on uncovering Mr. Bush's lies, a process
geared toward absolving those who believed them, not on compensating
those who died because of them.

If the war was wrong, then the United States, as the main aggressor,
must devote itself to making things right. Part of grief is guilt, when
the grieving party starts to wonder whether they did enough, if the loss
was somehow their fault, how they can make amends. Closure is supposed
to come only after that reckoning.

Naomi Klein is the author of No Logo and Fences and Windows.