NYC Letter: Tally Vultures Snug On The High Perch

The folks over at Iraq Body Count ("IBC") have ginned up a report decrying the killings of Iraqis.

'25,000 IRAQIS KILLED SINCE US INVASION'

July 20, 2005 (Scotsman) - About 25,000 people have been killed and 42,000 injured in Iraq by coalition forces, insurgents [see below] and criminal gangs since the start of the war in March 2003, according to an independent study published yesterday.

But IBC has not simply tallied the dead, they have distilled a high-toned message:

In its dossier, [IBC] said: "Leaders who commit troops to wars of intervention have seriously diminishing excuses for failing to weigh the human costs."

Well, this has the sound and form of something, but what? (Searching pause.) Ah. Yes. Sanctimony. In a soundbite.

We are curious as to the IBC's excuses for not noticing earlier the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in Saddam's Iraq.

"TINY BONES, FEMURS - THIGHBONES THE SIZE OF A MATCHSTICK"

The body of one woman was found still clutching a baby. The infant had been shot in the back of the head and the woman in the face.

"The youngest foetus [scil., a baby] we have was 18 to 20 foetal weeks," said US investigating anthropologist P Willey.

"Tiny bones, femurs - thighbones the size of a matchstick."

[Greg Kehoe, an American working with the Iraqi Special Tribunal] said that work to uncover graves around Iraq, where about 300,000 people are thought to have been killed during Saddam Hussein's regime, was slow as experienced European investigators were not taking part.

The Europeans, he said, were staying away as the evidence might be used eventually to put Saddam Hussein to death.

How much more impressive had the IBC found their moral voice sooner. But the IBC's quarrel has never been with Saddam. Were Saddam still in business, the IBC would not exist.

On its Web site's home page the IBC advertises itself as:

The worldwide update of reported civilian deaths in the Iraq war and occupation.

Behind this claim is IBC's inherent bias against Iraq's liberators and its flawed armchair methodology:

[The] numbers published on iraqbodycount.net don't distinguish between Iraqis killed by coalition forces or by insurgents [scil., terrorists, see below], arguing that they are all a result of the March 2003 invasion and the U.S.-led coalition is responsible for preventing [Iraqi deaths].

Small wonder that the British Foreign Office described the IBC's numbers as "misleading". The IBC's practices are approximate, and when, informed by its bias, the numbers are defective. Here is the CBC:

There are problems inherent in Iraq Body Count's methodology, not the least of which is the reliance on information gathered by the media. ... But people on the ground in Iraq can't keep count, either. ... Also, without the benefit of uniforms, the bodies of insurgents [scil., terrorists, see below] at the morgue can be difficult to distinguish from those of civilians.

Here are the IBC tallies:

Who was killed?
* 24,865 civilians were reported killed in the first two years.
* Women and children accounted for almost 20% of all civilian deaths.
* Baghdad alone recorded almost half of all deaths.

When did they die?
* 30% of civilian deaths occurred during the invasion phase before 1 May 2003.
* Post-invasion, the number of civilians killed was almost twice as high in year two (11,351) as in year one (6,215).

Who did the killing?
* US-led forces killed 37% of civilian victims.
* Anti-occupation forces/insurgents [scil., terrorists, see below] killed 9% of civilian victims.
* Post-invasion criminal violence accounted for 36% of all deaths.
* Killings by anti-occupation forces [scil., terrorists, see below], crime and unknown agents have shown a steady rise over the entire period.

Let us reflect for a moment on these numbers, because it only takes a moment to see their skew.

First the number of civilian deaths in year two are double the civilian deaths in year one, the year of major hostilities. Why would that be? Well, for one thing, once the media elevated terrorist activities into the romance of insurgency, terrorist activities stepped up.

Terrorist groups such as Ansar al-Sunna enlarged their missions "to attack both Iraqis and Coalition members, both military and civilian", as did al Qaeda’s "prince of Iraq" Abu Musab al Zarqawi. That IBC arrives at near parity between the coalition forces' numbers and the terrorist numbers suggests that the coalition is, if not targeting civilians outright, as indifferent as the terrorists to the casualties they cause. This is clearly absurd.

Second there is an obvious difference in kind between the coalition numbers and the terrorist numbers. Behind the terrorists' sanitizing rubric of "civilians" are the deliberate terrorist murders of women, children, babies. Not simply the innocent, but the defenseless innocent, the helpless innocent.

The terrorist numbers are the result of terrorist operations that target civilians. The coalition numbers are the collateral result of fighting the terrorist operations. The IBC treats the numbers not as equivalent outcomes but as equivalent actions. This is clearly malicious.

Third, the IBC exhibits no compunction about broadcasting its decontextualized numbers as hermetic conclusions. Not surprisingly in a project whose political mission is heaping blame on the American-led coalition, terrorism is not much of a story. This is clearly deceitful.

Then there is the fairy tale of an Iraqi insurgency. Insurgency (Latin, present participle of insurgere, to rise up) suggests an indigenous rebellion. One rises up from where one is, from amongst one's own. Many terrorists fighting in Iraq are foreign Al Qaeda jihadi. Within the Iraq terrorist community a battle is joined between native terrorists (kill only the kaffir) and the foreign Al Qaeda terrorists (kill everybody). Whereas some Iraqis may be a little put off by the embarrassment of foreigners liberating them, certainly none welcome being killed by foreign terrorsts:

For many Iraqi police, shutting down al Qaeda has become something of an obsession. Iraqi television and radio cover this battle with the terrorists intensely. The deaths of Iraqi civilians and security troops are given front page coverage, as are the operations against the terrorists. ... These kinds of attacks have made the terrorists very unpopular in Iraq, just as similar attacks in Egypt and Algeria (during the 1990s) turned the population against Islamic terrorists there. Tangible examples of that hatred are seen daily as more and more Iraqis report terrorist activity. This has led to more arrests of terrorists, and the capture of bomb making materials, workshops and the bomb makers themselves.

Finally, homegrown or no, a terrorist is a terrorist. They have signed no conventions, no treaties. They observe no common rules, no humane traditions in the conduct of war. They are not constrained by nice ideas. Mercy, compassion, fair play, good sportsmanship, baseline humanity and table manners -- all these things, which the press and groups like the IBC are punctilious about coalition forces observing, all these things are absent from the terrorist makeup.

They do not kill in defense or in a cause. Killing is not a means to attaining an objective. Killing is the objective. They kill in ways -- the most horrendous ways -- meant to advertise themselves as beyond your imagined protections, beyond your reasoned discourse, beyond your teariest petitions, beyond all that makes the human human. Their defining quality is evil. Their tool is terrorism.

You might think the IBC had noticed.

How much more impressive were the moral voice of the IBC an honest voice.

Posted by Damian at July 22, 2005 08:15 AM