Empire Notes

Nine days ago was the second anniversary of the war on Iraq – although, competing with both the Michael Jackson trial and the Terry Schiavo case, Iraq couldn’t get much airtime. 12 days from now will be the second anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime; perhaps by then Jen and Brad’s divorce wrangling will be the hot story.

Even those of us who focus like a laser beam on Iraq often end up analyzing the latest developments in the news cycle and not talking about the larger history. Anniversaries are a good time to look at the big picture.

In polls, Americans regularly estimate that U.S. forces killed roughly 100,000 Vietnamese in the Vietnam War. This is like estimating that 100 people were killed on 9/11 or that 200,000 Jews were killed by the Nazis. It is vitally important to have an accurate estimate of the damage done to Iraqis by U.S. policy.

Iraq was a devastated society even before this invasion. In the Gulf War, where U.S. forces probably killed about 100,000 Iraqis, most of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure, including electrical power, was deliberately targeted and destroyed. Afterward, Iraq suffered 12 years of sanctions, which made it difficult to impossible for Iraq to rebuild; most Iraqis lost access to basic medicines, educational materials, clean water, and other essentials of life. By the March 2003 invasion, these U.S. policies had created a country and a society, in collapse.

Iraq is the only country in the world whose literacy rate decreased in the 1990’s. Roughly a quarter of children were malnourished in a country where childhood obesity had been a serious problem. According to the best estimates, during the sanctions Iraqis suffered an excess mortality due to all causes of at least 600,000 children under the age of five, in addition to hundreds of thousands of older people. This was excess not as compared with peacetime, but over the baseline of the devastating Iran-Iraq war of the 1980’s.

Saddam’s government is often blamed for most of these deaths by sanction, but the record of the occupation belies that. Those of us who worked for years on the sanctions thought there was nothing worse; in fact, it turns out that the occupation kills in larger numbers than the combination of the sanctions and Saddam’s brutality.

The results are starting to come in. A study conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins, Columbia, and Mustansiriyah University concluded that by September 2004 the excess mortality after the regime change was 98,000. The margin of error was high, but given the methodology, it was probably an underestimate. This excess, remarkably, is with respect to a baseline, not of normal life, but of Saddam’s rule and the sanctions in 2002 and 2003, where excess mortality was already probably at least 50,000 per year. All of this was before the horrific November assault on Fallujah. To date, excess mortality during the occupation compared to an imaginary baseline of Iraqi normalcy, something they haven’t seen since the 1970’s, is likely well over 200,000.

About 30-40,000 of those, half fighters and half civilians, were killed directly by U.S. forces. The rest of the excess mortality is due to other causes, including crime, resistance attacks, enforced unemployment, a further collapse in health care, and lack of reconstruction – all of which can be laid at the door of U.S. policy.

This depressing reality is almost never faced in the mainstream media. Just as in Vietnam, we get barraged with military propaganda that things are “turning the corner.” Barbara Boxer, recently returned from Iraq, is optimistic because, she says, “we got a very, very upbeat report” from top U.S. military officials in Iraq.

In fact, things are getting worse. Violence, both by Iraqis and by foreign fighters, continues, and the death toll for Iraqis is increasing. Those foreign fighters include Syrians and Yemenis, but mostly they are Americans and British, who have killed several thousand in the last assault on Fallujah alone and hundreds in continuing operations like “River Blitz” in al-Anbar province afterward.

Gas lines have been getting longer. Electricity, once at marginally above prewar levels, is now significantly below; Baghdad is getting about 7 hours a day. Reconstruction is almost nonexistent; only $2 billion of the $18.4 billion allocated have been spent, and most of that these days is spent on “security,” i.e., private mercenaries, and not on the Iraqi people. Unemployment is estimated at anywhere from 30 to 60 percent.

In Iraq last April, not only Sunni Arabs but many Shi’a told me that the occupation was worse than Saddam Hussein – and things are even worse now. Somehow, the Bush administration has accomplished the difficult feat of creating a state in Iraq worse than the combination of Saddam and the sanctions. An election wrested unwillingly from that same administration is not enough to make up for that.

 Audio file