News Intelligence Analysis
Spiritual Suicide
How Many Iraqis Must Die
to Satisfy Mr. Bush's and His Supporter's Thirst for Blood Atonement?
by Dennis Crews
A Yurica Report Columnist
September 10, 2004 – This week marks the grisly milestone of 1,000 American combat-related deaths since the beginning of the Iraq war last spring.
But there are other milestones. On September 9, Associated Press reported that a big ledger kept at Sheik Omar Clinic in Baghdad records 10,363 violent deaths in Baghdad and nearby towns since the war began. This includes Iraqi deaths from clashes with coalition forces, mortar attacks, car bombs, revenge killings and criminal violence in the wake of civil breakdown.
Similar records are not known for the other seventeen provinces of Iraq, which include flash points like Fallujah, Najaf, Tikrit and Ramadi. One can only extrapolate from the Baghdad number what the toll across Iraq actually may be.
In the summer of 2003 hundreds of volunteers from the Iraqi Freedom Party fanned across the country to discover the number of civilians killed in the war, which at that point was believed nearly over. They interviewed undertakers, hospital officials and ordinary people in every province they were able to safely navigate. According to Dr. Mohammed Al-Obaidi, general coordinator of the party, five weeks of effort yielded the following statistics: in fourteen provinces, covering most of the country except Iraqi Kurdistan, a total of 37,137 civilians had died (this number was broken down by province – the full report may be read here).
Whether one chooses to start with this number and calculate forward, or the more recent figure published today by Associated Press and multiply it by population figures, the point could not be more clear. The Iraq war has wreaked enormous human damage on a nation that committed no aggression against the United States.
Human rights groups believe Saddam Hussein's regime killed as many as 300,000 Iraqis over twenty-five years of his rule. This averages 12,000 per year. It is hard to imagine how Saddam could have killed so many people in a year and a half as this war has. If the war has taken nearly Saddam's national toll in Baghdad province alone, multiply that by the entire country and one can only imagine the size of the mass grave these dead might fill.
All this would be bad enough, but signs point to many thousands more deaths in months to come. There has been a fourfold increase in insurgent attacks since spring, and now lethal air strikes are being carried out against Fallujah. Bush administration spokesmen predict increasing violence as the date for Iraqi national elections approach. If partition of the country and civil war occur, as most experts outside the administration expect, the numbers we see now may be a trickle against the bloodshed yet to come.
Few of the Iraqi resistance fighters we are killing now are terrorists. They are nationalists defending their country against an occupier. We went to Iraq to defeat Saddam Hussein, and now that he is gone we are killing and maiming people wholesale who present no threat to America, except for the resentment and hatred our unwanted presence has kindled in their midst. We have drawn suicide bombers and terrorists from outside their borders. We have leveled square miles of their cities, killed countless of their brothers, sisters, children and grandparents, and shown contempt for their sacred places.
On June 5 when President Bush visited troops in Qatar, the Washington Post reported that Sgt. Maj. Dwight Brown told the assembly beforehand: "I don't want any damn catcalls from the crowd. We have the president of the United States coming to tell us what a great job we did destroying those heathen up in northern Iraq."
This is the essence of war – the dehumanization of the "other", those designated as the enemy. It is contempt of the very fact of humanity. Once the threshold of dehumanization has been crossed it becomes possible to commit any atrocity at all. Witness the outrage of Abu Ghraib and understand this is the same mentality that enabled the ovens of Auschwitz, the butchery in Rwanda, the present ruthless occupation of Palestinian territory and a thousand other atrocities through history.
Our soldiers have been placed in a moral no-man's land by the policies of this administration. We rushed to war on fabricated pretexts, and as a result find ourselves killing thousands of human beings who have committed no offense against us. We have smashed our way into someone else's house to pick a fight with strangers. Killing with artillery, helicopter gunships, suicide bombs or sanctions is no less murder than putting hands around someone's neck and depriving them of breath until they die.
The Iraq war is a war on ourselves and all the values we claim to stand for. The error of what we are doing cries out for correction and justice. The gravest danger America faces now comes not from any external threat. It is not terrorism we should fear the most – it is spiritual suicide, committed in a fever of zeal and self-righteousness.
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