Murder in Baghdad

Gee, sounds like Washington, DC., NY city, Los Angeles and Detroit. But several hundred less than died under Saddam. What is the point of this story?

It’s good to see liberals in favour of cracking down on crime. They didn’t quite have this attitude last week in the UK when Blunket unveiled his measures to crack down on yob Britain, but at least it could be said you are in favour of this type of thing when it comes to Baghdad. Well done.

As you may be aware, there is a war going on in Iraq at present, and the brave Iraqi police are the main targets of the terrorists who are trying to prevent any chance of democracy through murdering as many people as they can. One might expect crime to go up under these circumstances – it’s quite obvious, really; just as it’s obvious that child malnutrition will go up when terrorists are killing aid workers and blowing up the infrastructure. But don’t worry; we will crush the f**kers. As well as giving Iraq the best damn public services they ever had, they will also enjoy the benefits of a decent police force, that while keeps crime to a minimum, doesn’t need to use electric wires, pull out nails or breaks fingers, or use other well known torture type activity, to extract confessions.

Having said that, reports coming out of Falluja during the fantastically successful operation that has taken place there over recent weeks, said that insurgent prisoners begged to be in the custody of US troops, rather than Iraqi police, so perhaps there is still a bit of training to be done. But make no mistake, this training is indeed going on. It’s an old record, I know, but everyday in Iraq teachers are being trained, police are being taught human rights; and great progress is being made. This is a great cause which deserves our unreserved support.

But don’t worry; we will crush the f**kers.

Have you ever given a moment’s thought to how you, your kin or your community would react if you were the _targets_ of a strategy like this at the hands of an occupying army? Do you think you’d just roll over?

former special forces from Saddam’s days

hmm. these must be the ‘former regime elements’ we hear so much about.

Have you ever given a moment’s thought to how you, your kin or your community would react if you were the targets of a strategy like this at the hands of an occupying army? Do you think you’d just roll over?

Of course he would. The warbloggers’s fundamental trait of character isn’t belligerence, but obsequiousness to power. Rob and his ilk would be collaborators, and wonder why the rest of us idiots were determined to make life difficult for everyone.

Martin,

I find your hypocrisy appalling. Briton’s too are crying out for tough law and order policies; not just Iraqis. Yet you choose to abandon your comrades in Brixton and else where, in their hour of need, in favour of cheap Blunkett bashing – shameless behaviour.

addi,

It stands to reason that former special forces troops would make better soldiers than someone who was a milk man up until six months ago. As long as these soldiers haven’t been involved in any crimes against the Iraqi people, then I see no problem with them fighting on behalf of the UN back legal Iraqi government. In fact, it’s now pretty much a consensus view that the biggest mistake the coalition made upon arriving in Iraq was to disband the entire Iraqi army, causing chaos.

However, if these special forces troops don’t want to fight for freedom, they can always go to Falluja and end up in a mass grave with all the other terrorists.

ogged,

I think it unlikely that I would be a collaborator. It’s one of life’s little ironies that the people who most vigorously oppose the war in Britain would most likely be an Iraqi that is working with the Americans to create some sort of democracy; even more so than the pro war gang, who although would be intelligent enough to fight against the fascist and Islamist forces – two things they deplore (the scenario is very different to the facile comparisons with the Nazi occupation of France we often hear), they would still feel a bit compromised by their strong feelings of patriotism. You would have no such problems.

Incidentally, the whole patriotism thing is why Americans understand the Iraqi state of mind often better than Europeans, I find. Americans know that a bit of patriotic hostility and bluster is perfectly natural, and doesn’t mean they don’t know deep down that they need them.

The Lancet report wins further support. As the bad news piles up, those who supported the war on humanitarian grounds find themselves in a bind. It becomes harder to argue that Iraqis were suffering more prior to the invasion than they are now. The usual response is to project a brighter future – a bit like a company whose sales forecasts get more optimistic as the cash flow dries up.

Orwell called it catastrophic gradualism. When you admonish a revolutionary about the bloodshed he is causing, he tells you that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. When you ask where’s the omelette, he tells you Rome wasn’t built in a day.

I’m sure Iraqis could have done without a couple of years of chaos before they were able to really enjoy the full benefits of their free press; freedom of expression, and the ridding of all the aspects of their fascist totalitarian system. But don’t think for a minute that the current problems somehow invalidate the war.

The antis may well have a lot of fun with the problems; but just as carpet bombed Germany, or nuked Japan, weren’t looking like the beacons of democracy they are today, for a considerable time after the war, a bit of chaos and high crimes in Baghdad (which, btw, is not representative of the situation all over Iraq) while the police and government are being trained and elected, won’t stop generations of Iraqis benefiting from this action.

Perhaps it’s the here today, gone tomorrow, culture we now have in the west, where people are unable to concentrate on anything for too long, and everything must happen yesterday, that is responsible for this short term view. But you must understand that this is very much a long game; to pass judgement before even the first round of elections have been held, only 19 months out, is of course an absurdity.

There’s a war going on in Iraq. What exactly are you expecting, that this would be the first war in history run so well that life was actually better in the war zone during the war, rather than just some time afterwards?

You know rob, by your standards we can justify any horror or atrocity by saying that in 50 years it will look different. Seeing as how the victor writes the history, you might even be correct from a history-books standpoint. But by your reckoning, I could go out and kill someone tomorrow and say “Well, they were going to blow up a school in three days. History will vindicate me.” When asked by, say, the authorities, what evidence I have of the random person’s school blowing-up plot, I can say that the really conclusive convincing evidence is classified, but the fact that the random person had a bag of fireworks in their house and a box of matches clearly indicates a program for blowing up schools.

Perhaps it’s the here today, gone tomorrow, culture we now have in the west, where people are unable to concentrate on anything for too long, and everything must happen yesterday, that is responsible for this short term view. But you must understand that this is very much a long game

Rob, you’re talking to old lefties here. We remember all these windy statements from the days of apologia for Communism. They sounded pretty thin then, and they haven’t improved with age.

Kevin O’D-
One extremely plausible answer is that the current situation was the plan. Is the plan. Because whether anyone wants to admit it or not, Fallujah has been leveled. There is to be sure a bitter anger among those Iraqis not catatonic with grief and despair, one imagines much like the anger and bitterness of the Irish as England began its period of exploitative rule there, some few hundred years ago. All you have to do is admit that the guiding hand here is not connected to a human heart, that it’s a P.R. concern, not a moral, certainly not a legal one. That the deaths of Iraqi civilians – whether men, women, or children – are not collateral but integral. That the goal from the beginning was an impotent, fragmented, decentralized, militarily dependent, economically quadriplegic Iraq.
Mission Accomplished.

Don’t we have the same level of culpability for these deaths in Baghdad as we did for the deaths that occurred under Saddam’s regime? We could stop both, after all.

Matt W: would you explain how your position–opposition to the war, thus leaving Saddam in power–isn’t subject to the “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” line? I mean, Saddam was in the habit of pretty regularly breaking eggs, so to speak, wasn’t he?

Rob, you’re talking to old lefties here. We remember all these windy statements from the days of apologia for Communism. They sounded pretty thin then, and they haven’t improved with age.

“Who can read Bob Woodward’s ‘Plan of Attack’ and not find his jaw dropping at the fact that from the very beginning, in late 2001, none of the civilian leadership, not Rice, not Powell, not Tenet, not the president, asked where the plan for the occupation phase was?”

I read plan of attack and wasn’t amazed by that. In 2001 they were still in the process of whipping the Taliban (and look how that turned out), so I wouldn’t expect them to be going through all the details at that stage. My impression was not that the problem was especially that they hadn’t gone through the planning thoroughly enough, but rather that they kept taken the plan off the shelf and taking bits out as confidence grew. Anyhow, I believe that Michael Ignatieff quote was from last April – a particularly low point in this whole venture. The Marines had just failed to re-conquer Falluja; Al Sadr’s boys had taken much of the south, and it appeared that nobody had any idea what to do next. But now, with a popular government in place since June, a successful operation to liberate Falluja having just taken place; Al Qaeda on the run, and elections – which are supported by the majority of Iraqis – only few months away, Ignatieff must surely be eating those words.

vernaculo,

you demonstrate the central dilemma for a lot of the war critics. You are so consumed by this notion of ‘the power’, that controls absolutely everything, and that we have to be against for being against’s sake. And of course, those who support ‘the power’ have to either have been corrupted by it, or are trying to appease it for fear of some strange thing happening to them (maybe they’ll ban smoking if I don’t do what they say?) – instead of the reality that it many instances they are actually egging the power on, and are even ahead of it (ahem) – that you simply can’t bring yourself to contemplate the idea that the power could ever fuck anything up. It would screw up too many other conspiracy theories if it were true; thus all the chaos in Iraq over the past year has to be put down to some sort of crazy, meticulously planned and choreographed, strategy designed to help Bush win re-election. There are more of you around than one might presume.

“And considering their success in seizing power and looting, incompetancy is less plausible.”

Hm, then considering that I’m fabulously competent at designing extrusion dies, I should have no trouble at all getting elected to the Senate… Since people who are competent at one thing are automatically presumed to be competent at ALL things, right?

Though I think your criteria for competence in warfare are rather wonky anyway. Judging before the task is finished, and counting anything short of overwhelming success as a failure, and all.

>>> When you admonish a revolutionary about the bloodshed he is causing, he tells you that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. When you ask where’s the omelette, he tells you Rome wasn’t built in a day.

– Yes, Saddam and his fellow Baathists did crush more than a few eggs, as thomas pointed out in a comment upthread. Likewise with the islamo totalitarians who have infested the Middle East and have projected their omelette-making around the world. Their long term “Rome” is offered as justification for bloodletting of innocents. Resist them or embrace them, there really is no middle ground for them.

– Frankly the above quotation and other posted cliches here are like screams of defeatism when applied to the war against islamo totalitarians. It’s hard, so stop trying. There is no instant and total victory, so cut and run. In fact the intellectualized defeatism expressed is one that gloats with reports of difficulties in Iraq and Afghanistan.

-It ain’t a schoolchild’s debate about the moment; it is a war that must be won. Both sides in this war know that it is being fought to be won long term.

-The Saddam regime released thousands of violent criminals prior to the imminent invasion. That just might have a little something to do with that portion of the death toll not attributable to military actions.

The administration didn’t seize power, Barry. They won an election. If you have trouble grasping that rather obvious fact, why should I take you seriously on anything else?

brett bellmore, yeah they won one election, and more than one, but in fact their power is not restricted to those defined in laws. You are forgetting that they had more power before any election than many elected, or not, governments in the world. And, btw, “seize the power” is perfectly applicable to describe what an election winner does.

http://www.yourdictionary.com/ahd/s/s0221800.html
DSW

Thomas wrote:
Don’t we have the same level of culpability for these deaths in Baghdad as we did for the deaths that occurred under Saddam’s regime? We could stop both, after all.

Well–we could have stopped the genocide in Darfur, couldn’t we, at least if we hadn’t tied up our whole army in Iraq? So by this standard, we’re responsible for the genocide in Darfur–specifically, you warmongers who called for the invasion of Iraq and are now trying to justify it on humanitarian grounds, while throwing up your hands at a much worse crisis elsewhere, are responsible for the genocide in Darfur.

I think this is a nonsensical way to assign responsibility myself–there’s a difference between recognizing that you have no satisfactory way to stop some bad things and causing some bad thing as the foieseeable consequence of a policy you choose to pursue–but if you’re going to use the warblogger’s standard, you have to convict yourself of genocide.

Well, that is all very predictable stuff, using Iraqis to pursue your own little political vendettas against American politicians. Unable to take your eyes away from manufacturing self-righteous “evidence” for your ideological attacks, you haven’t bothered to find out what might be happening in the southern Marshes (though bird-watchers have, and they have been good enough to thank Japan for the efforts being made by them), and the last thing you want to do is have to face what the Kurds in the North might say (though I don’t underestimate your ability to slant a story about either to suit your own ends). Let me say it clearly – the southern marshes might now survive, be a home agains to their people and to wonderfully diverse wildlife. One more year of Saddam would have been the end. No war was waged for this, but it is an outcome, and a very fine one.

“city’s descent into a Hobbesian world of crime and brutality”

It does not seem correct to refer to this as a Hobbesian world. The famous quote “Life in an unregulated state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish,and short.” is Hobbes’s description of the state of nature not the world that he was suggesting – in fact pre-invasion one could argue that Iraq was Hobbsian as there was a single leader, a leviathan, that stood outside morality, so the place has moved has moved away from a Hobbsian state not towards one.

Matt, you say that “there’s a difference between recognizing that you have no satisfactory way to stop some bad things and causing some bad thing as the foieseeable consequence of a policy you choose to pursue.”

It seems to me that you’re just relying on an action/omission distinction, and that’s not a distinction I’d expect you to find persuasive in any other context. (Unless your “no satisfactory way” test is meant to suggest impossibility–but I don’t think that’s what you mean.)

It’s interesting that when it comes to corporations, pretty much everyone agrees that in point of fact, corporations are legally bound to pursue profit, and moral concerns are irreleevant except insofar as responding to them makes a corporation more profitable.

But in debates about wars, the idea that states do not spend billions of dollars on “humanitarian interventions” in other countries – and if they claim to be doing so, they are lying – is considered a fantastical conspiracy theory by some on the right, it seems.

There are no theories of “free markets in state violence” which attempt to explain why the elite-directed self-interest of states are a benevolent and wonderful thing, in the same way as there are theories apologising for the capitalist system. No-one proposes an “invisible hand of the warring states”, by analogy to the invisible hand of the free markets. This would of course be absurd and impossible to carry through. Even libertarians (most of them, anyway) don’t try to include war in the legitimate sphere of market activity.

Rather, we are fed the frankly incredible claims that we are staying there and “finishing the job” out of some sense of moral responsibility, and “we have no long term ambitions in Iraq” (John Kerry). Often added to the claim that, after being “Machiavellian” under Kissinger et al, US planners have finally seen the happy light of democracy after all these years. (What? We’ve been lied to for all these years about putatively noble reasons for war and now they’re finally telling the truth? Do I smell something fishy here?)

I suppose the reason why some see it as conspiratorial is because of where a more realistic view of the situation takes you. What is our geostrategic interest in “not cutting and running”? (Never mind all that “humanitarian” bullshit, as I said, it really can be discounted as a credible motive.) War-on-turrr can also be discredited as a motive (see Chomsky). No, one of the main reasons is roughly “to exert greater control on Iraq and the region”, i.e., to put it bluntly, because of oil.

Given that we are occupying to safeguard oil supplies, and we have flown in Negroponte, and we are using / have used incendiary weaons and cluster bombs, and we have not done much reconstruction yet – what reason is there to trust the claim that we are there to do reconstruction, support human rights and institute liberal democracy with free speech and a free press?

Yes, there will be great anger in Iraq if the promise of democracy is not delivered. But there is great anger already in Iraq, and that hasn’t stopped the US so far.

Interesting comment, Ragout. Is it plausible that Baghdad pre-war was exceptionally prone to suspicious deaths, since many of Saddam’s victims were probably killed there? If so then the Lancet increase for Baghdad would be suspect, but not the increase for the country as a whole.

I’m just throwing out the suggestion – from your exchanges with D-squared I judge that you have a pretty good feel for the data.

Ragout, there is this section in that article: “But the staff also remember when hundreds of victims of mass execution were dumped by the Baathist authorities at the mortuary and relatives were too frightened to collect them. “.