I’m very glad that “Daniel has taken on the job of addressing the statistical arguments”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002780.html around “the Lancet study”:http://image.thelancet.com/extras/04art10342web.pdf because, quite honestly, I’m not up to it (though I did spend part of yesterday trying to get impromptu tutorials from friends on concepts like “confidence interval”). Reading the text of the Lancet piece, I was struck by three points especially. First, they let us know exactly what they did, so that critics can address their claims. Yes, there’s a highly controversial headline figure which the Guardian and others seize upon, but what the study actually says is that they asked such-and -such questions of such-and-such people, and extrapolation of the responses would generate such-and-such a number. Second, they notice a big difference between the numbers of people apparently shot by US troops (hardly any) and the numbers killed by aerial bombardments (lots). Third, they remark on the fact that the coalition forces have an obligation to find out for themselves how many civilians have been killed but have shown hardly any interest in doing so.
From the category archives:
Middle East Politics
I’d gone along with the popular wisdom that Bin Laden had only recently expressed interest in the Palestinian cause in order to broaden his appeal – “Juan Cole”:http://www.juancole.com/2004_10_01_juancole_archive.html#109909250653887930 tells us that this conventional view is flat-out wrong.
bq. Bin Laden has repeatedly said that one of the reasons he hit the US was over the Israeli attacks on the Palestinians. Bin Laden has cared deeply about Palestine since his youth. His partner in Peshawar at the Office of Services for 6 years when he was funding the Mujahidin was Abdullah Azzam, a prominent Palestinian Muslim fundamentalist. When he came back to Jiddah from Pakistan after the Soviets withdrew, Bin Laden gave a guest sermon at the local mosque in which he bitterly criticized Israeli actions during the first Intifadah. He declared war on the Zionists and the Crusaders, and has constantly complained about the Occupation of the Three Holy Cities, which are Mecca, Medinah and Jerusalem. Because he did not use traditional Palestianian nationalist language, it has been possible for some to miss his commitment to the Palestine issue.
NB – threads on CT and elsewhere that even mention Palestine or Israel in passing tend to descend swiftly into a repugnant back-and-forth of slurs against Israelis and Palestinians – I’ll be ruthless in deleting comments to this post that even hint at going down that path.
“Gene at Harry’s Place writes”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2004/09/30/who_will_they_blame_this_time.php :
bq. I know I’m expecting too much, but I really hope the “we can’t be choosy” Western supporters of the Iraqi “resistance” will find a way to blame the murder of dozens of Iraqi children– at a ceremony in Baghdad to mark the opening of a new sewage plant– on those who actually perpetrated it, without in some way implicating the US government.
I’m no supporter of the Iraqi “resistance”, but I still guess it would be expecting too much to hope that the contributors to Harry’s Place desist from making this kind of heavy-handed point every time something nasty happens in Iraq. In any case, the presupposition of Gene’s point — which he may or may not endorse when it is brought to the surface — is that if one gives the bombers the blame they deserve one must thereby absolve the US government. Not so, and for two reasons. First, if a government’s policies bring a situation into being in which crazy fanatics take the opportunity to slaughter innocents, a situation that would not otherwise have obtained, then that government is sure as hell implicated. Compare: if the British government gave an amnesty to all Britain’s sex offenders, it would in no way be exculpatory of the rapists to hold the government to account for the increase in rapes. Second, if you invade a country, destroy or disband the existing state apparatus, and assume responsibility for the peace and security of its citizens, then it is hardly unreasonable to hold you responsible when that peace and security fails to obtain. None of which, of course, settles the question of whether there should have been a war or not. But it does settle the question “Is it possible to blame to fanatics appropriately and still implicate the occupiers.” The answer to that question is “yes”.
I finally went to see Fahrenheit 9/11. I won’t give a review as I don’t have much to add to what lots of others have already said. What struck me about the film is how much worse things have become, and how much more has come out, in the time since the film was made (I haven’t checked but the film seemed to end around the time of the Fallujah atrocities and the subsequent abortive assault).
Extracts from Mark Danner’s article on “Abu Ghraib”:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17430 in the NYRB.
Another entry in my occasional role as co-ordinator of the Campaign For Real Body Counts; grateful for any comments that might help me make sense of these numbers:
As recently as the April uprising, the Sadrite Al-Mahdi militia was estimated by Iraqi experts to be between 3,000 and 10,000 strong, with the Pentagon suggesting that the hard core of fighters could be as small as 1,000.
In the May offensive against Sadr in Najaf and Karbala, it was once more credibly estimated that 1,500 of the Al-Mahdi Army were killed (note that this reference suggests that, as of the beginning of May, only 1,000-2,000 of the militia were located in or around the city of Najaf).
In the more recent episodes of fighting, official sources have told us that the Najaf branch of Sadr’s forces have taken a further 300 casualties, and lost a further 1200 men captured or surrendered.
So to recap … a force which was meant to have only 1,000 serious fighters, has had 1,800 of them killed and continues to fight on. Sadr had about 2,000 fighters in Najaf, has lost 3,000 of them and continues to fight[1]. Something doesn’t add up (or to put it another way, nothing does add up). Either:
- original estimates substantially underestimated the size of Sadr’s forces, or
- we have substantially overestimated the amount of Sadr’s force which has been neutralised, or
- Sadr has managed to recruit very substantial amounts of force indeed over the last three months.
To be honest, each of these three possibilities looks as bad to me as each of the others. Someone wake me up when it finally becomes acceptable to make comparisons to Vietnam.
Footnote:
[1] Even allowing for the likelihood that the Najaf militia would have been reinforced after May from Sadrite forces elsewhere in the country, I still can’t get this one to pass the laugh test. I’d also note that the 1,500 figure refers to Sadrite casualties in the whole of Iraq and probably shouldn’t be conflated with the Najaf figure of 300, but the qualitative conclusion is unlikely to be affected.
I have it on excellent authority that small kittens have done literally dozens of impossibly cute things in Iraq, yesterday alone. But are we going to read about that in the so-called paper of record? No, it’s all “there was this coordinated attack on Christian churches”, and “militants kill Turkish hostage; trucking group withdraws from Iraq over safety concerns.” As Tacitus blogger Bird Dog rightly asks, “Which is actually more newsworthy, something we hear about every day (terrorist bombings) or previously unheard of signs that Iraqis are stepping forth and taking steps to restore their country?” Signs like that one time in Mosul, when the kitten pretended to stalk and pounce on that dented beer cap, like it was a mouse or something, and everybody laughed. Remember that? Right before the mortar attack, remember?
I’m a great admirer of Karma Nabulsi’s book “Traditions of War”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0198294077/junius-20 . But “her piece in the Guardian today”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1245135,00.html is an exercise in wishfully projecting ideals onto real-world people without any critical examination of their claim either to represent those ideals or their chances of realizing them. She makes one point which seems right, namely, that sovereignty rests with the Iraqi people rather than with whoever happens to be exercising de facto authority at any time. But she then makes the astonishing leap to claim that the bearers of popular sovereignty in Palestine and in Iraq are the armed resistance groups there.
bq. The young men who defended Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank and Rafah refugee camp in Gaza, and who recently won back the Iraqi cities of Falluja and Najaf from the occupying power, are not the terrorists – or the enemies of democracy. They are our own past torchbearers, the founding citizens of popular sovereignty and democratic practice, the very tradition that freed Europe and that we honoured on D-day.
Are they? Do they see themselves that way? All of them or some of them? Don’t some of them favour theocracy rather than democracy?
John Howard’s government “gets sucked further in”:http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/05/31/1085855502334.html to the Iraqi torture scandal. The Defence Department is found to have been aware of the Red Cross’s documenting of torture “much earlier”:http://southerlybuster.blogspot.com/2004/06/defence-chiefs-come-clean-on-abuse.html than previously believed. “Howard insists”:http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,9714293%255E28102,00.html that he only learned about the abuses in April and claims to have been “misinformed by the defence department”:http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1120503.htm. Senior civil servants at the Defence department seems to be taking the flak. “Tim Dunlop”:http://www.roadtosurfdom.com/surfdomarchives/002400.php has more.
So does Howard bear any responsibility or is it just that no-one tells him anything? Though they wouldn’t like to admit it, in many respects Australians have a self-image very similar to that of Americans — they take the same pride in being down-to-earth, straight-talking types. It’s the legacy of a frontier country. A No-BS image is prone to its own distinctive kind of bullshit, but Australian politics does have more of a social-democratic conscience than America and less religiously-inspired self-righteousness. So we’ll see whether they put up with this.
Before I went to graduate school I worked for a year at an oil refinery — “Ireland’s only refinery”:http://www.hydrocarbons-technology.com/projects/whitegate/, in fact — in East Cork. Reading reports about the “hostage crisis in Khobar”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3761263.stm, I wonder why the terrorists went after the oil workers rather than the refineries they work at. After all, if you’re prepared to plan and execute a heavily-armed attack like this, you could do a lot more damage if you just broke into the plant. Oil refinery hardware is just lots of open-plan exposed pipes, tanks and towers filled with flammable liquids. Popping a few RPGs in the direction of a kero tank or “butane sphere”:http://www.vijaytanks.com/spheres.htm could have spectacular consequences. In the “fractionation towers”:http://www.cii-chemfab.com/gallery/infogalleryprojmgmt1.html the crude has helpfully been vaporized for you in advance. Instead, though, these guys hole up with 50 oil workers in a residential compound and basically wait to get themselves killed. Why? Hostage situations haven’t been reliably successful for hostage-takers since the 1980s. The CNN reports cite the terrorists as saying they are out to get “Zionists and crusaders” who are in Khobar to “steal our oil and resources.” Maybe they hate the workers but love the refineries? Who, exactly, are they trying to send a message to here? Do they think that killing foreigners will garner support whereas the destruction of a refinery would turn Saudi opinion against them?
*Update*: Just as I was finishing this post, I discovered that inquiring minds like “Billmon”:http://billmon.org/archives/001490.html want to know the answer to this question as well.
Thomas “Airmiles” Friedman, has had enough of pie-in-the-sky democracy-promotion, and is ready for some bracing realism:
We need to rebalance our policy. We still have a chance to do in Iraq the only thing that was always the only thing possible — tilt it in a better direction — so over a generation Iraqis can transform and liberate themselves, if they want. What might an Iraq tilted in the right direction look like? It would be more religious than Turkey, more secular than Iran, more federal than Syria, more democratic than Saudi Arabia and more stable than Afghanistan.
More federal than Syria? Frickin’ awesome! This reminds me of a joke of my grandmother’s on the difference between hell and heaven. In heaven, the cooks are French, the lovers Italian, the cops English, and the bankers Swiss. In hell, the cooks are English, the lovers Swiss, the cops French, and the bankers Italian. Airmiles’ list seems infernal: more democratic than Saudi Arabia? Less theocratic than Iran? Gosh, is such a country even concievable?
And what’s up with the only thing that was always already the only thing possible? To wit, a US-friendly, “democracy-minded strongman“, one imagines? (Now with 50% more mindfulness.) I tell you what: when I go around spending blood and treasure like water, I like a bit more value for money.
Bush has really lost Tacitus this time. He is getting mighty depressed:
As I write this, Nightline just flashed, together, the photographs of the two dead in Iraq whom I knew from younger days: Kim Hampton and Eric Paliwoda. I didn’t realize they were killed sequentially. They fell in the line of duty, on the field of battle, and there is honor in their lives and deaths. What remains is for us to impart honor to the cause in which they served. I speak not of the defense of the United States: this is forever honorable, and right. I speak of the creation of a just Iraq. This would be an Iraq in which jihadis do not walk free, in which Ba’athist generals no longer rule, and in which civil war is not the near-inevitable future. That this Iraq does not exist, and will not exist because of our choices, means we have profoundly dishonored our dead there. They deserve better: something right, and lasting. It is hard to see those faces, those young faces, among the roll call of the dead. I look at them, and it strikes me that in walking away from Fallujah, we are walking away from their graves; leaving their light and memory to the cruel care of those who killed them. It is the worst of all worlds, for there is comfort in a parent’s asking, “Why did my child die?” and finding the answer, “For liberty, for justice, for America.” Now, in this defeat, as we slowly take the abdication of our duties to its inexorable end, that answer changes into something awful; something that should be a reproach to our halfhearted leaders to the ends of their days:
“For nothing.”
I recommed you go read both linked posts in thier entirety. Tacitus has always been a fairly eloquent fellow (if, like his namesake, inclined to morose skepticism about human affairs), and white-hot searing rage and disappointment have spurred him to new heights.
(And read this post for title quote from my and John’s favorite Melville, The Confidence Man.)
The things you think of when you can’t sleep; my younger sister Nelly spent a good part of the wee hours this morning thinking about the relative merits and weight-bearing facilities of stiletto versus wedge heels.
The other night, I actually woke myself up with the conviction that the jealous threesome of Bush, Blair and Sharon is mirrored by the parable of the prodigal son. Apart from the fact that Bush makes a singularly uncompelling father figure, it fits.
Sharon is the wayward but adored son. It doesn’t matter how much of his father’s wealth/political capital he squanders, how many irresponsible gestures he makes, how much self-harm he inflicts. A light tap on the wrist and the fattened calf (flame-roasted Texan style) will be the paternal response. (The main difference, of course, being that the original prodigal son apologised for his folly before Dad threw the steaks on the barbie.)
Blair, on the other hand, is the ‘good son’ who has spent years toiling away within the system, doing as he’s told, taking all his father’s guff while being refused even a goat to feast on with his friends (or the occasional UN resolution/Guantanamo inmate).
Nothing new here of course. For all of Thatcher’s famous closeness to Reagan, she barely got a head’s up when the US invaded Britain’s former colony, Grenada.
The good son’s lot seems rather harsh and thankless, though it’s implied he will ultimately inherit the remaining property. But for our purposes, I don’t think the parable’s application can be stretched that far. And anyway, they do say virtue is its own reward.
I’ve put off this promised update because up until today, it seemed as if there was nothing to add. The Human Rights Watch/US State Department figures of 300,000 murders in the period 1988-2003, the majority of which occurred during 1988-91, seems to be settled. However, Johann Hari has published an article in today’s Independent which seems to be working on a much higher figure for the other crucial number I was looking for; the likely number of deaths in 2003 if the war had not taken place. Sourced to the Human Rights Centre in Kadhimaya, via the Iraqi Prospects Organisation (a UK-based Iraqi exiles organisation), the claim is that analysis of the Ba’ath Party archives reveals that there would have been 70,000 killings if the war had not taken place.
Update, below fold
I didn’t think George W. Bush had the capacity to shock me. But he has with his capitulation to the Israeli right.
I’ve been reading Robert Fisk’s “Pity the Nation”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0233985166/junius-20 , his account of the fate of Lebanon in the late twentieth century. Fisk has been the target of so much blogospherical opprobrium in the last three years, that I almost feel an obligation to explain myself. But whatever Fisk’s recent misjudgements (and there have been a few) “Pity the Nation”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0233985166/junius-20 is a truly great book: wonderfully written, fair, balanced and not seeking to disguise the crimes and failings of any of the protagonists.
Fisk’s book starts, though, not in Lebanon, but with ordinary Palestinian families, displaced in 1948, still guarding the Ottoman or British title-deeds to their properties, still keeping the rusting keys to their houses (often long-since demolished), still longing for their orange orchards and olive groves.