'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Disproportionate violence

Andrew Mack, former director of Kofi Annan's strategic planning unit, has a very important and carefully argued piece in the Japan Times today. He focuses on the issue of the gross disproportionality between the numbers of deaths of US combatants in Iraq and those that the US military has inflicted upon Iraqi civilians.

A (dis-)proportion of 100:1, that is.

His conclusion:

essentially for political reasons, the U.S. has chosen to pursue a counterinsurgency policy that is almost guaranteed to generate a huge civilian death toll.

In the West there is justifiable outrage at the barbarous beheadings of foreigners in Iraq, but relatively little concern about the tens of thousands of ordinary Iraqis whose deaths are the inevitable consequence of a U.S. strategy designed to reduce U.S. casualties.

I should note that--for people who believe in "just war theory" (a relatively late accretion into Christian doctrine, but one that many westerrners seem to believe in strongly)-- the "proportionality" of military actions taken by one's own side is very important.

So, actually, is the issue of the "probability of success". I.e., just war theorists recognize that since war is itself massively harmful, you don't want to have it drag on and be "unsuccessful".

I guess the Bushies just didn't read their St. Augustine before they launched this war?

Proportionality of military action, and in particular the need to take positive action to avoid the infliction of harm on civilians, is also an important principle in the international laws of war.

I went to the website of the ICRC, the body internationally charged with interpreting and guarding the integrity of the international laws of war, and I punched "proportionality" into their internal search. It came up with this lengthy list of materials.

One of them was this appeal, issued Nov 9, dealing explicitly with the situation in Iraq. It starts:

The ICRC reminds all those involved in the armed confrontations in Iraq that international humanitarian law prohibits the killing or harming of civilians who are not directly taking part in the hostilities.

It calls upon all fighters to take every feasible precaution to spare civilians and civilian property and to respect the principles of distinction and proportionality in all military operations.

["Distinction" = the positive obligation to distinguish between combatants and civilians and to take active steps to avoid damage to the latter. Where such a distinction cannot be clearly made, commanders are obliged to assume that the individuals concerned are civilians until the opposite has been proved.]

Okay. How dispropotional have the US operations in Iraq been?

Andrew Mack, in the article cited above, builds on the results of the recent Lancet survey. He notes that the authors of that survey already recognized that Fallujah was such an extreme "outlier" in terms of the casualty totals inflicted there, that they had excluded the Fallujah figures from their global estimate of the death toll. He writes,

If the death rate from Fallujah had been included in the calculation, the "excess death" total would be closer to 200,000.

... It is important to note that the huge death toll is not due simply to the war -- most violent deaths have occurred since the United States declared victory in April 2003.

The survey also shows that 84 percent of the violent deaths were caused not by rebels, but by coalition forces. And most of these deaths weren't caused by soldiers fighting on the ground, but by long-range air and artillery strikes. Women and children together made up more than half of the violent deaths, with 38 percent of the total being children.

He notes:

The central message of the remarkable Lancet report is clear: High civilian death tolls are inevitable when a modern high-tech army seeks to reduce its own casualties by fighting an urban counterinsurgency campaign remotely via air and long-range artillery strikes.

No matter how precise the weapons and accurate the targeting, using long-range ordinance against densely populated residential urban areas will always cause massive civilian casualties.

The body-count consequences of fighting this way are instructive. For every 100 dead Iraqis (most of them civilians), just one U.S. combatant has been killed. (More than 900 U.S. service personnel have died in action since the fighting started with more killed in accidents.) A 100:1 "kill ratio" is extraordinarily high.

When Israel attacked a Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin in 2002, there was a storm of protest at the civilian casualties (estimated at 56). But the Israelis didn't attempt to strike at their enemies remotely, they went into harm's way on foot. Twenty-three Israeli soldiers lost their lives. Here the kill ratio was under 3:1 in Israel's favor. Deaths in the Israel-Palestine conflict receive huge publicity around the world despite the fact that the death toll for both Palestinians and Israelis is tiny compared with that in Iraq -- less than 2 percent of the total.

Had the U.S. fought in Iraq the way that Israel fought in Jenin and suffered a comparable casualty ratio, more than 40,000 U.S. service members would have been shipped home in coffins by now.

He explores the question of why the US commanders don't seem interested in providing body counts of casualties in Iraq (unlike, notably, in Vietnam, where just about any dead Vietnamese person of whatever age or gender was counted as an "enemy dead").

Mack speculates as to why that is:

Part of the answer is that the Iraqi Health Ministry is ill-equipped to carry out surveys. But the reality is that neither the U.S. nor the interim government in Baghdad has any interest in publicizing high civilian death tolls. The higher the coalition-caused civilian death toll, the more hollow the U.S. claims that it is doing everything it can to reduce civilian casualties.

The head of Statistics Department in the Iraqi Health Ministry reported last December that the Coalition Provisional Authority didn't want civilian casualty statistics to be collected. As U.S. Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the invasion, put it: "We don't do body counts."

The huge, but mostly unreported, Iraqi civilian death toll and the central U.S. role in creating it helps explain why Washington is losing the hearts and minds battle in Iraq and just why there is so much Iraqi rage about the occupation.