A Spectacular Misconception, Part 1
Rahul Mahajan
Five years ago, less one week, 19 fanatical young men hijacked four airplanes, crashing three of them into the two towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. A total of 2986 people were killed, making it by far the largest single act of non-state-sponsored terrorism in history.
As of today, the policies that were implemented afterward by the U.S. government have resulted in the deaths of 333 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, 2647 U.S. soldiers in Iraq, at least 136 American contractors, and several American journalists, for a total of at least 3116. In addition, at least 250 soldiers and over 200 contractors from allied countries have died.
No one will ever count the dead in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to Professor Marc Herold, using newspaper accounts alone, at least 3000 civilians were killed during the first phase of the Afghanistan war. Jonathan Steele of the Guardian, trying to estimate the number killed directly by the bombing and indirectly because of the cessation of aid and by being made refugees during the brutal Afghan winter, came up with 20,000 as the most likely estimate. The Afghan death toll continues to mount.
The Iraq Body Count Project, working off of confirmed news reports and sporadic reporting from hospitals and morgues, says 41-46,000 civilians have died by violence in Iraq from the invasion and occupation. Even given its limited purview, this is likely a significant underestimate. In July, at the height of the intersectarian violence, for example, 1800 people came to the morgue in Baghdad alone, over 90% of whom had been killed violently. In the bombing of Fallujah in November 2004, many estimate that several thousand were killed, but those numbers are not reflected. And so on.
In the first 18 months of the conflict, according to a demographic study published in the Lancet in October 2004, the invasion and occupation had caused most likely 100,000 “excess” deaths. The 24 months afterward were significantly more violent, reconstruction has been negligible, and provision of medical care has not substantially improved; a conservative extrapolation of the 100,000 figure would be a quarter of a million.
This quarter million excess deaths cannot be balanced against the number of Saddam’s victims – it represents an excess with regard to a baseline of the twin tyrannies of Saddam and the sanctions.
The hecatombs continue to mount, with no end in sight. Iraq’s very existence as a society, let alone a nation, is at stake. Afghanistan is no worse off, but not substantially better off than it was under the tyrannous Taliban, whose advent itself derived from U.S. policies.
Osama bin Laden, an obscure figure with a handful of followers, has been turned by the U.S. response into a world celebrity, an iconic figure even for Muslims who, like the vast majority, oppose terrorism.
Young men who were barely born at the time of the Gulf War are watching videos of atrocities against Muslims from Iraq, Palestine, Chechnya, and Bosnia, drawn into a war that both sides seem to think will go on forever.
And even the American public, always willing to support a militaristic solution to its perceived problems, is evenly split on whether the United States is safer from a terrorist attack now than it was five years ago – with a significant majority saying the occupation of Iraq has made it less safe.
It’s not hard to see that the so-called “war on terror” is a failure from every standpoint – legal, moral, pragmatic. The truth, however, goes well beyond that.
The “war on terror” has not just failed in implementation; it is a spectacular misconception. It could not be implemented correctly because it was the wrong paradigm, based on a misunderstanding of the enemies faced and of the political situation so gross as to be almost willful – and also on the opportunistic intertwining of policies aimed at aggrandizing U.S. hegemony with those that were supposed to be anti-terror.
Next week, I’ll explain what I mean and what the alternative was. |
