By Mickey Friedman
December 27, 2015
It is almost always the innocent who suffer. Whatever the cause, those who inflict terror invariably target the innocent. Those who shop in Baghdad, take the train in Spain, listen to music in Paris. The terrorists always have a reason but they are without reason. Their anger, their arrogance has poisoned them.
Yet because once again we are the victims, we slip into hysteria.
And those who make things simple only distort the more complex reality. And do a great disservice.
Sadly, we Americans have never been good at acknowledging the most lethal of our failures. Vietnam, Iraq, for example.
Pundits and politicians – even those who screamed for war – may nowadays offer an ever-so-quick and throwaway “mistake.” But how many times have we acknowledged the massive numbers of the dead and wounded who died for our mistake. The Iraqi civilians who perished during “shock and awe” and in the horrifying years of anarchy and despair that followed.
In October 2004, the British medical journal Lancet interviewed members of Iraqi households. They estimated that up to 100,000 civilians died because of airstrikes and the violent invasion and initial occupation.
A revised Lancet study in October 2006 estimated that 393,000 and 943,000 excess deaths occurred during those years, with 655,000 the most likely estimate. 56% of violent deaths were from gun shots. Car bombs and air strikes accounted for about 26% of deaths.
The United Nations Refugee Agency stated in October 2006 that “there are now more than 1.5 million people displaced within Iraq itself … [and] up to 1.6 million Iraqis are now outside their country … ” 50,000 people were leaving their homes every month.
In August 2007, ORB International asked Iraqis “How many members of your household, if any, have died as a result of the conflict in Iraq since 2003?” Based on these interviews ORB estimated 1,033,000 deaths with a range of 946,000 to 1,120,000.
Of course, controversy rages over these numbers and polling methodology. Iraqbodycount.org, which relies on “media reports, hospital, morgue, NGO and official figures or records” for its data, estimates civilian deaths from violence at 147,735 – 167,427.
So we don’t even know the real number of Iraqi dead. While we are so very aware of every last American who has fallen to Islamic terror, we hardly ever talk about the hundreds of thousand Muslims who died at our hands. Not because they were members of al-Qaeda, but because they were unfortunate enough to live in the land of Saddam Hussein. With no weapons of mass destruction. With no link to 9/11. But a land sitting on oil. For we know now, as Alan Greenspan, the preeminent Republican economist and longstanding chairman of the Federal Reserve admitted in his “Age of Turbulence” in 2007: “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”
Saddened, he says. Hardly an adequate response to the devastation we wrought on Iraq. For oil which was always ours for purchase. Saddened doesn’t do it.
I am so very horrified that once again we are talking about terror and terrorism without any sense of our own culpability. The great French writer, Albert Camus, wrote: “In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”
There will never be an excuse for killing the innocent. It is unforgivable that Muslim terrorists are slaughtering music-lovers in Paris, the innocent participants meeting at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernadino, enslaving women in Syria, and beheading journalists. They must be stopped.
But really are we ever going to face our history squarely in the eye? To learn from our mistakes? If we destabilize a secular nation, embolden Shi’a Muslims while punishing the Sunni, turn neighbor against neighbor, cousin against cousin, destroy schools and hospitals while plunging millions into poverty, have we not created the perfect breeding ground for terrorists? Have we not brought our own horrifying version of terror to the innocent?
And whether you pick 167,427 or a million, we are talking about civilian deaths. Civilians. The innocent. The victims.
Maybe Iraq is a distant memory for you, pale in comparison to the horror of San Bernadino. In that case there’s the recent aerial bombing of a Doctor Without Borders trauma hospital in Afghanistan that killed 30 brave staff members and civilian patients, including children. Yet another mistake.
Should it matter to us that innocents were lost to the automatic weapons of the Paris attackers rather than our misplaced U.S. bombs, and/or our completely unnecessary invasion and occupation of Iraq?
What must this American hysteria feel like to the innocent Muslim victims of our multiple terrifying mistakes. When we refuse responsibility for our own acts yet blame every Muslim for the actions of a few.
Terror is terror is terror.
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This column was originally published in The Berkshire Record of December 17, 2015.
For more information:
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2804%2917441-2/abstract
2006 revised Lancet study:
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736%2806%2969491-9/abstract
http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736%2807%2960040-3.pdf
http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736%2807%2960058-0.pdf
The United Nations Refugee Agency
http://www.unhcr.org/news/NEWS/452f69d74.html
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