The Sad Truth of the Iraqi War

Published on Sunday, December 31, 2006 by the Long Island, NY Newsday

In Iraq, the Losses Americans Don't See: We focus so much on the deaths of our troops that we don't understand the suffering of Iraqis

by John Tirman

For all the talk about the violence in Iraq, Americans are focusing little attention on the human costs to the Iraqis. The Iraq Study Group report, for example, which is a kind of national temperature gauge of the public's mood, fails to express much sympathy or regret for the chaos and colossal loss of Iraqi lives. In this oversight, if that's what it is, an essential lesson is lost about this war.

The Iraq Study Group includes a number of references to the hardship and danger for U.S. forces. It speaks of growing violence caused by insurgents, militias and criminals. But where is the analysis of the role of the U.S. military in the violence and carnage suffered by the Iraqi people?

This skewed perspective is reflected among think tank analysts and news commentators. What matters in most of these accounts is that U.S. troops are caught in the crossfire of ancient rivalries within Islam. The major opinion pollsters have not asked about Americans' concerns about the carnage in Iraq except as it relates to Americans. The slew of journalists' reports of the war have essentially ignored Iraqi fatalities as well.

When there has been reporting on civilian deaths, the U.S. government moves quickly to express skepticism. Following the bombing of the Samara mosque by Sunni extremists last February, for example, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accused the news media of misreporting and inflating the civilian toll by referring to a difference of nearly 1,000 in varying reports. "Interestingly, all of the exaggerations seem to be on one side," he said during a March 7 news conference, "...the steady stream of errors all seem to be of a nature to inflame the situation and to give heart to the terrorists."

The Iraqi casualties issue received a short jolt of energy from a mortality study by medical teams in Iraq and epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University. This Iraqi household survey, published in October in a British medical journal, found that 600,000 Iraqis had been killed. (My center at MIT sponsored the survey.) President George W. Bush said that "the methodology is pretty well discredited," and a number of think tank analysts followed suit.

But scientists broadly endorsed the method and the study. So did the Iraqi health minister, though not intentionally, when he acknowledged that some 150,000 civilians had been killed by Sunni Arab insurgents. (The Hopkins scientists' number was much larger because they included all Iraqis and all means of death.) Other reports, from graveyard counts to refugee flows, indicate the mortality figure is in the hundreds of thousands.

It's understandable that Americans do not want to acknowledge the terrible consequences in Iraq of the U.S. operation there. But if we want to understand the reasons for the daily violence, its astonishing durability and its decentralized nature, we need to ask hard questions about the role of the U.S. military in starting a war and then failing to find a formula for quelling the consequent violence.

Denying that large-scale civilian death and suffering has occurred leads us to false assumptions that the violence is wholly internecine and prevents us from learning the most useful lesson of this debacle - that counterinsurgencies relying on force actually produce more insurgents.

Among many people in liberal and human-rights circles in early 2003, there was qualified support for the invasion precisely to improve the lot of Iraqis suffering under Saddam Hussein's rule. Now, we hear nothing about a very different kind, and scale, of suffering in Iraq. Peruse the Web sites of major religions in America and you will find nothing prominent about Iraqi deaths. Nor is there a significant peace movement to demand accountability. With few exceptions, Democratic Party leaders have said nothing on the topic.

If we were to come to a new self-reckoning and grapple with the painful reality of what our country has done to theirs, we might think differently about sustaining our military role, or, conversely, walking away. It likely would drive us to do everything we could to end the violence and to commit ourselves to a massive and scrupulously accountable reconstruction of the country once the violence subsides. These actions may be the only hope for ending this conflict with the U.S. world reputation even partially intact.

For now, however, the silence persists. The regrettable, but unavoidable, conclusion: Americans do not care how many people are killed there. In the end, for us, that may be the biggest tragedy of the war.

John Tirman is executive director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for International Studies.

© 2006 Newsday Inc.