Three Ways (Out of 100) That America's Screwing Up the World

By John Tirman, AlterNet. Posted August 15, 2006.

The following three subchapters are excerpted from John Tirman's 100 Ways America Is Screwing Up the World (Harper Perennial, 2006). Read another excerpt here.

Three ways America is screwing up the world:

1. "We Don't Do Body Counts"

When U.S. General Tommy Franks uttered those words in 2003, he was conveying the new sentiments of the American military and its civilian leadership, that counting the dead of "the enemy" was not necessary or useful. Franks, who may be remembered as the only general in the annals of American history to lose two wars, was simply repeating what his political handlers told him to say, as all active duty generals do. In this case, it was an attempt to deflect the moral consequences of a "war of choice," a lesson Frank's generation learned from Vietnam. But the "no body counts" policy reverberates around the Arab and Muslim world, to America's detriment.

The policy is an insult and a mistake for two reasons. First, it lends the impression -- or is it a fact? -- that the United States does not care about civilian casualties. In the autumn of 2005, in a fairly typical sequence, the military announced that a sweep of Anbar province in Iraq had resulted in the death of 120 "terrorists." No civilian casualties were reported by the U.S. government, or by the American press. Al Jazeera, the Arabic news organization, had firsthand accounts of dozens of casualties. And it is inconceivable that major military operations of that kind would not result in casualties of the innocent. This is an embittering legacy of the war: not merely the fact of large numbers of war dead, but the neglect of even acknowledging that this could be occurring or is important enough to investigate.

Second, it is bad for the war effort itself. The American people have a right to know what is going on in their name. Learning about things like Abu Ghraib and casualties from foreign news sources or NGOs makes the revelations all the more troubling, as they think they are being lied to by their government. (Which they are, of course.) And military planners themselves should understand what the effect of operations is on civilian populations. Family ties are strong in Iraq, with close extended kinship networks; killing of family members, especially innocent family members, is likely to produce more resistance -- and more terrorists. It is one of the seemingly inexplicable things in Iraq -- how could the insurgency grow when America is so clearly a liberator, where even Sunni Arabs will ultimately be better off if only they would lay down their weapons? The answer is not only that they are former Saddamites or jihadists. The far more probable answer is that the insurgents are driven in part by acts of defense, in effect, or vengeful honor.

A military officer told me around that same time that "rules of engagement" for U.S. troops were so broad that civilians even faintly suspected of being insurgents were routinely "blown away." Men talking on cell phones, for example, while a U.S. military convoy was passing were fair game for shooting. Many anecdotes of this kind circulate, but have stimulated little curiosity on the part of journalists.

Most take at face value the estimates of Iraq Body Count, a noble effort to count, via press reports, the total number of Iraqi civilians killed in the war. Their estimate by the end of 2005 was about thirty thousand, but their method was incomplete, as they readily acknowledge, since they count only those who are reported dead in two or more reputable news sources. That's like doing the census of the United States by counting everyone mentioned in the news media.

A more complete estimate was provided by a team of epidemiologists, led by American and Iraqi health professionals, and published in the British medical journal, The Lancet. Using a well-tested method of random cluster surveys, interviewing more than 7,000 people, their midrange estimate was 98,000 dead in the first eighteen months of the war, with 80 percent of those likely to have been killed by U.S. and U.K. forces.

That report was widely dismissed in the United States as politically motivated or flawed, though the secretary of state and many others used the same method to estimate casualties in other wars, such as the Congo. (The method, by the way, while widely misunderstood, is perfectly sound.) The violence, by most accounts, increased in the next eighteen months, and one can safely assume that the actual dead in Iraq now exceed 100,000 by perhaps tens of thousands more.

John Tirman is executive director of MIT's Center for International Studies.

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