Criminals walk free

Yesterday Eli Stephens at Left I on the news made this insightful observation,

…imagine an admittedly improbable circumstance - a Hamas rocket firing squad has managed to infiltrate Sderot, and fires their rocket from in front of a school or hospital in Sderot. Do you really think for one second that the Israelis would fire on those people, knowing that the dozen or so civilians they would be killing at the sam time would be Israelis rather than Palestinians? Of course they wouldn't. Because they value Israeli lives, while to them, the lives of innocent Palestinians are worth nothing. That's genocide.

I don’t agree that evidence of a racist approach to targeting noncombatants alone demonstrates genocidal intent. ‘But in a non-legal sense, "genocide" involves the killing of people because of their religion or nationality. Which is precisely what is going on in Gaza right now,’ Eli writes. Again, genocide does typically involve such killing, what makes it genocidal is the intent.

But then, that’s hardly at issue. For reference, here’s the definition from Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which Israel has ratified [emphasis added].

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Israel claims, and will doubtless continue to claim, that it never targets civilians. And by and large the world’s ‘leaders’ will echo them. But it’s got to the point now where even the media are forced to question this, if only sporadically, when the IOF guides its precision guided weaponry pretty consistently at hospitals, schools, and private homes and fully a third of those killed are kids. When they can no longer sustain the illusion that that’s all just unfortunate but unavoidable collateral damage, they will resort to the worn out casuistry, ‘But the Palestinians didn’t exist as a distinct “national, ethnical, racial or religious group” until we came’. Even if the sophists of the hasbara establishment could prove such a thing, they are one now.

In fact, even before the ‘outbreak of hostilities’ whose consequences we are now witnessing with horror and rage, the siege of Gaza certainly qualifies as ‘Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’.

Eli also observes that ‘international law is pretty much of a joke anyway. War crimes trials are reserved for the weak and the defeated, while far bigger war criminals walk free.’ This is not only empirically the case, but actually inherent in the nature of international law. Consider a scenario where the long sought Security Council veto wielded by the US, UK, France, Russia and China is abolished and a resolution was passed under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter calling, for instance, on the US to cease its aggression against Iraq. A UN force would need to be assembled capable of taking on and defeating the US military. Even if all other member states contributed to the force, it would be a big ask, if not downright impossible. But since it is inconceivable that countries embroiled in military alliances with the US or dependent upon the US economically or politically would participate, is is simply out of the question. Ultimately, international law is only enforceable against the weak, as Eli says, and therefore can only serve as some kind of moral guidance for states. As you’ve probably noticed, states have never exhibited a proclivity to act in accordance with the kinds of moral principles that sometimes guide individual human beings’ actions.

So despite the incontrovertible evidence that confronts us every minute that Israel is in breach of its obligations under the Convention, I’m not expecting to see Tzipi Livni et al. in the dock at the Hague any time soon.

In another penetrating insight I came across yesterday, Jonathan Cook writes,

In September 2007, the international media reported that 69 Israeli soldiers had been wounded when Palestinian militants fired a rocket into the Zikim army base near the Gaza Strip. The rocket struck a tent where the soldiers were sleeping.

It is worth noting the details of the attack. Israeli officials related that, of the 69 wounded, 11 had moderate or severe injuries and one was critically injured. A few more had light wounds. The rest, probably 50 or more, were injured in the sense that they were suffering from shock.

So, if we apply the same standard to Gaza, that would mean 1.5 million Gazans have been wounded. Or is there still some doubt about whether the weeks of bombardment of Gaza, one of the most densely populated places on earth, have left the entire civilian population in a deep, and possibly permanent, state of shock?

I’m not holding my breath for the mainstream media to start reporting 1.5 million casualties. The press is not sensitive to accusations of double standards and racism. After all, they are the paragon of professional, objective, dispassionate reporting.

Another thing I finally got around to reading yesterday was the 7 January MERIP report, ‘Birth Pangs of a New Palestine’ by Mouin Rabbani.

'They might snap'

In a recent exchange on lenin’s tomb, Sean Coleman, Ireland Campaign Manager, Sudan Divestment Task Force, wrote,

Now imagine the US military unveiled a new strategy in Iraq: …attacks will be conducted without any reference to civilians, merely to say that if you're a civilian killed by an American bomb, it was your own fault for your proximity to the insurgents and your lack of "protection". Any such policy would be decried as a murderous and monstrous way to prosecute a war. That is because it is. Supporting it - as in the case of those who lend support to Iraqi resistance - is, I think, concurrently lacking in moral sense.

Now, writes Tina Susman, the April murder of the teenage son of a Los Angeles Times employee in Baghdad has provided an opportunity to see what is really going on there.

The 17-year-old had been struck by a bullet in the chaos that followed the explosion and was bleeding heavily. Within two hours, the boy was dead. Witnesses charge he was killed by U.S. troops firing randomly.

U.S. military officials say troops are trained to avoid civilian casualties and do not fire wildly. Iraqis, however, say the shootings happen frequently and that even if troops are firing at suspected attackers, they often do so on city streets where bystanders are likely to be hit. Rarely is it possible to confirm such incidents…With more troops on the ground as a result of President Bush's "surge," U.S. military officials acknowledge that there are greater chances for civilian casualties.

"Being that we are doing more operations in places where we were not before, and doing operations in large numbers, there is just more contact with the enemy and therefore more chance of people on the periphery being involved in that," said Army Lt. Col. Christopher Garver, a military spokesman in Baghdad.

According to counterinsurgency expert Kalev Sepp, "you just end up with another group of foreign occupation troops shooting civilians who they feel threaten them when their car drives too close to them."

If the anecdotal evidence is an indication, such deaths often occur after troops are shaken by roadside bombs, as occurred when The Times employee's son was killed April 17.

"They were confused and angry and suspecting anyone around," Mohammed said. "If a bird had passed by, they would have shot it."

The U.S. military said troops shot in self-defense after being targeted first by the bomb and then by gunfire, but Mohammed and other witnesses denied that anybody shot at the soldiers.

"It's a psychological thing. When one U.S. soldier gets killed or injured, they shoot in vengeance," said Alaa Safi, who said his brother, Ahmed, was killed April 4 when U.S. troops riddled the streets of their southwestern Baghdad neighborhood with bullets after a sniper attack.

"I can't tell you that nobody got killed in that specific incident," Garver said. "In some instances, we're not able to know what really happened."

"You must be reasonably certain that your target is the source of the threat," the rules state.

Military officials have acknowledged, however, that the rules are sometimes broken in the heat of combat…troops "become stressed, they become fearful" on a battlefield where it is difficult to tell civilians from insurgents…"But I would say it's stress, fear, isolation, and in some cases they're just upset. They see their buddies getting blown up on occasion and they could snap."

And who could blame stressed and frightened kids from snapping under such conditions? Clearly they need to be disarmed and removed from harm’s way. At least if a concern for innocent bystanders is the point. What always seems to get lost in these news reports is that the IEDs and the snipers wouldn’t be attacking American troops if they weren’t there in the first place. Garver speaks of the insurgents as ‘the enemy’. But in reality, he and his troops are the enemy. The insurgents can’t just pack up and go home. They are home.

Last year, retired Lt. Col. Andrew J. Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran who is a professor of international relations at Boston University, estimated that U.S. troops alone had killed "tens of thousands" of innocent Iraqis, either by accident or through carelessness.

Even the troops directly involved in incidents often cannot say if civilian casualties have occurred.

So it’s no surprise that nobody is doing body counts. Furthermore

The challenge of reaching an accurate tally has become more acute since the military surge began.

The Iraqi government, eager to show that the security plan is working, has stopped releasing monthly civilian casualty figures to the United Nations, arguing that Cabinet ministries collecting the numbers were inflating them for political purposes.

The U.S. military rarely issues public reports on civilians it has killed or wounded. It did not respond to requests for information on civilians killed this year by U.S. troops.

And yet nobody wants to believe the estimates of excess deaths resulting from the invasion and occupation of Iraq from the only reliable source there is – the cluster survey carried out last July by a team from Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al-Mustansariya University Medical School and published by Burnham et al. in the eminent British medical journal The lancet last October.

Susman writes, for example, ‘Estimates of civilians killed…range from tens of thousands to as many as 600,000.’ In reality, Burnham did not estimate civilian deaths at all for quite sound reasons. For one thing, they thought it could endanger the interviewers to probe too deeply into such matters. For another, in this context, it is simply not possible to distinguish reliably between civilians and combatants. And since the resistance only exists as a response to the occupation, those killed fighting the occupation are absolutely no less victims of the occupation than those who die without taking arms against their oppressors.

In contrast, Iraq Body Count’s (IBC) claim that it can rely on the mainstream media - i.e. 65 journalists holed up in the Green Zone or 'embedded' with Coalition troops - to distinguish reliably between combatants and non combatant deaths in each and every case is beyond naive. It is wilfully dishonest.

In this connection, I want to emphasise a point Eli Stevens always makes.

In the news today, a car bomb in Baghdad killed 23 people and injured 68 others, while later, a second killed 17 people and wounded 55 others. Will you ever hear what happened to those 123 injured people (or the others who were injured in incidents where the numbers of dead didn't reach double-digits, and weren't even "newsworthy" by the standards of American reporting on Iraq)? Not a chance. Will some, maybe even the majority, die later today in the hospital, or tomorrow, or next week? Quite likely. But according to the Western press (and those such as Iraq Body Count), 40 people died in those two incidents, a number which will never change.

So it never contributes to the IBC count. Obviously, this is not an issue with the Burnham team’s methodology.

Furthermore, Burnham et al did not estimate ‘as many as 600,000’ dead. They estimated about 655,000 excess deaths, although for statistical reasons, the true number could have been as low as 400,000 or as high as 940,000. And that was a year ago, a year moreover that has seen Iraqis dying at an accelerating rate. The current number of Iraqis who have died because of the occupation of their country is almost certainly a million or more.

While on the subject of Burnham et al again, apologists for the invasion have made a clumsy attempt to discredit their findings by suggesting that the sampling methodology deployed in the survey is subject to ‘main street bias’ (MSB). Interviewers were instructed to select a ‘residential street’ intersecting a main street, to select a dwelling at random, and to interview the household residing there and the next 39 households.

The MSB hypothesis relies on the assumption that the interviewers would have interpreted ‘main street’ as ‘principal thoroughfare’ and selected the first household in a street intersecting one of these that was itself a main street. It also assumes that car bombings and other killings would occur on these secondary main streets where markets are thought to be located. This is of course irrelevant, as those killed at a bazaar are not just those residing whose in the flat above it. Anybody buying or selling there is equally vulnerable, whether they live in the same building, in the same street, or somewhere else in the neighbourhood, or anywhere.

The 17 year old son of the LA Times employee lived

…in a middle-class neighborhood of split-level houses with balconies, driveways and cerise bougainvillea draping garden walls. The stroll took him down his quiet street to a commercial strip with small stores, butcher shops and cafes. Parallel to the strip is a median and then a highway, which passes beneath a concrete tangle of overpasses before heading to the airport. Blackened blotches are evidence of the frequency of attacks on troops patrolling it.

One tragic incident showing, among other things, that in a city full of rampaging stressed and frightened US troops armed to the teeth, you don’t have to live on a main street to be a victim of the violence they have unleashed.

Return to Tel Aviv

Today is the fortieth anniversary of the launch of Israel’s ‘preemptive’ war of conquest. I hasten to add that respected Israeli historian and Ha’aretz columnist, Tom Segev, writes in today’s NY Times,

Leading Israeli policy planners had determined six months before the Six-Day War that capturing the West Bank would be bad for the country. Recently declassified Israeli government documents show that according to these policy planners, taking over the West Bank would weaken the relative strength of Israel’s Jewish majority, encourage Palestinian nationalism and ultimately lead to violent resistance.

These comprehensive political and strategic discussions began in November 1966 and concluded in January 1967. The participants were representatives of the Mossad, the Israel Defense Forces’ intelligence branch and the Foreign Ministry. The documents they prepared were approved by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and the army’s chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin, and therefore reflect Israel’s strategic thinking six months before the war.

[Jordan’s King] Hussein was also endeavoring to unify the West Bank with the East Bank and was encouraging West Bank Palestinians to migrate to the east. Over the preceding 15 years, the number of Palestinians who had left the West Bank for the east had reached 200,000. Moreover, approximately 100,000 Palestinians had left Jordan altogether. Hussein’s effort to integrate Palestinians was “a positive phenomenon from Israel’s point of view,” concluded the final position paper that emerged from that winter’s discussions. Hussein was acting to eradicate the Palestinian question, and this was an excellent reason not to take the West Bank away from him.

But when Jordan attacked the Israeli part of Jerusalem on the first day of the conflict, all reason was forgotten. Jordan’s attack obviously called for some kind of retaliation — but striking back at the Jordanian Army did not require the conquest of the West Bank or East Jerusalem.

Records of the Israeli cabinet meeting where the scope of the retaliation was determined are now available. Amazingly they show that not one of the cabinet ministers ever asked why it was in the interest of Israel to control the Arab parts of Jerusalem. Israel was about to take over some of the holiest places in the Christian and the Muslim world, but no analysts were called in to offer the cabinet alternative ideas. No experts on international law were asked to brief the ministers on the legal implications of their pending decision.

The ministers obviously felt there was no need to raise these questions: the answer was as clear as only fantasy can be. Acting under the influence of the age-old dream of return to Zion as well as Israel’s spectacular victory over Egypt’s forces a few hours previously, the ministers decided with their hearts, not their heads, to take East Jerusalem.

So his argument is that territorial conquest was not really part of Israel’s orginal plan for the June 1967 war. And that’s as may be. But as he points out, they wanted it. And badly. Segev’s central point seems to be that it was a matter of timing. Cooler heads in cabinet would have deferred taking the West Bank until King Hussein had completed the job of transferring all the Palestinians out. Or at least taken the process a lot further. And now, poor Israel is saddled with this terrible demographic burden.

Eli Stephens of Left I on the news linked to, ‘Occupation’, a 2003 song by David Rovics that I’d never heard before. The audio is available from that link, along with the lyrics. I couldn’t help noticing some transcription errors, so I’ve taken the liberty of amending the transcript to correspond to the audio and reprinting them here.

Occupation
(David Rovics)

You ask me how it is
That I dare to take a side
You say I loathe myself
For pointing out that you have lied
You say it's tribal warfare
But I disagree
For the dynamics of the situation
Are not difficult to see
On the one side is the fighter jet
On the other is the stone
On the one side is the slave
On the other is the throne
For the many there are checkpoints
While foreign soldiers rule the street
For the one side there is victory
But the people don't accept defeat

(Chorus)
The word you need to know is occupation
The very definition of a land without a nation
And if peace is what you're after then let us not deceive
It will come on the day the tanks return to Tel Aviv

On one side there is hunger
And bulldozed olive trees
On the other is the Army
Ruling by decrees
Caterpillars maul the streets
Destroy entire city blocks
While children swallow shrapnel
For the crime of throwing rocks
Fences are erected
Around the towns they flatten
And Herzl's own fanatics
Sleep on sheets of satin
And they water their plantations
Drilling ever-deeper wells
While the displaced children of the hopeless
Are filled with bullet shells

(Chorus)
...It will come on the day the settlers return to Tel Aviv

On one side there’s the Mossad
Rounding up the men
Thrown in jail with no trial
Being tortured once again
On the other there is rage
Helplessness and fear
And a growing realization
That another holocaust is near
On the outside there are prisons
Inside detainees
Being stripped of their humanity
Beaten naked to their knees
Outside the ghetto walls
Stormtroopers all around
While inside the hungry people
Yearn for liberated ground

(Chorus)
...It will come on the day the jailguards return to Tel Aviv

All across the world
You can hear the people say
The children of Jerusalem
Will be free one day
In overcrowded camps
Amidst the stench of death and flies
To the suburbs of Detroit
You can hear the anguished cries
While in the land of Israel
With God ever on their side
Walls and fences are constructed
Papers are denied
People fight for their existence
While we turn a blinded eye
And those who should know better
Insist on asking why

(Chorus)
...It will come on the day the refugees return to Tel Aviv

Created February, 2003
Copyright David Rovics 2003, all rights reserved

Pedantic nitpicking bastard that I am, I feel compelled to point out that Tel Aviv was established in the 1880s specifically as a Jewish town. It didn’t grow to engulf the neighbouring Arab town of Jaffa until 1950. So there are unlikely to be very many refugees from the ethnic cleansing operations of 1948-49 who could, strictly speaking, ‘return to Tel Aviv’. Still, the sentiment is welcome.

The next meal

The UN’s Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN), yesterday reported via Reuters/Alertnet the story of Adeela Harith, a 39-year-old Iraqi widowed mother of three.

"I will keep trying to find food for us in rubbish bins and with the money my children get in the streets by begging, we can buy some water and milk for them…

“…They no longer attend school. The oldest two are street beggars and the youngest, Youssef, is with me looking for food in rubbish bins.

"After my husband was killed, militants came to my home and threatened to kill everyone if we didn't leave our house in 24 hours. I left without carrying anything… I don't have parents. The only brother I had was killed a year ago and his wife is leading a similar life to mine.”

Almost a year has now elapsed since the conclusion of the study of excess mortality in Iraq by Burnham’s team from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al Mustansiriya University published in The Lancet last October. As of the beginning of last July, they estimated about 655,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the invasion and occupation. Projecting from that estimate, assuming that the monthly toll has remained at the average for the thirteen months form June 2005 through June 2006 (although we know it has actually increased), by the end of this month, there will be nearly a million Iraqis who have died needlessly in America’s brutal war for control of the planet’s energy resources.

Lurking behind each individual unnecessary death is a story like that of Adeela Harith and her three children, Ahmed 14, Zaineb 12, and Yasser 8. George Bush, Tony Blair, John Howard, and all their accomplices have left a country full not only of death and destruction but millions of grieving homeless widows, widowers, and orphans.

"A local NGO recently told me they will assist me but I am still waiting. Youssef has serious diarrhoea and two weeks ago Zaineb got sick from the food we ate. The doctors told us to stop eating food which we collect from rubbish bins but we don't have a choice. Either we eat like this or we die of starvation.

“I keep remembering how good the old days were when we had good food, good health and good living conditions but now our life is a disaster. And with the deteriorating situation in Iraq no one cares any more."

And what of the wounded. In posts like ‘Iraqi deaths’ (29 May), Eli Stephens has been pointing out that the death counts we read in the media only enumerate those who die on the spot. They often report large numbers of injured who we never hear of again. With Iraq’s medical infrastructure in the parlous state the occupation and ‘rebuilding’ of Iraq have reduced it to, many of those must subsequently die. And that’s an important point. Many others, however, live on without their legs or without their sight. They may need constant attention by a family member who therefore doesn’t even have time to beg or to scavenge. The statistics are horrifying, but the reality is worse.

A is for Alienation

This morning, Ratbert made this profound observation.

Which reminded me of Alex Glasgow’s classic song. It’s actually on Rick Kuhn’s Marxism page, but Google took me to this other page first.

The Socialist ABC
(by Alex Glasgow) (PRS)

When that I was and a little, tiny boy,
Me daddy said to me,
'The time has come, me bonny, bonny bairn,
To learn your ABC.'

Now Daddy was a lodge chairman
In the coalfields of the Tyne
And his ABC was different
From the Enid Blyton kind.

He sang, 'A is for Alienation
That made me the man that I am, and

B's for the Boss who's a Bastard,
A Bourgeois who don't give a damn.

C is for Capitalism,
The bosses' reactionary creed, and

D's for Dictatorship, laddie,
But the best proletarian breed.

E is for Exploitation
That workers have suffered so long, and

F is for old Ludwig Feuerbach,
The first one to say it was wrong.

G is all Gerrymanderers,
Like Lord Muck and Sir Whatsisname, and

H is the Hell that they'll go to
When the workers have kindled the flame.

I's for Imperialism,
And America's kind is the worst, and

J is for sweet Jingoism,
That the Tories all think of the first.

K is for good old Kier Hardy,
Who fought out the working class fight, and

L is for Vladimir Lenin,
Who showed him the left was all right.

M is of course for Karl Marx,
The daddy and the mommy of them all, and

N is for Nationalisation -
Without it we'd tumble and fall.

O is for Overproduction,
That capitalist economy brings, and

P is for all Private Property,
The greatest of all of the sins.

Q's for the Quid pro quo,
That we'll deal out so well and so soon, when

R for Revolution is shouted and
The Red Flag becomes the top tune.

S is for Sad Stalinism
That gave us all such a bad name, and

T is for Trotsky, the hero,
Who had to take all of the blame.

U's for the Union of Workers -
The Union will stand to the end, and

V is for Vodka, yes, Vodka,
The vun drink that vont bring the bends.

W's for all Willing Workers,
And that's where the memory fades,

For X, Y, and Zed,' my dear daddy said,
'Will be written on the street barricades.'

Now that I'm not a little tiny boy,
Me daddy says to me,
'Please try to forget those thing that I said,
Especially the ABC.'

For daddy is no longer a union man,
And he's had to change his plea.
His alphabet is different now,
Since they made him a Labour MP.

And that inevitably reminded me that:

I hate the capitalist system,
And I’ll tell you the reason why:
It has caused me so much suffering,
And my dearest friends to die.

Well, I know you all are wondering
What it has done to me.
Well I am going to tell you
That my husband has TB.

Brought on by hard work and low wages,
And never enough to eat,
From going cold and hungry,
With no shoes upon his feet.

My husband was a coal miner
Who worked hard and risked his life,
Just trying to support three children,
Himself, his mother and wife.

Well I had a blue-eyed baby
Was the darling of my heart.
But from my little darling
Her mother had to part.

While the rich and mighty capitalist
Goes dressed goes dressed in jewels and silk,
My darling blue-eyed baby
Has died for the want of milk.

Well they call this the land of plenty,
And for them I guess it’s true,
For the rich and mighty capitalist,
Not for workers like me and you.

Well what can we do about it
To these men of power and light?
Well I tell you, Mr Capitalist,
We are going to fight, fight, fight!

(Words and music by © 1965 Sara Ogan Gunning)

Those are the lyrics I transcribed from the liner notes of Barbara Dane’s eponymous 1965 album. Sarah Ogan Gunning’s original lyrics for a version she recorded entitled, ‘I hate the company bosses’, are also online.

Eli Stephens has been posting some ancient classic songs from his amazing collection of vinyl over at Left I on the news. If you’ve never heard these songs, watch his blog. Maybe he’ll put the audio up some time.

Toll dwarfed?

A few days ago, lenin had a piece quoting extensively from Anthony Arnove’s article on Tomdispatch drawing a comparison between the treatment of statistics of the tragedy in Darfur and in Iraq. According to Arnove,

Since 2003, according to UN estimates, some 200,000 have been killed in the Darfur region of Sudan in a brutal ethnic-cleansing campaign and another 2 million have been turned into refugees.

How would you know this? Well, if you lived in New York City, at least, you could hardly take a subway ride without seeing an ad that reads: "400,000 dead. Millions uniting to save Darfur." The New York Times has also regularly featured full-page ads describing the "genocide" in Darfur and calling for intervention there under "a chain of command allowing necessary and timely military action without approval from distant political or civilian personnel."… celebrities on Good Morning America talking about their commitment to stopping "genocide" in Iraq.

The point of this post is not, however to discuss the reasons for the discrepancy between all the noise about Darfur and the silence about Iraq. Apart from those two articles, Arnove cites ‘The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War, Insurgency’ by Mahmood Mamdani in the latest London review of books. In a later piece, lenin returns to the theme, citing Ed Herman’s recent article on the ‘“Worthy-Genocide” Establishment’.

One of the ironies is that the emphasis on the Darfur crisis is not related to its scale. While the latest UN assessment, cited by Arnove, claims ‘More than 200,000 people have been killed and at least 2 million others forced from their homes since 2003’, estimates of Iraqi deaths and displacement are much higher. According to the latest information on their website,

UNHCR estimates there are some 1.9 million Iraqis displaced internally, and up to 2 million in neighbouring states, particularly Syria and Jordan...in 2006 Iraqis had become the leading nationality seeking asylum in Europe…By early 2007, internal displacement was estimated to be continuing at a rate of up to 50,000 a month.

In other words, the US occupation of Iraq has displaced nearly twice as many people as the situation in Darfur, universally condemned as genocide. In another cruel irony that I’ve covered before, the US has only accepted as refugees 466 of the two million Iraqis it drove from their country.

What really prompted this post is that while Arnove and others continue to cite the Johns Hopkins study estimate of 655,000 excess deaths published in the Lancet last October, Information Clearinghouse posted an article entitled ‘Deaths In Iraq Have Reached 1 Million’, dated 22 March. Attributed to an ‘Alan Jones’ but not linked to any source, it starts out by claiming,

THE number of deaths in Iraq since the start of the conflict could be as high as one million, it was claimed yesterday.

On the fourth anniversary of the invasion by Allied troops, an Australian scientist insisted the true death toll dwarfed previous estimates.

Dr Gideon Polya said: "Using the most comprehensive and authoritative literature and UN demographic data yields an estimate of one million post-invasion excess deaths in Iraq."

The article does in fact link to Dr Polya’s Global Avoidable Mortality blog, where the most recent post, dated 16 May 2006, relates to Israeli and Palestinian deaths.

In reality, the ICH article appears to relate not to anything published on 21 March, but to Dr Polya's 1 March editorial on his Media With Conscience site. He actually presents the same analysis in a 7 February Countercurrents article.

In the 7 February article, Polya writes, ‘the post-invasion excess deaths (avoidable deaths, deaths that did not have to happen) total 1.0 million (ONE MILLION)’. This is his reasoning,

Consider the following estimate from the Johns Hopkins medical scientists of "annual death rate per 1,000 of population" of 13.3 (post-invasion Iraq) as compared to (a) 5.5 (for pre-invasion Iraq after 12 years of crippling Sanctions) and (b) 4.0 (for Iraq's resource-poor but peaceful neighbours Syria and Jordan; UN Population Division data: http://esa.un.org/unpp/).

The "post-invasion excess death rate/1000 of population" was 13.3 - 5.5 = 7.8 (Comparison A) or 13.3 - 4.0 = 9.3 (Comparison B). Assuming an average population of 27 million, the "post-invasion excess deaths" total (over 4 years i.e. as of February 2007) (A) 7.8 x 2,700 x 4 = 842,000 and (B) 9.3 x 2,700 x 4 = 1,004,400 i.e. ONE MILLION.

In other words, the estimate of one million is arrived at by multiplying the difference between the Johns Hopkins study’s estimate of deaths per 1000 in Iraq over the 40 months to July 2006 and the UN estimate of deaths per 1000 population in Syria and Jordan at an unspecified date. Note that the link he provides is to a database that provides population projections. There probably are UN crude mortality rate (CMR) data for Syria and Jordan available, but not at any of the URLs he cites in either the MWC or the Countercurrents articles.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s not really outrageous to compare the post invasion Iraqi crude mortality rate with the rate for a neighbouring country. The rationale is that preinvasion mortality in Iraq was already inflated by the twelve years of sanctions. But by using the Syrian data as the benchmark, Polya is effectively factoring in the sanctions’ effects rather than isolating the effects of the invasion and occupation. Apart from that, there may be any number of other factors that might render the mortality rate in Syria or Jordan not comparable with that in Iraq. Perhaps more importantly, there is no possibility of the mainstream media treating a comparison like this seriously. So the relevant estimate is really his ‘Comparison A’, which, based on the Lancet study’s estimate of crude death rates in Iraq before and after the invasion, arrives at a figure of 842,000 (not 1 million!) for the four years to March 2007.

I’ve made attempts to update the Lancet estimate before, but the Lancet data are now eight months old and we know the slaughter has proceeded, by all accounts at an accelerating pace, we need some new estimates. The report of Polya’s estimate has prompted me to take it a little further. This is not to cast aspersions on Polya’s method, but I have adopted a different approach.

The Lancet estimates published last October cover the period March 2003 through June 2006. The estimated average monthly crude death rate for the fourteen months through April 2004 was 7,017. For the thirteen months from May 2004 to May 2005, the average was 15,115 per month, and for the last thirteen months June 2005 to June 2006, 27,710.

The method I am using is to assume that the Lancet estimates are correct as a starting point and increment them for the eight months since July 2006 based on monthly averages. I have calculated projections using three assumptions. As I am not actually weighting new data, but just projecting from the July 2006 data on the basis of some assumptions about the probable average monthly rate of increase, I will round the figures to the nearest thousand.

First, if we assume that the monthly rate of deaths over the last eight months was equivalent to the average of the forty months from March 2003 to July 2006, 16,373 per month, the current toll would stand at about 786,000. I regard this as highly improbable, as it would mean that the average monthly crude death rate had decreased by 41% from the 2005-2006 average.

Second, if we assume that the monthly rate has remained at the average for the 2005-2006 period, the total would now come to 877,000.

Third, if we assume that the current average monthly crude death rate has increased proportionally by as much over the 2005-2006 average as that average increased over the previous thirteen month period, by about 83%, the monthly average would now be 50,801 and the total to date, 1,061,000.

Bear in mind that these are based on statistical estimates each of which represents the approximate midpoint of a range of values. Principally because the size of the sample in the Johns Hopkins study, the confidence interval is wide. The claim the authors, Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doocy, and Les Roberts, made was that they were 95% confident that the true number of excess deaths in July was between 393,000 and 943,000. Using the same confidence interval proportionally, in the first and least likely scenario, where the monthly rate had decreased, we would be talking about a range of 472,000 to 1,131,000. In the second scenario, where the rate had remained constant from last year, it would be between 526,000 and 1,262,000. Finally, if the average monthly crude death rate has increased as much as it did between 2004-05 and 2005-06, the range is 637,000 to 1,528,000.

The following table may clarify the results.

		Estimate	95% Confidence interval
			Minimum	Maximum
Lancet estimate to 2006 07		654,965	392,979	942,636
Polya’s estimate	Iraq baseline	842,000	n/a	n/a
	Syria baseline	1,004,400	n/a	n/a
My projection assuming increase at:	Per month
A. 2003-2006 average rate	16,373	786,000	472,000	1,131,000
B. 2005-2006 average rate	27,710	877,000	526,000*	1,262,000
C. 83% above B.	50,801	1,061,000**	637,000	1,528,000

* The true death toll is almost certainly more than 526,000.

** The probable death toll is 1,061,000.

From all reports, the rate of increase has been increasing itself, so even these highest projections are likely to be on the low side. Conservatively speaking, I think you could claim with nearly 100% confidence that the crude mortality rate over the last eight months has certainly not decreased from the average of the previous thirteen month period and that the US invasion and occupation has cost at least 525,000 Iraqi lives over the last four years. If, as seems probable, the CMR has in fact increased since last July, the figure is very likely to be over a million and could exceed a million and a half.

The central point is that, horrific though the situation is in Darfur, estimates based on similar methods demonstrate that it is in fact much much worse in Iraq, where the US, UK, and Australian governments bear direct responsibility for the catastrophe.

An ancillary point is how we use these statistics. At the top of the daily ICH email and the ICH site it asserts, ‘Number Of Iraqi Civilians Slaughtered In America's War On Iraq - At Least 655,000 + +’. I thought that the Johns Hopkins University team did good work under dangerous conditions and have done the peace movement a big favour by publishing their results in the prestigious and impeccable Lancet journal. Sorry to split hairs, if that’s what it is, but I think it would be fair to treat their findings as if we believed what they said.

What they actually found was that there were 654,965 excess deaths in Iraq over the 40 months to July 2006. Specifically, they were 95% certain that the number of people who had died since the 20 March 2003 invasion who would not have died otherwise, was in the range 392,979 to 942,636. As I have pointed out before, Burnham et al. do not say that at least 655,000 civilians were slaughtered.

For one thing, if there is an ‘at least figure, it is not 654,965, but 392,979. For another, the Johns Hopkins study is absolutely explicit that, ‘Separation of combatant from non-combatant deaths during interviews was not attempted…’ So their research provides no basis for any claim specifically about ‘civilians’. Finally, these estimates are for deaths from all causes. The relevant estimate of specifically violent deaths to July 2006 is 601,027 (i.e. in the range 426,369–793,663). Presumably, that would be the number slaughtered.

It’s not as if the Lancet study’s findings were not sensational enough. There’s no need to distort them as ICH continues to do, much less to headline Polya’s 1 million figure, which explicitly includes sanctions effects with the invasion and occupation.

In my view, the safest, most responsible approach remains to be to cite ‘the July 2006 estimate of about 655,000’. Alternatively, as Eli Stephens of Left I on the news points out, the confidence that the true figure is above 393,979 is nearly 98%, so it would be even more accurate to assert that the invasion and occupation of Iraq killed ‘at least 394,000’ by July 2006. However, I am fairly comfortable that my projections provide a sound basis for asserting that the current death toll definitely exceeds half a million, is probably much higher, and possibly three times that number.

Move to the back

On Friday, Left I on the news reported on an article in Ha’aretz about a woman savagely beaten on the Egged No 2 bus in Jerusalem. According to Wikipedia, it transpires that

Some lines, mainly running in and/or between major Haredi Jewish population centers, are classified as 'Mehadrin' buses. These buses, while identical to others, can be used by anyone whether Haredi or not, but travellers should note that men and women (with the exception of husband and wife, or parents with children) are not supposed to sit next to each other, and women may be expected to sit in the back of the bus, while the men are supposed to sit in front. For women, a modest style of dress would also be recommended (meaning, no miniskirts or bare shoulders). These are guidelines that most of the riders of these specific lines insist on. These rules on these mehadrin buses are not 'law', and anyone can ignore them, but it is seen as disrespecting the local population.

Apparently anyone can ignore them, but at their own peril. I couldn’t find any corroboration on the Egged site, but it says that information on local bus routes is only in Hebrew.

So the days of ‘move to the back of the bus’ are not over yet in Israel, the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’. Even Jews haven’t achieved full civil rights, if they’re women. I wonder if that’s why observant Jewish men thank a supernatural being every morning she lo asani ishah ‘who didn’t make me a woman’?

Meanwhile, Jonathan Cook reports that Israeli security guards both in Israel and at overseas airports are racially profiling Arabs.

"The countries in which these [Israeli security] investigations take place do not supervise them, and prefer to ignore their discriminatory nature and the human rights violations committed on their own soil," the report [by lawyer, Tarek Ibrahim, on behalf of the Arab Association for Human Rights and the Centre Against Racism] states.

Israeli security staff identifies most Arab passengers through clothing, appearance or accent, or through questions about their name or where they live. If there is doubt, passengers are asked to show their Israeli ID card, which is believed to reveal their ethnicity in coding.

Once identified, Arab passengers' luggage and passports are marked with specially colour-coded labels.

And it’s not just their luggage that gets special treatment. The report includes accounts from several victims.

Ibtisam Maranah, a film director who represented Israel at an international film festival in the Netherlands in 2005 along with several Jewish colleagues, reports that Israeli staff took her off alone to an underground section of the Dutch airport, away from the rest of her group and local airport staff, where she was made to undress.

As Jimmy Carter says, ‘Israel is a wonderful democracy with equal treatment of all citizens whether Arab or Jew’, or indeed, woman.