The Face of Genocide ?

(from Alternet)

Study: More Than 600,000 Dead in Iraq
By John Tirman


The new mortality survey of Iraq that estimates 600,000 deaths by violence is startling and should alter the way America thinks about this war.

The John Hopkins University researchers were meticulous about the methods used to randomly choose the survey sites and analyze the data. It is state-of-the-art work, and its accuracy is not an issue. The survey is the only scientific account of the war dead. There is no other, and those who publicly dismiss the findings must offer an alternative. There is none. Every other account is deeply flawed in method, and this one is not. It is standard in epidemiology and disaster response.

The survey, which my Center helped organize, is available here.

Just two weeks ago, the Washington Post published a survey of Iraqi attitudes toward the United States and the war. The survey, conducted by the State Department, revealed that enormous majorities blamed the United States for the violence and wanted us to leave Iraq. Another poll from the University of Maryland published the next day confirmed that sentiment and also reported that 60 percent of Iraqis support attacks on U.S. troops. The Johns Hopkins mortality survey and these polls go hand-in-hand. The Iraqi attitudes are difficult to grasp unless the violence people suffer is an enormous, daily threat to them.

The implications of this level of mayhem are profound. Most obviously, the United States is not providing security. It is not viewed by the Iraqi people as doing so, and the death rate confirms why these attitudes are so firmly held. The "mission" is not being accomplished, and if trend lines are an indication, the mission is deteriorating rapidly. The debate about withdrawing must be waged in this context.

It is conceivable that the application of force by the U.S. military is making things worse. Again, this is what Iraqis believe. A number of explanations for the violence see insurgent action in particular as "defensive" -- that is, the insurgents believe they are defending their communities. Because the United States went in with a relatively small number of troops, more force was applied to compensate for those inadequate numbers. (That does not mean, however, that larger numbers would have changed the course of the war.) This strategy has perhaps stirred the insurgency as much as any other plausible factor, and the growing violence then generates itself in a giant feedback loop: the United States attacks a village where they think insurgents are harbored, and this produces more insurgents who then act violently, exacting a new U.S. military response, and so on and so on.

Many of the journalistic accounts of the war, such as Thomas Ricks' "Fiasco," suggest that this may be what is occurring. At the same time, journalists are only seeing a tiny fraction of what goes on in Baghdad, what Dexter Filkins of the New York Times describes as 2 percent of the entire country, and thus their scope is very limited in seeing the violence, accounting for the dead, or drawing out the broader meaning. As a result, we have very little understanding of how the violence affects everything -- politics, ethnic and sectarian divisions, the hundreds of thousands displaced (another invisible statistic), the many thousands leaving Iraq in droves, the deterioration of the public health care system, and every other dimension of life and death in Iraq.

This is what we need to concentrate on as the discussion of the mortality survey unfolds. Even if there were a large sampling error in the survey -- which there does not seem to be -- the numbers would be colossal in scale. And it is the meaning of these colossal numbers that we must debate. We now have empirical evidence of the scale of this human disaster. In that light, what is best for Iraq? How can such violence be ended? How can the United States carve out a constructive role from the ruins of its intervention?

Let's honor the dead of Iraq by grappling realistically with their tragedy and forge a way to ensure that this horrific human cost does not continue to mount.

John Tirman is executive director of MIT's Center for International Studies.
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.



The numbers do add up

The attempts to rubbish the Lancet study on the massive Iraqi death toll are devious hack-work.

"I would surely like to see the insurgents in the ICC on war crimes charges, but the Nuremberg convention was also correct to say that aggression was "the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole". The people who started this war of aggression need to face up to the fact, and that is a political issue."

The Lex Gabinia - History Repeats Itself

Pirates of the Mediterranean
by Robert Harris

In the autumn of 68 B.C. the world's only military superpower was dealt a profound psychological blow by a daring terrorist attack on its very heart. Rome's port at Ostia was set on fire, the consular war fleet destroyed, and two prominent senators, together with their bodyguards and staff, kidnapped. ... [I]n the panicky aftermath of the attack, the Roman people made decisions that set them on the path to the destruction of their Constitution, their democracy and their liberty. One cannot help wondering if history is repeating itself.

Consider the parallels. The perpetrators of this spectacular assault were not in the pay of any foreign power: no nation would have dared to attack Rome so provocatively. They were, rather, the disaffected of the earth: "The ruined men of all nations," in the words of the great 19th-century German historian Theodor Mommsen, "a piratical state with a peculiar esprit de corps."

Like Al Qaeda, these pirates were loosely organized, but able to spread a disproportionate amount of fear among citizens who had believed themselves immune from attack. To quote Mommsen again: "The Latin husbandman, the traveler on the Appian highway, the genteel bathing visitor at the terrestrial paradise of Baiae were no longer secure of their property or their life for a single moment."

What was to be done? Over the preceding centuries, the Constitution of ancient Rome had developed an intricate series of checks and balances intended to prevent the concentration of power in the hands of a single individual. The consulship, elected annually, was jointly held by two men. Military commands were of limited duration and subject to regular renewal. Ordinary citizens were accustomed to a remarkable degree of liberty: the cry of "Civis Romanus sum" — "I am a Roman citizen" — was a guarantee of safety throughout the world.

But such was the panic that ensued after Ostia that the people were willing to compromise these rights. The greatest soldier in Rome, the 38-year-old Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (better known to posterity as Pompey the Great) arranged for a lieutenant of his, the tribune Aulus Gabinius, to rise in the Roman Forum and propose an astonishing new law.

"Pompey was to be given not only the supreme naval command but what amounted in fact to an absolute authority and uncontrolled power over everyone," the Greek historian Plutarch wrote. "There were not many places in the Roman world that were not included within these limits."

Pompey eventually received almost the entire contents of the Roman Treasury — 144 million sesterces — to pay for his "war on terror," which included building a fleet of 500 ships and raising an army of 120,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry. Such an accumulation of power was
unprecedented, and there was literally a riot in the Senate when the bill was debated.

Nevertheless, at a tumultuous mass meeting in the center of Rome, Pompey's opponents were cowed into submission, the Lex Gabinia passed (illegally), and he was given his power. In the end, once he put to sea, it took less than three months to sweep the pirates from the entire Mediterranean. Even allowing for Pompey's genius as a military strategist, the suspicion arises that if the pirates could be defeated so swiftly, they could hardly have been such a grievous threat in the first place.

But it was too late to raise such questions. By the oldest trick in the political book — the whipping up of a panic, in which any dissenting voice could be dismissed as "soft" or even "traitorous" — powers had been ceded by the people that would never be returned. Pompey stayed in the Middle East for six years, establishing puppet regimes throughout the region, and turning himself into the richest man in the empire.

Those of us who are not Americ ans can only look on in wonder at the similar ease with which the ancient rights and liberties of the individual are being surrendered in the United States in the wake of 9/11. The vote by the Senate on Thursday to suspend the right of habeas corpus for terrorism detainees, denying them their right to challenge their detention in court; the careful wording about torture...; the admissibility of evidence obtained in the United States without a search warrant; the licensing of the president to declare a legal resident of the United States an enemy combatant — all this represents an historic shift in the balance of power between the citizen and the executive.

An intelligent, skeptical American would no doubt scoff at the thought that what has happened since 9/11 could presage the destruction of a centuries-old constitution; but then, I suppose, an intelligent, skeptical Roman in 68 B.C. might well have done the same.

In truth, however, the Lex Gabinia was the beginning of the end of the Roman republic. It set a precedent. Less than a decade later, Julius Caesar — the only man, according to Plutarch, who spoke out in favor of Pompey's special command during the Senate debate — was awarded similar, extended military sovereignty in Gaul. Previously, the state, through the Senate, largely had direction of its armed forces; now the armed forces began to assume direction of the state.

It also brought a flood of money into an electoral system that had been designed for a simpler, non-imperial era. Caesar, like Pompey, with all the resources of Gaul at his disposal, became immensely wealthy, and used his treasure to fund his own political faction. Henceforth, the result of elections was determined largely by which candidate had the most money to bribe the electorate. In 49 B.C., the system collapsed completely, Caesar crossed the Rubicon — and the rest, as they say, is ancient history.

It may be that the Roman republic was doomed in any case. But the disproportionate reaction to the raid on Ostia unquestionably hastened the process, weakening the restraints on military adventurism and corrupting the political process. It was to be more than 1,800 years before anything remotely comparable to Rome's democracy — imperfect though it was — rose again.

The Lex Gabinia was a classic illustration of the law of unintended consequences: it fatally subverted the institution it was supposed to protect. Let us hope that vote in the United States Senate does not have the same result.