Though you probably didn’t hear about it on the evening news or NPR, the group International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (of which Physicians for Social Responsibility is a member) released a report on casualties of the so-called “war on terror” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The toll is conservatively estimated at 1.3 million in total, with 1 million in Iraq killed as a result of our 2003 invasion. Anyone familiar with the figures breezily tossed around by the last two administrations might be surprised by this total. (I recall W. Bush casually offering 30,000, as if guessing the number of marbles in a jar.) Actually, the number is roughly in line with what the Iraq Study Group estimated in 2005-06.
No matter – this wasn’t worthy of comment, except on Democracy Now! That’s not surprising. We can’t acknowledge the magnitude of our own crimes, only those of our official enemies. Assad is an execrable mass murderer, right? Sure he is. But has he killed as many as we have over the past fifteen years? Not nearly. How about ISIS? Killer crackheads, to be sure. But pikers next to us. Absolute freaking amateurs. We have a long tradition of outdoing those we criticize. No one denounced the Russians for their invasion of Afghanistan more than we did; and yet here we are, 14 years into our own Afghan war, no end in sight. Noble mission vs. international crime. Curiously, the former has a higher body count.
This is nothing new. We’ve just passed the fiftieth anniversary of our invasion of South Vietnam – the arrival of the first contingent of combat units in the country. If they think about it at all, most Americans generally think the number of dead in the Vietnam war as being in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps – maybe 300,000. Given that millions were killed, millions more gravely wounded, this is akin to holocaust denial. Kind of sickening. It’s estimated that about 40,000 Vietnamese have died since the war due to unexploded ordinance alone – see this recent article in the Nation.
Unless we come to terms with this as a people, we will be condemned to repeat it. We already have, and we will again. But we don’t have to. It’s up to us.
luv u,
jp
